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The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Anthony O'Hear
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Extract

I will begin by considering some themes from Proust's wonderful essay on Chardin, Chardin and Rembrandt (Proust, 1988). Proust speaks of the young man ‘of modest means and artistic taste’, his imagination filled with the splendour of museums, of cathedrals, of mountains, of the sea, sitting at table at the end of lunch, nauseated at the ‘traditional mundanity’ of the unaesthetic spectacle before him: the last knife left lying on the half turned-back table cloth, next to the remains of an underdone and tasteless cutlet. He cannot wait to get up and leave, and if he cannot take a train to Holland or Italy, he will at least go to the Louvre to have sight of the palaces of Veronese, the princes of van Dyck and the harbours of Claude. Doing this will, of course, make his return to his home and its familiar surroundings seem yet more drab and exasperating.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 32 , March 1992 , pp. 47 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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References

Fuller, P. 1988. Theoria. (London: Chatto and Windus).Google Scholar
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