film screening:
April 12, 2013 – 6:15 p.m.
Proust + Vermeer
(Dir. Richard Voorhees, 30 mins., in French with English subtitles)
Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park. 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco
If you are in the San Francisco area and are a Vermeer devotee, an evening at the De Young might be worthwhile. Arguably, the greatest French writer of the 20th century, Marcel Proust and one of the most fervent early admirers of Vermeer, wove many observations about the painter into his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. The most famous was the narrative of Bergotte, an aging art critic who leaves his sick bed in order to go see The View of Delft, suffers an attack and dies while admiring Vermeer’s painting and contemplating on the mysterious “petit pan de mur jaune.” Perhaps more than any other, Bergotte’s final thoughts before dying faithfully reflect Proust’s idea of art. (But which part of Vermeer’s View of Delft, if any, picture corresponds to the noted “petit pan de mur jaune”?) Click here.
Afterwards (7:00 p.m.) Kate Lusheck, Assistant Professor of Art History/Arts Management (University of San Francisco) and a specialist in 17th-century Northern Baroque art, discusses issues of artistic meaning, representation, and tradition in the paintings and prints of the Dutch Golden Age: Looking Beneath the Surface: Dutch Art and Meaning in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
