THE CENTENARY OF THE DEATH OF THE GREAT FRENCH WRITER

Proust
and his characters

In view of the anniversary, here are the portraits of the characters from La Recherce and two unpublished works by Proust designed by Ettore Viola.

In 1989, the Center Culturel Francaise de Rome organized “Dessins”, an exhibition of illustrations by Ettore Viola inspired by Marcel Proust and the world of the great French novelist. Here is what Giovanni Macchia wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue.

“…Ettore Viola, approaching as a very fine designer and reader the great immense fresco of the Proustian universe, tried to disturb as little as possible the silence of whoever had created that universe. And we can’t blame him. Such discretion is entirely in harmony with what the writer thought. In fact, as the years passed, Proust was increasingly horrified by the indiscreet portrait. He didn’t like to entrust to a canvas, a drawing, a sad display of lines and surfaces, what he considered the most fleeting part of ourselves and which one day we might feel sorry for or be ashamed of.

Of the images of Proust that appear in this short gallery, all in black and white, and never deluded by the magnificence of color, one or two belong to Proust. The portrait that the photographer Martinie took around 1902, in the years in which he had finished writing a work that he would never publish: Jean Santeuil, is interpreted and gently deformed by the incisive and exact line of the designer. No attempt on Viola’s part to caress her model. In Blanche’s portrait that face of an Assyrian prince seemed to pose before all of Paris. Here the long, white eyes like a fresh almond have become dark, worried and slightly cross-eyed, as if they wanted to retain a reflection of their own restless interiority.
The cheeks that are a little too full, the dense and very black mustache of a country gentleman, the rebellious lock that falls on the forehead, are a little in contrast with the elegant whole of the lower part of the drawing. And this face, transcribed in its painful physicality, without promises, without dreams, without desires, opens the brief parade of the characters of the exhibition, friends or actors of his novel: some linked to him like obsessions and others tolerated or rejected…”

Today, in view of the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust (Paris, 18 November 1922) we are re-proposing the drawings from that exhibition with the addition of two new plates created expressly by Ettore Viola for this anniversary