Charles Demuth and Marcel Proust

Marc Lida, Proust Watercolors: Morel in the Brothel, watercolor 11”x15”, 1989

The current exhibition at the Demuth Foundation - of illustrations for Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu - is the work of the late Marc Lida, who readily acknowledged his debt to the work of Charles Demuth. Lida must have known that Demuth himself had looked forward to executing a set of illustrations for A la recherche de temps perdu during a proposed Paris holiday with his Lancaster friends, Elsie and Frank Evarts, in the spring of 1935, until ill health thwarted him. He had been fascinated for years by the eight-volume novel, though his response to it was ambivalent. He identified closely with its protagonist in a combination of impatience and affection. Nearly fifteen years had passed since a work of fiction had so engaged Demuth that he wanted to paint about it. In 1918, he had done a series of illustrations for Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, based on specific lines of dialogue in the novella, and indeed as late as 1933 there were plans afoot for Harcourt Brace to issue an edition of that work with Demuth’s watercolors, although they never came to fruition. He had done a series as well for James’s The Beast in the Jungle, for Emile Zola’s Nana and L’Assomoir, for Frank Wedekind’s play, Ergerist, and a single illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. At least one very early ink wash for James’s The Real Thing, in 1906, is now part of the Foundation’s permanent collection. Illustration, therefore, was no new medium for Demuth, but by 1920 he “no longer had the energy,” he told his friend, art critic Henry McBride, and by 1930 his health prevented his ever realizing another trip abroad for that final set of drawings. Demuth’s interest in Proust began early, probably because of an article by Paul Morand, in the September 1925 Dial, when talk of the novel was sweeping the American literary scene, and he mentioned his interest to Henry McBride. “No, I haven’t read “Swann’s Way” (the first volume), he then wrote to playwright Eugene O’Neill’s wife Agnes Boulton in July 1926, “but it’s been on my mind to do so for some years, one or two. After your long letter about it, will get busy. It apparently put you completely out of business, and anything that can do that must be something.” By the end of the next summer he had read the books that had thus far been translated into English, and he wrote to his friend and longtime supporter, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, on 10 October 1927, “so I’ve joined the others,- not without reservations, however. It’s too much like myself for me to be able to get a great thrill from it. Marvelous, but eight volumes about one personal head-ache is almost unbearable, especially when you have your own head-ache most of the time.” To his old friend, the painter Edward Fisk, he confided that the books were “what I call suffering.” By that time, 6 April 1929, Demuth had read another volume, but he could not write a word about Proust’s work, he said: “He wrote about it himself. I couldn’t add anything.” By 10 September 1931, Demuth had finished reading the final volume, summing up the whole vast novel for Stieglitz: “Most of it is like my big [John] Marin water-colour [Cliffs and Sea, 1926], it doesn’t quite happen, but the idea,- being so grand,- well, you are quite satisfied with what is there. Of course the pages which do ‘happen’ are quite like the water-colours when they ‘happen,’ in and beyond Time.” Illustrations for Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu finally appeared in Charles Demuth’s house, beginning May 23rd of this year when Marc Lida’s exhibition opened, from the collection of Maurice Sendak; it continues through June 20th. Consciously or coincidentally, this gifted young artist’s work echoed Demuth’s own illustrations for literary works.