The Yellow of Marcel Proust: On Ideas and Pictorial Thinking

Images activate our thinking and thus result in ideas. At the crossroads of the present and the past, Mieke Bal searches in The Yellow of Marcel Proust for the relevance of art for current questions and problems. In this search we encounter both literary and visual works of art, both old masters and contemporary artists. Via Proust and Flaubert, Munch and Bourgeois, the Bible and the Koran, the reader is invited to think again about history and anachronism, biography and character, rhythm and space, love and domination. The contribution of the media in which the works are set also plays a role: the photographic, the cinematic and the struggling with thick paint – it is all part of what makes us think. The Yellow of Marcel Proust is a plea for the recognition of the importance of the ideas we form when we look at images. Time and again a detail, a peculiarity or an apparent imperfection appears to offer an entrance to 'seeing meaning'. That is visual thinking