My Year With Proust - Day 174

"We are so accustomed to incorporating in this type not only the beauty of an Odette but her personality, her identity, that standing before the portrait which has thus stripped her of it we are inclined to protest not simply 'How plain he has made her!' but 'Why, it isn't the least bit like her!'  We find it hard to believe that it can be she.  We do not recognise her.  And yet there is a person there on the canvas whom we are quite conscious of having seen before.  But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her general appearance seem familiar.  They recall to us not this particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural pose never formed any such strange and teasing arabesque, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever painted, women whom invariably, however they may differ from one another, has has chosen to plant thus, in full force face, with an arched foot thrust out from under the skirt, a large round hat in one hand, symmetrically corresponding, at the level of the knee which it covers, to that other disc, higher up in the picture, the face.  And furthermore, not only does a portrait by the hand of genius dislocate a woman's type, as it has been defined by her coquetry and her selfish conception of beauty, but if it is also old, it is not content with ageing the original in the same way as a photograph ages its sitter, by showing her dressed in the fashions of long ago.  In a portrait, it is not only the manner the woman then had of dressing that dates her, it is also the manner the artist had of painting.  And this, Elstir's earliest manner, was the most devastating of birth certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as did her photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of various well-known courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary with the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to history."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 921-922

We've talked before about the concept of "air," the indefinable quality that makes a person a unique person, that quality that appears in some photographs and an even smaller number of portraits.  The problem with air is that you, at least theoretically, have to know the person in question to recognize the air, as compared to simply perceiving a personality or emotion in the photograph or portrait. One of the reasons why it could be argued the Velazquez's painting of Innocent X is the greatest portrait of all time is that, beyond capturing at least a hint of his personality or his emotional life, it seems to capture his air.  You know him.

Velazauez's brilliant portrait of Pope Innocent X.  I feel that I know him, although I'm not certain that I want to.

And the famous Francis Bacon homage to the classic Velazquez work in his Screaming Pope.  Come to think of it, this may also capture Innocent's air.

Clearly Elstir captured Odette's appearance because Proust recognized her, but he also clearly shaped her image to fit his perception of her personality,her self (going back to the previous post), but did he capture her air?  Maybe you can capture the air if you free yourself of the tyranny of producing reality, which may be another way to think about the revolution of modern art.

Having said that, Proust seems to be saying that the Odette in the painting is not truly, uniquely Odette at all, but rather the sum total of any number of women. Proust writes, "But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her general appearance seem familiar.  They recall to us not this particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural pose never formed any such strange and teasing arabesque, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever painted . . ." I think I would argue that this artistic example is a microcosm of a much greater truth. Is every woman we're ever with the same woman, just as we're the same man to her?  We're clearly the sum totals of all of our emotional and sexual experiences, and they are, to paraphrase a great novel, the things we carry.  When a woman adapts and accepts your emotional and sexual habits is she not unconsciously (or maybe consciously) accepting her role in that progression (just as you are in hers)? So when you see her you truly see all the women you've ever known.  It's a nice philosophical discussion, although one likely to lead to something like Bacon's Screaming Pope.