We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.
- Proust, preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies
Here, Proust admonishes the creative emptiness of hero worship; and here I faithfully reproduce his golden words, waist deep in irony.
1 Comment
October 23, 2008 at 1:28 pm
its a fine line between hero worship and inspiration. Monet and Millet were no doubt inspired by ‘heros’ that came before them and were thus able to produce beautiful art from simple scenes such as fields, gardens and bends in the river. in a warped sense by Monsieur Proust’s book, they were guilty of hero worship to some extent too. man and consequently art cannot exist in a vacuum. take heart, what you deem irony is no more than reality.