My Year With Proust - Day 173

"Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type.  All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the persistence of which she oversees in her mirror, every day, before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman's features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.  Similarly it often happens that, after a certain age, the eye of a great scientist will find somewhere the elements necessary to establish those relations which alone are of interest to him.  Like those craftsmen, those players who, instead of making a fuss and asking for what they cannot have, content themselves with whatever comes to hand, the artist might say of anything, no mater what, that it would serve his purpose."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 920-921

Sometimes I will make the point that my favorite classes that I teach in the Core are Concepts of the Self (COR 110) and Aesthetic Expressions (COR 220) and that I could not have predicted that.  To which my friends normally reply, "you are such a dumb ass, you love art and you know a lot about it."  I guess I know I love art, but I never really thought that I LOVED art, but apparently I do, or at least it is evident to my friends.  Anyone who has ever gone to a museum with me, and suffered through that Bataan death march (as I'm happy to spend six hours just looking at paintings) still bears the emotional scars.  And, to be fair, whenever I'm overseas I inevitably end up spending way too much time in the local museums.  OK, so maybe I do LOVE art.  I'm not really certain that I know a lot about art.  I think I have a passion to learn more about art.  If I have any intellectual gifts, and that is doubtful, one of them would be that I'm pretty intellectually ravenous.  My supposition is that I know a little bit about many different aspects of art, which is a representative of my surface level knowledge of many subjects.  However, if I know anything at all about art I blame it on endless hours spent playing Masterpiece when I was a kid.

Who knew it would teach me anything?  The damn game tricked me.  Mainly I was just trying to pound my friends Marty and Giggy into submission, and somehow I ended up learning something.  I do need to track down a copy of that game somewhere.

Now, more importantly, I think Proust is making a very important point about the relationship between the artist and subject. In both Concepts of the Self and Aesthetic Expressions we talk about the negotiation between the artist and the subject.  The subject, either verbally or non-verbally, is trying to express to the artist a constructed identity, a self to be captured on the canvas.  In turn, the artist is trying to impose his/her perception of the subject's self.  Herein lies the conflict, which has to be negotiated; although often I suspect the negotiations with a strong-willed artist are much like those with Kim Jong-un.  In the short term it is almost certainly the artist that "wins" the negotiation.  However, in the long term both the artist and subject probably end up losing because they'll be long dead, and every person who stands in front of that portrait will be carrying on their own negotiation and coming up with their own perception of the subject (and, for that matter, the artist).

Just thought I'd throw in a few of my favorite paintings.  I wonder if the subjects would have agreed with how the artist captured their projected identity?  And I've often wondered if Madame X (the real life Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau) liked her strap down, as in the original version, or the strap up, which Singer repainted after public outcry.

Sargent, Portrait of Madame X .

Cezanne, Portrait of Madame Cezanne with Loosened Hair. 

Matisse, Portrait of Lydia Delectovskay. 

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase,no. 2.