Aesthetes and Paintings: The Work of Art and the Deformed Eye in Gautier and Proust

Abstract

Between 1835 and 1839 Gautier published the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-1836) and the nouvelle La toison d'or (1839). Both Albert and Tiburce, as art lovers, were looking for a beautiful woman who resembled their artistic ideal. Gautier's aesthetic ideas about the conception of the beautiful will appear in the figures of aesthetes and dilettantes in nineteenth-century French literature up to the Recherche..., where the exceptional model who stands out for having his eye deformed by works of art, and consequently for contemplating other subjects as paintings, will be Charles Swann. This article studies what we will call the "deformed eye" of the artist-lovers in Mademoiselle de Maupin, La toison d'or, and Un amour de Swann (1913), which these characters acquire because of their delight in works of art and their search for the artistic ideal in life. We will propose that in the aforementioned works there is an eye deformed by the aesthetic delight in works of art, which seeks in reality or in life an object of desire defined as the beautiful ideal. Consequently, this search for the aesthetic ideal on the plane of life translates as the "sublimation" of erotic desire for the work of art, that is to say, the disinterested love of the theory of l'art pour l'art.