Office & Reading room - La Villa du temps retrouvé

David HOCKNEY (1937- )
Hawthorn Bush in Front of a Very Old and Dying Pear Tree
2019, Inkjet printing on paper
Courtesy Galerie Lelong

David HOCKNEY • Hawthorn Bush in Front of a Very Old and Dying Pear Tree

Proustian in spirit and imagination, David Hockney is one of the most innovative artists of his generation, notably creating numerous works on the iPad – digital ‘watercolours’ of a wholly new kind. Like Pissarro in Éragny of old, Hockney has also been ‘immersed’ in the Pays d’Auge, living and working in Beuvron-en-Auge for all these past years. Jean Frémon, Hockney’s gallery owner, offers a subtle analysis of this new style of painting: ‘The invention of the landscape lies in the invention of the marks that compose it, which turn it into a painting. In most of these drawings or paintings, Hockney has not created a landscape; he has painted a portrait of a tree that stands, alone, at the centre, and fills the entire space with majesty.”

Guy YANAI (1977- )
Young Woman Holding Flower
2025, Oil on canvas
Courtesy Galerie Lelong

©Guy Yanai-Courtesy-Galerie Lelong

Guy YANAI • Young Woman Holding Flower

Guy Yanai has borrowed the title of his exhibition – "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" – from the world of Proust, which he reveres and which deeply inspires his pictorial work. In his series inspired by "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", he paints scenes of life in a seaside resort, featuring young women in interiors and gardens. Capturing the spontaneity of digital snapshots, the artist transposes these candid shots into subtle paintings that reduce forms to colourful, rhythmic planes. His figurative compositions gain in universality and mystery, resembling more or less hazy memories of youth, as in Proust’s novel.

Yan Pei-Ming (1960-.)
Portrait de Marcel Proust
2022, Oil on canva
Courtesy de l’artiste, MASSIMODECARLO & Thaddaeus Ropac, London - Paris - Salzburg – Seoul

Yan Pei-Ming • Portrait de Marcel Proust

Born in Shanghai in 1960, Yan Pei-Ming arrived in Dijon in 1980 at the age of 20. The artist became famous for his portraits of Mao Zedong. Provocative, seeking "to create astonishment", the artist creates portraits of great personalities of the contemporary world (the Pope, Obama, Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson) and highlights the human gravity by attacking news and wars. The artist creates his large formats with a lively touch - criss-crossed, superimposed - and a monochrome palette, black and white being "shadow and light".

Whilst Jacques-Émile Blanche painted Marcel Proust as a young socialite in 1892, Yan Pei-Ming seeks, in this portrait specially created for the Villa du Temps retrouvé, to capture the spirit of Proust as a
writer, around 1907, at the time when he began writing "In Search of Lost Time" in Cabourg. Drawing on a selection of photographs in which Proust displays a melancholic expression, Yan Pei-Ming has sought to capture his enigmatic gaze, at once distant and penetrating, reflecting the depth of his thoughts. For this portrait, the painter chose to use a palette of greys to bring light to the face and to contrast with the old photographs, yellowed by time.

Adel Adbessemed
Proust 2015
Charcoal Drawing Print
City of Cabourg

Proust 2015 • Adel Adbessemed

A Paris-based artist of Algerian origin, Adel Abdessemed is the author of a multidisciplinary body of work (sculpture, charcoal drawing, video, installation) that raises awareness and bears witness to the violence of the world.
In this tribute work, with its sober style, he chooses a more traditional medium, lithography, to produce a death portrait of Marcel Proust directly inspired by the photograph taken by Man Ray and the engraving executed by Paul César Helleu. This work questions the posterity of the writer, relatively unknown at the time of his death, and who, a century later, has become a monument of world literature and inspires contemporary artists.

Anh DUONG (1960-.)
Elle n’était pas de son monde Autoportrait
2024, Oil on linen
Anh Duong / @anhduongart

Anh DUONG • Elle n’était pas de son monde

Sharing her life between New York and Paris, Anh Duong is unique in the art world in that she is also a visual icon, and has been a star fashion model since the 1980s. As an artist, she has sought to construct
a different image of herself in her paintings, which are largely composed of self-portraits. "I've been portrayed a lot, but it was mainly the outside of my personality. Fashion projects an external image of the self, and I didn't recognise myself in those photos. In my painting, I wanted to show what we couldn't see, what was buried inside me... When I paint, I try to look for that...". His paintings have recently been exhibited at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Grand Palais in Paris.

Monarch Typewriter
circa 1911
Ville de Cabourg Collection

Monarch Typewriter

In the summer of 1911, during a long stay in Cabourg, Marcel Proust asked the shorthand typist at the Grand Hôtel to type up part of his novel. Coecilia Hayward, of English origin, worked on her typewriter for the writer during the summer in Cabourg and then in the fall in Paris, under the supervision of his secretary Albert Nahmias - whose family owned a house in Cabourg. Then, the writer multiplies endlessly the corrections on his typescript, as on his manuscripts.

Camille de Morlhon (1869-1952)
La Broyeuse de cœurs, 1913
Pathé frères
Gaumont Pathé Archives

Oval frame

Pierre de Brézeux (Pierre Magnier) has everything he needs to be happy. Rich, kind, gifted with an iron health, he is engaged to a charming young girl, Marthe (Clémence Liceney) whom he adores and of whom he is deeply in love. This happiness, alas! was to be destroyed by the meeting of a woman who was to turn his life upside down. It is during a rehearsal organized at the royal circle that Pierre, as a member of the festival committee, meets for the first time Ida Bianca (Léontine Massart), famous for her flamboyant dance...