André Malraux and Art: An Intellectual Revolution 1433180464, 9781433180460

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André Malraux and Art

This book is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Derek Allan

André Malraux and Art An Intellectual Revolution

PETER LANG New York • Bern • Berlin Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Allan, Derek, author. Title: André Malraux and art: an intellectual revolution /​Derek Allan. Other titles: André Malraux et l’art. English Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2021. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027598 (print) | LCCN 2021027599 (ebook) ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8046-​0 (hardback) ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8047-​7 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-​1-​4331-​8048-​4 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Malraux, André, 1901–​1976. | Art—​Philosophy. Classification: LCC N7483.M27 A3613 2021 (print) | LCC N7483.M27 (ebook) | DDC 700.1—​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021027598 LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2021027599 DOI 10.3726/​b18641

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://​dnb.d-​nb.de/​.

Cover image: Notre Dame de Chartres, Royal Portal. Old Testament figures. Photograph: Derek Allan © 2021 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 80 Broad Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10004 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

“People confuse the nature of art with the pleasure it can bring; but, like love, it is passion, not pleasure.” Malraux, The Voices of Silence

Contents

Foreword

ix

Introduction

1 5



1

The Fundamental Emotion



2

Art –​A Rival World

19



3

Art and Creation

27



4

Art and the West

45



5

Art and Time

73



6

The First Universal World of Art

105



7

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire

125

viii | Foreword



8

Art and History

143

Conclusion: An Intellectual Revolution

169

Appendix: Titles of Malraux’s Works References Index

177 179 185

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Foreword

This book is the English version of a study entitled André Malraux et l’Art: Une Révolution Intellectuelle published in French by Peter Lang in April 2021. It is intended for those with a special interest in art theory or Malraux, as well as for the general reader. With occasional minor exceptions, the text of the English and French versions is the same. There are very few books in English that discuss Malraux’s theory of art in any depth, and it is hoped that the present study will help fill that gap. To assist readers with little or no French, all quotations from French sources, including Malraux, have been translated into English. The Appendix provides a list of Malraux’s works mentioned in the text. It gives the English titles of those that have been translated, with suggested English titles for the others. Where translations exist, the text of the present study generally uses the English title.

Introduction

In 1973, three years before his death, André Malraux confided to a friend: “Of all my books, those I’ve written about art are certainly the ones that have been most seriously misunderstood.”1 Malraux was doubtless disappointed by this state of affairs but it seems not to have discouraged him. He wrote prolifically about art, with two of his major works appearing as late as 1974 and 1976, and his final contribution –​L’Homme précaire et la littérature –​ published posthumously in 1977.2 In all, Malraux’s works in this field span nearly three decades of his life, beginning in 1949 with the first volume of The Psychology of Art (later revised as The Voices of Silence).3 Together with numerous occasional pieces such as prefaces, interviews, television programs, and speeches (often connected with his responsibilities as France’s Minister for Cultural Affairs), Malraux’s books on art constitute a literary output at least as extensive as his six novels. Why have these works been so frequently misunderstood? Answering that question is one of the objectives of the present study, which presents a step-​by-​step explanation of Malraux’s theory of art, examines a range of critical responses, and identifies a series of erroneous and misleading readings, often by major figures such as E.H. Gombrich, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice

2 | Introduction

Merleau-​Ponty, Jean-​François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Hans Belting, and Georges Didi-​Huberman. The errors seem to have two principal causes. First, there has been a widespread tendency to read Malraux quickly and superficially –​an approach almost guaranteed to fail because his thinking is highly original and often quite challenging; and second, many critics have attempted to interpret his works through the lens of traditional aesthetics, apparently not realizing that Malraux presents us with a radically new way of thinking about art. Both factors have led to major, demonstrable errors, such as Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s claim that Malraux is an historical determinist (in thrall to “Hegelian monstrosities,” no less), and the widespread tendency to confuse Malraux’s ground-​breaking proposition that art endures via a process of metamorphosis with the traditional view, inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, that it is exempt from time –​eternal, immortal or timeless. Some commentators have even miscategorized Malraux’s books on art. As early as the 1950s, a number of critics, principally art historians, seem to have concluded that they were histories of art, a mistake that still lingers on in some quarters today. Malraux stated explicitly on more than one occasion that he was not writing as an art historian and, indeed, it is quite obvious that his central aim is not to trace the history of art, or of particular artistic periods, but to explain the basic nature and purpose of art –​its role and importance in human life. Malraux, in other words, is an art theorist, not an art historian. The revolutionary nature of his theory of art, which, for reasons we shall examine, makes greater use of the history of art than traditional explanations, perhaps explains why this mistake has been made, but it is nevertheless a basic error that has caused misconceptions about the very nature of his thought. Malraux was always a keen reader of art history, but his own ambitions were quite different. Given this situation, critical reactions to Malraux’s books on art have, not surprisingly, varied greatly. Initially, there were many favorable comments, one French critic in 1949 even declaring that The Psychology of Art was “one of Malraux’s greatest books, and one of the greatest books in all modern literature.”4 But the honeymoon was short-​lived and voices of a less friendly nature soon began to be heard. In a lengthy attack in 1956, the French art historian Georges Duthuit accused Malraux of nothing less than “ignorance, negligence, and fraud,”5 while his English counterpart, E. H. Gombrich, wrote

Introduction | 3 of The Voices of Silence that “there is no evidence that Malraux has done a day’s consecutive reading in a library.”6 Disparaging comments such as these inevitably influenced a wider audience, including philosophers of art who, with rare exceptions, decided that Malraux could be safely ignored. By1987, Gombrich felt confident enough about Malraux’s fall from grace to suggest that his views on art were little more than “sophisticated double talk.”7 To some extent, attitudes of this kind still persist today. It is true, of course, that Malraux’s books on art have many admirers, and that within the field of French literature especially, there have been enthusiastic and perceptive studies by specialists who have read them with care. It is also true that recent years have seen a significant resurgence of interest, prompting one French critic to write that “Today, Malraux’s books on art are the subject of intense editorial activity. Their time in purgatory, it seems, has come to an end.”8 The comment may, however, be a little premature. Despite encouraging signs, it remains true that within the broad field of art theory, and especially within the academic disciplines of aesthetics and the philosophy of art,9 Malraux’s books on art are still relegated to the margins and often ignored. His name is mentioned occasionally –​usually in connection with the musée imaginaire, the idea with which his books on art are most frequently associated10 –​but analysis of his ideas is typically brief and superficial. Outside France, needless to say, the situation is even worse. In anglophone countries and especially among philosophers of art, Malraux’s books on art are seldom read, and it is not difficult to find studies in aesthetics or the philosophy of art in which his name is not mentioned. One leading exponent of the Anglo-​ American school of “analytic” aesthetics even informed the present writer that he was “proud” that he had never read any of Malraux’s books on art. The present study presents a direct challenge to this situation. In essence, the chapters that follow argue that Malraux offers us a carefully considered, thoroughly coherent, and highly enlightening theory of art which, contrary to the views of Gombrich, Duthuit, and certain more recent critics such as Pierre Bourdieu and Georges Didi-​Huberman, is extremely well-​informed and reliable. More than that, and despite occasional claims that Malraux’s thinking is derivative, this study will contend that the theory of art presented in works such as The Voices of Silence, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, L’Irréel and L’Intemporel is highly original and constitutes a radical challenge to the traditional explanations of art stemming from the Enlightenment that have

4 | Introduction

dominated Western philosophical aesthetics for some three hundred years. The present study, in short, seeks to remedy the highly regrettable neglect of Malraux’s books on art and present them in a light that does justice to their true value. In doing so, it reveals a way of understanding the nature and purpose of art that amounts to nothing less than an intellectual revolution.

Notes 1 Correspondence to present author from André Brincourt, 25 April 2006. (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French sources are my own.) 2 As noted in the Foreword, translations of the titles of Malraux’s books are given in the Appendix. 3 Malraux had in fact begun work on his theory of art before the war, in the mid-​ 1930s. This point is discussed briefly in Chapter One. 4 Gaëtan Picon, L’Usage de la lecture (Paris: Mercure de France, 1960), 134. The essay originally appeared in the journal Liberté d’esprit in 1949. 5 Georges Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable, Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1956). Avertissement (Foreword). 6 E.H. Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1978), 78. The review was first published in The Burlington Magazine in 1954 but is still widely quoted. 7 E.H. Gombrich, “Malraux on Art and Myth,” in Reflections on the History of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 218. 8 Lucas Demurger, “Un Malraux philosophe. ‘Les Écrits sur l’art’,” Critique LXX, no. 805–​06 (2014): 520. 9 The terms aesthetics and philosophy of art are often interchangeable, and as a general rule, this study makes no distinction between the two. 10 Malraux’s phrase le musée imaginaire is discussed in Chapter Seven. It is usually translated as “imaginary museum” or “museum without walls.” The present study leaves the phrase in French.

1

The Fundamental Emotion

Although Malraux began writing about aspects of literature and art from the earliest years of his literary career in the 1920s, it was not until 1934, following a decisive event in his life, that he began to develop a comprehensive theory of art –​a theory explaining art’s general nature and purpose. The event in question is examined in some detail later in this chapter, but to see it in context and grasp its full import, one needs to look first at certain key elements of his thinking in the preceding years. We begin therefore with a rapid survey of certain aspects of Malraux’s intellectual outlook in the period prior to 1934. From the outset, Malraux accepted that as a deeply held value, as distinct from a pious convention, Christian faith had run its course and that, for the West at least, God was dead. Early signs of the decline had emerged in the 1600s but philosophers in the eighteenth century, with their passion for science and reason, had administered the coup de grâce, precipitating what Malraux described in a later essay as “the radical abandonment of Christianity.”1 The vacuum left by the death of God was, however, quickly filled by a new absolute –​a passionate faith in man himself. In the eighteenth century, this faith centered on the ideal of an enlightened, rational humanity

6 | André

Malraux and Art

of refined sensibilities, liberated from the harmful “prejudices” of previous eras. The nineteenth century embraced a similar faith but transferred its hopes to the future, looking forward to a renewed humanity yet to be born (“l’Homme à naître,” to borrow the phrase Malraux used later in The Voices of Silence2) for whom science would solve all essential problems and who would live in peace, prosperity, and dignity. This faith took many forms (Marxism is an obvious example) and in each case, Malraux wrote in 1927, it can only be compared, in power and importance, to a religion. It manifests itself above all in a powerful attraction, a kind of passion, for Man, which takes the place previously occupied by God.3

The twentieth century, however, had seen the collapse of all these hopes. Mass warfare and the invention of weapons of unprecedented power had revealed that alongside its power to benefit mankind, science possessed a formidable capacity to destroy.4 In addition, the decades around the turn of the century had witnessed a series of intellectual developments that cast doubts on the cherished ideals of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Psychological theories of the subconscious weakened beliefs in a human nature ruled by reason,5 while anthropology and archaeology fostered a radically revised understanding of the significance of European civilization and its view of history. “Our predecessors had lived in a privileged civilization, the Mediterranean civilization,” Malraux commented in a 1973 interview, “and they looked upon the rest as more or less barbaric. For Hegel, and even for a Marxist […] there is one History –​History with a capital H –​just as there is only one civilization.” But all that had changed fundamentally: A civilization that starts talking about Sumer, Egypt, India, Mexico, etc as data among others, the data on which our understanding of man must be founded, that was certainly the first time. The scope of human knowledge had been vastly extended: ethnography, ethnology, all sorts of things were being brought into play. Art was discovering reproduction, and a series of new techniques and kinds of knowledge was confronting us with civilizations whose very range seemed an enigma.6

Unilinear concepts of history (central to any notion of “l’Homme à naître”) were supplanted by “discontinuous history”7 in which theories and ideologies based on notions of the progress of one “privileged” civilization gave way to

The Fundamental Emotion | 7 belief in a plurality of cultures and histories, each understood as a distinct entity. What does this mean for the concept of “human nature”? Where in all this complexity could one identify a unified notion of man? Today, these historical and intellectual developments have left us in the grip of a profound cultural crisis. The humanist ideals –​the successive notions of “man” that replaced Christian faith –​are in ruins, and modern Western culture finds itself bereft of any fundamental value. Ling, the Chinese correspondent in Malraux’s early essay, The Temptation of the West, writes to his Western counterpart: “Absolute reality for you was God; then man. But man is dead, after God, and you are engaged now in an anguished search for something to which you can assign his strange inheritance.”8 The search still continues today, and we have now become an essentially agnostic culture lacking any coherent, fundamental value –​any absolute. We have what we like to regard as values, Malraux concedes, but “they seem to have been emptied of substance. They lack dynamism and their unity having been destroyed, we no longer recognize them as values.”9 The situation is without precedent. Modern Western culture, Malraux writes in The Metamorphosis of the Gods, is the first civilization “conscious that it is unaware of the significance of man.”10 What connection is there between these ideas and theories about the nature of art? “Once the question ‘What is art?’ becomes serious,” Malraux commented in a 1952 interview, “the question ‘What is man?’ is not far away.”11 There is, in other words, a close link between explanations of the function and importance of art in human life and beliefs about the nature and significance of man –​a claim well exemplified by the traditions of post-​ Enlightenment aesthetics that continue to underlie the prevailing currents of thought in the philosophy of art today. Eighteenth-​century aesthetics derives directly from the Enlightenment’s post-​religious models of man conceptualized in terms of a universal “human nature” endowed with certain innate faculties12 which, in the case of art and beauty, are deemed to include a sense of “taste” (sometimes called a “sense of beauty”13) allied to an aptitude for “aesthetic judgement” and a capacity to experience a refined form of delectation termed “aesthetic pleasure.” The Hegelian-​Marxist tradition added the claim that man and all his activities are inextricably bound up with processes of historical change, declaring that answers to the question “What is art?” must also take account of changing social and historical contexts; but in both

8 | André

Malraux and Art

cases, despite this difference, answers to the question “What is art?” depend fundamentally, on responses to the question “What is man?” What happens, however, if “man is dead”? What foundation can one rely on for a theory of art if all existing notions of man have disintegrated? For Malraux, as indicated, 1934 was a turning-​point in this regard, and one can readily detect the sudden change in his thinking that took place at that time. As noted earlier, Malraux had begun writing about art from the very beginning of his career and his early works in the 1920s included a number of articles on individual artists and their works. Yet while one can certainly discern certain recurring themes in these essays,14 nowhere is there anything that could be seriously regarded as a comprehensive theory of art, or even an attempt to formulate one. From late 1934 onwards, however, Malraux began to write essays and speeches with titles such as “Art is a Conquest” (August 1934), “The Work of Art” (1935), “Cultural Heritage” (1936) and “The Psychology of Art” (1937) –​works which, as their titles suggest, have a much broader scope than anything he had written before.15 Here we find Malraux striking out in new directions and, for the first time, tackling the general question “What is art?”; and here also we encounter many of the basic propositions that will be central to the books on art he published after the war, such as: “Art is not a form of submission; it is a conquest,”16 “The artist’s struggle is not with life but with imitation,”17 and “A work of art is an object, but it is also an encounter with time.”18 What had happened? Had Malraux discovered a new concept of man to replace those he regarded as defunct –​a new “absolute reality” to borrow Ling’s phrase in The Temptation of the West? Or had he perhaps found some other basis for a theory of art, and if so, what was it? The answers to these questions lie in the pivotal experience in 1934 which, in Malraux’s words, “played a major part in my life, and that I have tried to express a number of times.”19 The result was not a new concept of man –​not, at least, in anything resembling the established meanings of that phrase –​but something he came to regard as even more fundamental, something that had a profound effect not only on his thinking about art but on all his writing from then on, including his last three novels and the works that go to make up Le Miroir des limbes, such as the Antimemoirs. Given the significance of this event, it is important to spend a little time exploring its nature and implications.

The Fundamental Emotion | 9 The context was a return flight from an aerial expedition to Yemen in a light aircraft, piloted by one of Malraux’s friends, Corniglion-​Molinier.20 As the aircraft crossed mountainous terrain in Tunisia, it encountered a violent storm and only narrowly avoided crashing. Soon afterwards, following a safe landing in Bône (now Annaba) in Algeria, Malraux found himself amidst the very different sights and sounds of everyday urban life and, for the first time, encountered the remarkable experience he later called “the return to the earth.” This experience, he wrote later in Le Miroir des limbes, was “transposed directly into Days of Contempt,”21 his fourth novel published a year later, and it reappears later in Le Miroir des limbes itself where Malraux relates it in the first person. The two accounts are very similar and the following analysis draws on both. In Days of Contempt, Malraux places “the return to the earth” in a European setting. The novel’s central character, Kassner, is imprisoned in Germany by the Nazis but escapes by light aircraft to Prague. Mirroring the event over Tunisia, the aircraft encounters a severe storm and comes close to crashing. The narrative falls into two related parts: the description of the plane at the mercy of the elements, and Kassner’s bewildered reactions shortly after landing as he walks along the peaceful streets of Prague. As the storm takes hold and the aircraft is overwhelmed by wind, rain, and hail, Kassner begins to feel he has entered another world –​a world of relentless violence cut off from the earth below. In the version related in the first-​person in Le Miroir des limbes, Malraux writes, I felt as if I had escaped gravity, as if I were suspended somewhere between the worlds, grappling with the clouds in a primitive combat, while below me the earth continued its course that I would never encounter again.22

The second part of the narrative follows closely on the heels of this. The pilot forces the aircraft below the level of the clouds and manages to land in Prague. Kassner is driven into the city where he suddenly finds himself amidst the ordinary scenes of everyday urban life. The sharp contrast between the two contexts –​the ferocious storm and the calm city life –​is key to the powerful, unfamiliar emotion he then experiences. Everything Kassner sees around him in the Prague streets, including the most commonplace objects, seems strange and incomprehensible. Through a window he notices that “a woman was carefully ironing clothes, applying

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herself to the task,” and he thinks in astonishment: “there are shirts, linen, and hot irons in this strange place called the earth …”23 Everything he encounters evokes this same sense of wonder. Malraux writes in Le Miroir des limbes: I could not recognize these shops, this furrier’s shop-​window where a little white dog was playing among animal skins, sitting down, then moving around again: a living being, with long hair and clumsy movements, and which was not a man. An animal. I had forgotten animals.24

What is happening here exactly? A key point to bear in mind is that the memory of the storm is still very much alive and, as Malraux writes, “Kassner could still feel its fading rumble reverberating within him.”25 As a result, every object and incident in the city streets, no matter how banal, no longer seems part of the familiar world that Kassner, like everyone, usually takes for granted, but part of a world of a particular kind –​a world quite unlike the world of the storm, for example, which only a short time ago seemed to be the sum of all that existed. During this brief interval of “the return to the earth,” the familiar human world –​the everyday world of shirts, hot irons, shop-​windows and dogs –​seems to be merely one possibility among others, and Kassner has the bewildering impression that it is emerging out of nowhere “as condensation and droplets of water appear on a frozen glass.”26 No longer the way things “naturally are,” the ordinary, unremarkable world of things and events has become an inexplicable irruption into existence. Nothing has a reason for being, or for being the way it is. All the forms of the earth seem arbitrary and contingent –​transient appearances, not familiar constituents of a permanent scheme of things. The dramatic context in which this experience takes place gives it a special intensity, but its essential nature is simply a rupture of the links with everyday life followed by a sudden return, and this, as Malraux noted in a speech in 1973, can sometimes occur in contexts of a much less dramatic kind. The human reaction at such moments, he observed, is “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life, beginning with his own,” an emotion inseparable from the questions “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” and “Why has life taken this form?” He continued:

The Fundamental Emotion | 11 Anyone who has glimpsed the shores of death has, upon his return, experienced the depth of that feeling. Most of us have felt it, undramatically, when confronted with other cultures: it makes even familiar ones seem exotic. It is, undoubtedly, inseparable from the passing of time; a simultaneous awareness of the strange, the contingent, and the ephemeral.27

The phrase “shores of death” suggests the kind of perilous situation exemplified by the battle with the storm, but the same emotion can be aroused, Malraux comments, by less unusual circumstances such as a sudden encounter with the sights and sounds of another culture (which is in fact one of the contexts in which it occurs in his sixth novel, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg28). The human response he describes, is not, in other words, one that could only occur in extremely rare circumstances, or be experienced only by a person with a certain level of psychological sensitivity or philosophical awareness. It is “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life,” and as such, one that anyone might feel after being jolted out of familiar, everyday experience and then returning to it. It is important to stress also that Malraux is speaking of an emotion, not simply an idea –​not simply a response limited to the intellect alone. “The return to the earth” is an experience in which the person involved is himself or herself implicated, and the questions “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” and “Why has life taken this form?” are not impersonal, intellectual inquiries (as they have been for a number of philosophers) but questions about a world to which the individual involved is returning and to which he knows he belongs. This is why, in the speech quoted above, Malraux speaks of “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life, beginning with his own.” The emotion has no simple, familiar name. It clearly involves wonder and bewilderment but wonder and bewilderment of a particular kind –​evoked not by a specific object or event but by existence as a whole. It is also, importantly, a human emotion in a quite literal sense of that phrase. In the special circumstances Malraux describes, personal concerns are eclipsed, and the individual responds not as someone pursuing the particular course of his or her own life (Malraux and Kassner as individuals with private concerns are peripheral to the narrative), or even as a participant in a specific collective endeavor, but solely in terms of human life as a whole. “The return to the earth,” in other words, affords a brief glimpse of human

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life –​life of which the individual knows he or she is a part –​purged of all elements other than those that relate to all humankind. There is no mistaking the importance Malraux places on this experience, and he clearly regards it as nothing less than a reliving of the dawning of human consciousness. It is a brief revisiting, triggered by exceptional circumstances, of the definitive moment in which the pre-​human animal emerges from “the blind kingdom” (as Kassner terms the pre-​conscious state29) and becomes aware of a condition of which he was previously only a passive, unknowing victim. Anticipating a little, it is why Malraux can write in The Voices of Silence (where, as we shall see, these ideas are fundamental) of “that first glacial night on which a kind of gorilla, looking up at the stars, suddenly felt mysteriously akin to them.” The sense of kinship with the stars –​here symbolizing something that seems to endure in the face of endless mutability –​springs from a sudden awareness, despite the merciless indifference of things (the word “glacial” is not there by accident), that humanity can be more than an inconsequential nullity in a universe in which everything is “merely servile, and flies without light,” to borrow the description of this condition in The Voices of Silence.30 Malraux is not attempting to describe the physical or mental operations of consciousness (assuming that were possible31). He is, nevertheless, doing something of profound significance: he is identifying what the elusive phenomenon known as consciousness is. Human consciousness, for Malraux, is based on primordial wonder and an urge to question existence; it is a sudden recognition by “a kind of gorilla” that life has so far been blind subjection, and that now, by calling existence into question, it has escaped that condition. This experience was a watershed in Malraux’s intellectual development. It did not provide a new notion of man in the traditional senses of that phrase (such as Ling’s 1926 pronouncement that “Absolute reality for you was God; then man …”) It did, however, provide a vivid awareness of human existence, even down to the banalities of shirts, hot irons, shop-​windows and dogs. It is an awareness arising from human consciousness alone, affording no answers to the questions consciousness poses –​why human life exists, or why it is the way it is. It does, however, provide a release from the subjugated state which Kassner senses he has left behind as he returns to “this strange place called the earth.”

The Fundamental Emotion | 13 The point can be clarified by looking briefly at Malraux’s understanding of an absolute, a concept he was able to develop more fully as a consequence of the experience we have just examined. In Malraux eyes, as we have said, the sense of wonder and bewilderment illustrated in the experience of “the return to the earth” is fundamental: it is the basic condition of humankind endowed with consciousness alone. Throughout the ages, however, cultures have sought answers to the questions consciousness poses, and they have responded by means of absolutes (to use the term Malraux often prefers). Setting aside prehistoric times, where we are essentially reduced to guesswork, absolutes, both Western and non-​Western, have usually been religious or quasi-​religious –​a faith in God, or the gods, reverence for the ancestors, communion with intercessory spirits, or something similar. The Christian and the Jew, for example, reply that the world exists, and is the way it is, because it is the work of a Creator God and the manifestation of his divine Will. The Buddhist believes that the world is a fleeting illusion masking the immutable Truth revealed by Enlightenment. From the eighteenth century onwards, Western civilization fell back on a faith in humanity itself –​“a kind of passion for Man, which takes the place previously occupied by God.” Answers, both religious and secular, have taken many forms, but their common feature is that they render the world “natural” in the sense that it is seen to exist and be the way it is, for a reason. The world is not an arbitrary, fleeting spectacle; it is the only way it could be –​the way it was “intended” to be (by God, or the preordained processes of History, for example) and man is “at home” in it, even if, as Christianity and many other religions taught, the home is only temporary, and frequented at times by malevolent forces. No longer merely a passing parade of arbitrary appearances, the world revealed by the absolute has been created “once and for all,” and far from being an unexplained irruption into being, is the manifestation of the one and only everlasting Truth. This is a powerful idea and explains, among other things, why absolutes such as religious faiths have not simply been intellectual constructs but have typically involved a strong affective component. Just as the dawning of human consciousness (as relived, for example, in “the return to the earth”) is a fundamental emotion, so an absolute, as a response to that emotion, not only sets its seal on the nature of things, removing all suggestion that the world is only one arbitrary possibility, but also establishes a powerful

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psychological bond between the individual and the world he or she inhabits. Hence, Malraux argues, the links with the cosmos that have so often played a prominent role in religious faiths. These are not simply the consequence of a primitive susceptibility to superstition as the modern world usually assumes, but a predictable constituent of a belief in an absolute because a cosmos with meaning, even if intermittently hostile and requiring propitiation, is a cosmos transformed into something known and familiar –​a “home,” something to which the individual feels he or she belongs. The more powerfully and comprehensively the features of the world, such as the heavens, the seasons, the mountains and rivers, the way the social order is organized, and even the passing days and hours, bear the imprint of the faith –​the absolute –​ the more obvious and persuasive the evidence that all things are the way they are “for a reason.”32 Thus, “Greek civilization,” Malraux comments, “is inseparable from the fact that it was linked to the cosmos through the gods. Any Greek god one cares to name is a mediator between a particular group of forces, the cosmos and man.” And the same was true of Christianity at its height: “The Middle Ages felt this connection in a different way but nevertheless very strongly. God made the evening and the morning, but the church bells linked good Christian folk to God. The Angelus was a time of day, but it was also the Angel of the Annunciation.”33 The distinction between an absolute (such as God or Man) and the basic predicament of humankind endowed with consciousness alone, is therefore quite clear. Consciousness escapes from “the blind kingdom” but still finds itself immersed in an ephemeral world of appearances: human life is revealed in its endless multiplicity and transience, but its purpose, its underlying reason for being, is unknown. Absolutes provide that purpose, replacing transience with permanence, chaos with meaning. Once furnished with an absolute, men and women are at home in the world and understand the reason for all their strivings. Critics occasionally allege that Malraux was himself a votary of an absolute of some kind, but this is clearly not the case. As noted earlier, he describes modern civilization as an agnostic culture, and he includes himself in this diagnosis. Nowhere in any of his works, pre-​or post-​1934, is there the smallest indication that he believed he had discovered a new absolute to replace Christian belief or the now-​defunct faiths in Man. Indeed, the evidence suggests that at some point –​perhaps quite early in life –​he abandoned

The Fundamental Emotion | 15 the search for an absolute. In a passage intended for his Antimemoirs, which he subsequently decided not to include (possibly because he considered it too abstract), Malraux tells his interlocutor, Max Torrès: “Nietzsche thought: if God is dead, there is nothing behind appearances, and those who search behind appearances are daydreaming about other worlds. I do not search …”34 Malraux was keenly aware of the power of absolutes in human history and had thought deeply about them, but he himself proposes no absolute, religious or secular. In a striking metaphor in Lazare, he speaks of “this inn lost in the wilderness called life,”35 an image that speaks clearly, not to say poignantly, of a deeply felt agnosticism. This was Malraux’s position quite early in life and it remained so until his death. This background is crucial in approaching Malraux’s thinking about art because, unlike traditional aesthetics, whose origins, as we have seen, lie in eighteenth and nineteenth-​century beliefs about the nature of man, Malraux’s theory of art, consistent with his agnosticism, makes no appeal to any absolute, religious or secular. Absolutes certainly play a role in his thinking –​often an important role –​but only in an episodic way; the foundations of his thought owe nothing to any such faith or belief. Malraux’s basic propositions about art spring entirely, in ways we shall begin to explore in the next chapter, from an awareness of life built on the capacity to call existence into question. This explains why his thinking about art differs so radically from the familiar philosophies of art inherited from the Enlightenment and its nineteenth-​century aftermath. Malraux has no interest in the absolutes on which these philosophies of art are built. He has nothing to say about a permanent human nature endowed with a “sense of taste,” or faculties for “aesthetic judgement” and “aesthetic pleasure”; nor does he believe, as Enlightenment thinkers typically did, and as many of their modern descendants still do, that there is a necessary connection between art and beauty. Equally, he has no interest in absolutes based on the idea of history, which typically conceptualize art as an instrument or expression of historical forces. Malraux develops a theory of art in keeping with the nature of modern, agnostic Western36 civilization “conscious that it is unaware of the significance of man,” which is why (as we shall see) his thinking relates so directly to contemporary experience and to the world of art as we know it today. It is also, perhaps, why many modern philosophers of art, still wedded to certitudes that Malraux abandons, have found him difficult to understand.

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Notes 1 André Malraux, Le Triangle noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 10. 2 Literally, “Man [yet] to be born.” André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 731. See also: André Malraux, “L’Homme et la culture artistique,” in Écrits sur l’art (I), 1201–​03. 3 André Malraux, “D’Une Jeunesse européenne,” in Écrits, Les Cahier Verts (Paris: Grasset, 1927), 138. 4 Cf. Malraux’s comment in a 1974 interview: “A hundred years ago people said: ‘We won’t solve the essential problems, but the twentieth century will.’ They lived in a kind of future kermess: ‘Science will deliver everything we need.’ Now all that’s finished. People no longer believe that science will sort it all out. We have discovered that science has a negative side. […] We know that it’s powerful enough to destroy humanity but not to furnish a human ideal [‘former un homme’]. That’s the drama of our times.” Michel Cazenave, Les Réalités et les comédies du monde (Paris: L’Herne, 1996), 20, 21. Malraux’s emphasis. 5 Cf. Roger Stéphane, André Malraux, entretiens et précisions (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 72. 6 Guy Suarès, Malraux, celui qui vient: entretiens entre André Malraux, Guy Suarès, José Benjamin (Paris: Stock, 1974), 22. Malraux’s emphasis. The book has been translated into English as: Guy Suarès, Malraux, Past Present Future (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974). 7 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 34. Malraux writes: “ ‘Discontinuous’ history, the historical study of civilizations that was born with our century, involves a profoundly different idea of their past: for continuous history, Egypt is a childhood of humanity; for discontinuous history it is a humanity of times gone by.” As Malraux commented in his interview with Suarès, the idea is very familiar now, but it was not so then. Suarès, Malraux, celui qui vient, 16. 8 André Malraux, La Tentation de l’Occident (Paris: Grasset, 1926), 128. Malraux’s emphasis. Malraux’s thinking in this regard substantially predates Michel Foucault’s well-​ k nown comment on the imminent death of man. Malraux may have been an early influence on Foucault. See David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 33, 34, 89, 90. 9 Suarès, 25. Malraux adds a little later: “The West is not only disconnected from the cosmos, it also has very tenuous links with a universal idea of man and of History. The door is closed. We try to force it open.” Ibid., 34. 10 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 37. Cf. also his remark in 1948: “The drama enveloping Europe today is the death of man.” André Malraux, “Adresse aux intellectuels,” Le Cheval de Troie, no. 7–​8 (1948), 984.

The Fundamental Emotion | 17 11 André Malraux, “Entretien avec Gabriel Aubarède,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires 3 avril, (1952), 3. 12 See, for example, the classic account in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 13 See, for example, Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1973). 14 Explored in books such as: André Vandegans, La Jeunesse littéraire d’André Malraux (Paris: Jean-​Jacques Pauvert, 1964); Pascal Sabourin, La Réflexion sur l’art d’André Malraux: origines et évolution (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972); Jean-​ Claude Larrat, Malraux, théoricien de la littérature, 1921–​1951 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). 15 André Malraux, “L’Art est une conquête: discours prononcé au premier congrès des écrivains soviétiques tenu à Moscou du 17 août au 31 août 1934,” in André Malraux: La Politique, la culture, discours, articles, entretiens (1925–​1975), ed. Janine Mossuz-​Lavau (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 104–​08; André Malraux, “Préfaces, articles, allocutions: ‘L’Œuvre d’art’,” in Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​ Yves Tadié, (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1188–​91; André Malraux, “Préfaces, articles, allocutions: ‘Sur l’héritage culturel’,” ibid., 1191–​99; André Malraux, “Articles de ‘Verve’: La Psychologie de l’art,” ibid., 910–​22. Cf. also Malraux’s statement in 1970: “The earliest passages of Les Voix du silence were written more than thirty years ago.” André Malraux, “Appendice aux ‘Voix du silence’: préface inédite aux ‘Grandes voix’ (1970),” ibid., 956. 16 Malraux, “L’Art est une conquête: discours prononcé au premier congrès des écrivains soviétiques tenu à Moscou du 17 août au 31 août 1934,” in Mossuz-​ Lavau, op. cit., 106. 17 Malraux, “Articles de ‘Verve’: La Psychologie de l’art,” ibid., 910, 911. 18 Malraux, “Préfaces, articles, allocutions: ‘L’Œuvre d’art’,” Écrits sur l’art (I), 1190. 19 André Malraux, Antimémoires, Œuvres Complètes (III), ed. Marius-​François Guyard, Jean-​ Claude Larrat, and François Trécourt (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 72. 20 Malraux was hoping to identify the site of the lost capital city of the Queen of Sheba, but this is only incidental in the present context and has no bearing on the nature of the experience in question here. In Days of Contempt, as noted below, he was quite happy to transpose the event to a European setting. 21 Malraux, Antimémoires, 72. (The Antimémoires form the first volume of Le Miroir des Limbes.) 22 Ibid., 69.

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23 André Malraux, Le Temps du mépris (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 92. 24 Malraux, Antimémoires, 72. 25 Malraux, Le Temps du mépris, 92. 26 Ibid., 94. 27 André Malraux, “Discours prononcé à la Fondation Maeght,” in Œuvres Complètes (III), 885. Ionesco sometimes describes emotions of a similar kind, even if aroused in a different way. See for example: Eugène Ionesco, Le Solitaire (Paris: Mercure de France, 1973), 108–​12. 28 In an episode describing Berger’s father’s first encounter with Europe in Marseille after a long absence in central Asia. See André Malraux, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, Œuvres Complètes (II), ed. Marius-​François Guyard, Maurice Larès and François Trécourt (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 652–​55. 29 Malraux, Le Temps du Mépris, 93. 30 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 899. In French the full sentence is: “Le reste est espèces soumises, et mouches sans lumières.” 31 Modern philosophy, especially of the analytic persuasion, includes an extensive literature on human consciousness. The nature of the mental and physical processes involved is a major area of dispute. Indeed, there is little sign of consensus about how the concept of consciousness should even be defined. 32 In the case of a humanist absolute, such as the nineteenth century faith in Man founded on processes of History, links with the cosmos may be more limited. Malraux writes interestingly: “Ideas derived from an interpretation of the past carry less weight than the forms through which man freed himself from the passage of time.” Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 722. 33 Suarès, 18. As noted earlier, Malraux used the idea of “absolute reality” as early as The Temptation of the West. However, while its general meaning there is clear enough, it lacks the substance it acquires in Malraux’s post-​1934 writings. In particular, the earlier usage might be construed as simply denoting an intellectual construct. 34 André Malraux, “Appendices: 1. Fragments d’une réflexion sur les Antimémoires,” in Antimémoires, 898. Malraux writes in the same paragraph: “I believe that the feeling of fleeting appearances is a fundamental and initial psychic state. I stress initial. It is the sense of impermanence that leads Buddha to the Illumination, not the reverse.” (Buddhism here is simply being used as an example of an absolute.) 35 In French: “cette auberge sans routes qu’on appelle la vie.” Malraux, Antimémoires, 6. 36 The term “Western civilization” is intended in the broad sense in which it includes cultures strongly affected by Western values –​“Westernized” cultures.

2

Art –​A Rival World

At the fundamental level, we have said, art, in Malraux’s eyes, is closely linked to human consciousness. Art is a response to “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life” –​the emotion that lies at the heart of consciousness which, in the absence of an absolute, reveals a human world bereft of meaning and steeped in impermanence. How exactly does art respond? Malraux’s answer is straightforward. Art combats the sense of transience and chaos at the heart of this fundamental emotion by creating another world, a rival world –​“not necessarily a supernal world, or a glorified one,” he explains, “but one different in kind from reality.”1 Different in what way? Different because, in the same sense that “reality” in this context is the fleeting world of appearances in which nothing has a reason for being the way it is, or for being at all, the rival worlds created by art are constructed solely of elements that are the way they are, and are present, for a reason –​that is, worlds that are, to use Malraux’s terms, “coherent” or “unified.” Thus, where art is concerned, “reality” is only a “dictionary” –​a catalog of forms capable individually of being invested with meaning but combined in a way that renders them incoherent,2 and the task of the true artist, whether or not he or she is aware of it, is to replace incoherence with unity. In a key passage in The Voices

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of Silence that merits more attention than it sometimes receives, Malraux defines artistic styles in this way: Styles are significations […] always we see them replacing the unknown scheme of things with the coherence they impose on all they “represent.” However complex, however lawless an art may seem to be –​even the art of a Van Gogh or a Rimbaud –​it stands for unity as against the chaos of mere, given reality.3

“The unknown scheme of things” –​not, in other words, a world in which order of some kind pre-​exists the artist’s creative endeavor, but a world lacking all order and meaning, a world of transient appearances. Ultimately, Malraux comments in The Voices of Silence, art is “a humanization” of the world,4 not in the sense that it presents a benign, reassuring image of human life, but in the sense that a scheme of things in which the significance of everything including man and all his efforts is unknown, is replaced by a rival world charged with meaning, a unified world in which everything is present for a purpose (and from which, as a corollary, everything lacking that purpose is excluded). In place of a scheme of things in which humanity is merely an incomprehensible accident, there emerges a rival world of images (or literature or music) which, as Malraux writes, are “powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”5 We are dealing here with a fundamental aspect of Malraux’s theory of art and the issues are inevitably somewhat abstract. The argument can be made more accessible, however, if one contrasts his position with the thinking behind some of the more familiar claims of Western aesthetics. Traditional accounts of the nature of art, such as those based on the popular idea that art is a form of representation, often imply that the “reality” or “world” to which art is addressed operates as a kind of reference point or guide. This is the meaning often intended by the term “nature,” which frequently conveys the notion of an underlying, ideal model to which the artist must remain the faithful servant and interpreter, whether this fidelity finds expression through the relative naturalism of, say, Chardin or Courbet, or through the quite different styles of, say, Cezanne or Picasso (choosing examples from visual art). Now, Malraux rejects explanations of this kind and we can now see why. Where art is concerned, there is no pre-​existing model; there is simply the teeming multiplicity that appears to lack any reason for being the way

Art – A Rival World | 21 it is, or for being at all. Far from being a reference point or guide, “nature” (or “reality” in the quotation given above) is the chaos that art seeks to overcome, and a key feature of his theory of art is his consistent and unambiguous rejection of traditional thinking of the kind described. “Whatever the artist may say on the matter,” he writes in The Voices of Silence, “never does he let himself be mastered by the world; always he makes it submit to something he puts in its stead.”6 Certain points of clarification are in order. At first sight, Malraux’s understanding of artistic styles might seem similar, if not identical, to his concept of an absolute as described in Chapter One –​and there is certainly an important point of resemblance. Both respond to the same sense of transience and incomprehensibility that Malraux encounters in the “return to the earth,” and both replace this sense of chaos with a coherent world –​a world in which all things exist for a reason. There is, however, a crucial difference. As noted earlier, an absolute (such as a religion or a secular faith) reveals a world created “once and for all” –​a permanent Truth beneath the veil of appearances. Art makes no such pronouncement. Art, for Malraux, is always agnostic: unlike an absolute, which asserts that all things are the way they are for a reason (such as the will of God), art speaks only of its own rival world, leaving the question of the ultimate nature of things unanswered. Expressed a little differently, art unifies the world but does not affirm that there is only one world –​one definitive scheme of things. The full significance of this distinction will become apparent later when we explore Malraux’s revolutionary account of the relationship between art and the passing of time, but the point is made here to forestall any hasty conclusion that Malraux makes no distinction between art and religion (a claim occasionally advanced by his critics). While both share the same origin as responses to “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life,” there is a crucial difference in the nature of their responses. It should be stressed also that Malraux’s definition of artistic styles –​in brief, the replacement of chaos by a rival unified world –​in no sense implies an attempt to establish rules intended to distinguish art from non-​art –​the kinds of rules traditional aesthetics often links with the idea of “aesthetic judgements” or “judgements of taste.” Malraux’s account of the nature of our responses to works of art is discussed in the next chapter, but it is important to note here that the definition of art under consideration relates to the

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general nature and purpose of art and has nothing to do with the proposition (much favored by philosophers of art of the “analytic” school, for example) that aesthetics should strive to establish rules or norms capable of drawing a dividing line between art and non-​art. Malraux never thinks in terms of “rules” of this kind, or even, as we shall see, of “aesthetic judgements.” Here, as elsewhere, his focus is the fundamental purpose of art, not on methods of placing putative works in categories, or establishing orders of merit. It is important to note too that the notion of unity (or coherence) in Malraux’s definition has no connection with the conventional idea of structural unity one sometimes encounters in aesthetics and art criticism. Malraux is in no sense seeking to revive traditional arguments to the effect that a work of art should exhibit qualities of “balance,” “harmony,” or “order,” for example. The unity he has in mind is of a deeper nature; it is a “metaphysical” unity in a quite precise sense of that elusive word: a work of art is unified to the extent that it replaces fundamental chaos –​the unknown scheme of things –​with a coherent world. As he writes in The Voices of Silence, art “wrests forms from the world to which man is subject and makes them enter a world in which he is ruler.”7 Traditional arguments about form and structure have no place here. One might, however, be tempted to object that the proposition that art creates a rival world implies an irresponsible attempt to “escape from reality” and that, in the words of a contemporary French critic, Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux’s understanding of art implies “a withdrawal from the world and its urgent needs” and “a flight from life.”8 Comments of this kind misunderstand the sense in which terms such as the world, life, or reality are frequently employed in Malraux’s theory of art. Art, for Malraux, is certainly a means of escaping from the fundamental, chaotic reality to which it is addressed –​the reality, world, or life in which man is an incomprehensible accident.9 But this escape –​this flight, to borrow Vaugeois’ term –​takes the form of a conquest, a transformation that replaces chaos with coherence. The subject matter of a particular work may, of course, concern “the world and its urgent needs,” and as a novelist, Malraux himself wrote some remarkable works of this nature, such as Man’s Estate and Man’s Hope;10 but the issue here is not subject matter but the basic function of art, and Malraux’s position in this regard is quite clear. As early as 1936, in a speech in London entitled “Cultural Heritage,” he commented that “art’s function is to enable

Art – A Rival World | 23 men and women to escape from their human condition, not through flight but through possession.”11 The suggestion that this is a withdrawal from the world is a basic misunderstanding. Vaugeois is not the only critic to have misunderstood this point. In a well-​k nown essay on Malraux, the French philosopher and critic Maurice Blanchot writes: If art [for Malraux] is defined and constituted by its distance from the world, by its absence from the world, it is natural that everything that questions the world –​called now by a now highly imprecise term, transcendence –​everything that surpasses, denies, destroys, threatens the complex of stable, comfortable, reasonably established, and hopefully durable relations, whether pure or impure, proposed for man’s “salvation” or destruction, insofar as this questioning shatters the validity of the ordinary world, works for art, open the way for it, summons it.12

Blanchot’s comment is somewhat opaque at points (and, despite his comment, Malraux’s use of the term “transcendence” is quite clear), but he appears to be suggesting that, for Malraux, “the world” to which art is addressed consists of an amalgam of social, political and ideological factors (which, presumably, is the general thought expressed in the words “the complex of stable, comfortable, reasonably established, and hopefully durable relations, all these forces, whether pure or impure, proposed for man’s ‘salvation’ or destruction”). If this reading is correct, and if it were in fact true that Malraux defines art in terms of “its distance from the world, by the absence of the world,” one might possibly agree that he regards art as an escape from practical realities (“the ordinary world” in Blanchot’s phrase) –​that is, an escape in the sense of a flight. But Blanchot’s premises are wrong. At the fundamental level, art for Malraux is not a response to social, political, and ideological forces but to the chaotic world of appearances –​the unknown scheme of things. And where that world is concerned, he nowhere defines art in terms of “its distance from the world, by the absence of the world;” he defines it in terms of a capacity to create a unified, rival world which functions as a defense against the chaos in question. Like Vaugeois in other words, Blanchot situates Malraux’s theory of art in a conceptual framework in which it does not belong and interprets his concept of art as a response to a world (or reality) which is quite different from the one he has in mind.

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This discussion raises a more general issue that merits brief comment. Terms such as “the world,” “reality,” “the world around us,” “life,” and others of a similar nature are used frequently in the philosophy of art but are rarely examined in any depth, as if one can safely assume that their meaning is always unambiguous and self-​evident. Philosophers often ask, for example, if art “represents the world,” “imitates reality,” or “expresses” some aspect of “life,” and if so, in what way; but such discussions typically focus on terms such as imitate, represent, and express without examining the other element in the equations –​the meaning in the context of terms such as the world, reality and so on. Yet these very general terms can vary greatly in meaning. Is the “reality” addressed by a novel, for instance, the same as that addressed by history or by scientific theory? Like social and political theories, history concerns itself with collective experience: its “reality” is founded on interactions between men and women, not on individual experience in itself –​that is, the hopes, fears, joys and sorrows of specific individuals, which are the focus of the novelist. Scientific discourse also marginalizes individual experience, albeit in a different way. Science looks for “publicly verifiable” facts, that is, a reality that distances itself as far as possible from individual perceptions and reactions –​which, in the eyes of the scientist, are, by their very nature, of doubtful reliability.13 Science’s ideal perspective, as philosophers have sometimes pointed out, is a perspective “from nowhere,” and the reality it pursues is, as a matter of principle, as impersonal as possible. None of this implies, of course, that a work of art –​a novel for instance –​is unable to include historical or political (or even scientific) subject matter, and Malraux himself often uses historical events in this way. But there is a basic difference between the “content” of a given work of art and the perspective of art as such –​including the essential nature of the reality it addresses –​and as this brief analysis suggests, art focuses on the reality of individual experience –​the world as perceived and understood by the single individual even if, in some cases, that world includes aspects of history, politics, or science.14 In short, where the theory of art is concerned, the meaning of words such as reality, the world, and life cannot simply be taken for granted.15 To raise questions about the fundamental nature of art is also, necessarily, to raise questions about the nature of the reality it addresses, and the more nebulous the answer to the second question (as is often the case in the philosophy of art) the more dubious the answer to the first. In Malraux’s case, the question is answered

Art – A Rival World | 25 quite clearly. The reality art addresses is “the unknown scheme of things” as that idea has been expounded here; and it is certainly a reality of individual experience because it emerges from “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life, beginning with his own.” We will have occasion to return to this issue at a later stage because the two misinterpretations considered here are not the only cases where misunderstandings of the basic point in question have led critics astray. Much of the discussion in these early chapters has been of a somewhat abstract nature and the reader might be forgiven for thinking that Malraux’s theory of art, like much modern aesthetics, is a rather colorless affair with little to say about the concrete world of art itself. That conclusion would be mistaken, as one quickly realizes when one begins to read works such as The Voices of Silence or The Metamorphosis of the Gods; but given the revolutionary nature of Malraux’s theory of art, and given also that certain critics have alleged that he is not a systematic thinker, it has been important to begin this study by explaining the foundations of his thought, a process that has called for an examination of certain issues of a somewhat abstract nature. The chapters that follow build on these foundations to explore topics much closer to the concrete world of art.

Notes 1 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 538, 539. Malraux’s emphasis. 2 Ibid., 570. As Malraux acknowledges, he is borrowing the concept of the world as a dictionary from Delacroix. This issue is discussed again in the next chapter. 3 Ibid., 544. In a similar vein, Malraux speaks elsewhere of “the coherence of style, which becomes the rival of universal chaos” (“la cohérence du style, qui devient rivale de l’insaisissable universel”). André Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 289. 4 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 883. 5 “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random amidst the profusion of matter and stars, but that within this prison, we have drawn from within ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Skira, 1947), 139, 140. The same statement occurs in Malraux’s, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, Œuvres

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Complètes (II), ed. Marius-​ François Guyard, Maurice Larès, and François Trécourt (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 664, 665. 6 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 541. Malraux’s emphasis. It is not difficult, incidentally, to see possible links between the traditional idea of “nature” in art as described here and the concept of an absolute: nature in this traditional sense would be “underlying reality” –​the permanent truth beneath appearances. 7 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 539. The point at issue here is implied in his definition of styles quoted above where he writes “However complex, however lawless an art may seem to be …” 8 Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps: L’Art à l’ épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-​ Michel Place, 2016), 67, 68. Similarly, an English critic accuses Malraux of an attempt to “refuse life.” Denis Boak, André Malraux (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 198. 9 Note, for example, the statement “[art] stands for unity as against the chaos of mere, given reality” in the definition of styles quoted above. The implication is that, in the context of art, reality tout court and chaos are one and the same. 10 Malraux’s third and fifth novels. The French titles are La Condition humaine and L’Espoir. The title of the former work is sometimes translated as Man’s Fate. 11 Malraux, “Préfaces, articles, allocutions: ‘Sur l’héritage culturel’,” in Écrits sur l’Art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1192. 12 Maurice Blanchot, “Time, Art, and the Museum,” in Malraux, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​Hall, 1964), 155. Blanchot’s emphasis. The French source is: Maurice Blanchot, “Le Musée, l’art et le temps,” in L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 13 Cf. the claim by Francis Bacon, well-​k nown, early advocate of the scientific method, that one of the “illusions which block men’s minds” is that brought about by “the individual nature of each man’s mind and body; and also in his education, way of life and chance events.” Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverstone (eds.), (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41, 46. 14 This does not mean that art necessarily addresses itself to individual differences or to oppositions between the individual and society. Individual experience may assume a wide variety of forms including, as we saw in the previous chapter, a sense of being part of human life as a whole. I have examined these matters in more detail in Derek Allan, “Literature and Reality,” Journal of European Studies 31, Part 2, no. 122 (2001). 15 Malraux has some interesting comments on the assumption that the notion of “the real world” can simply be taken for granted in the context of art. Not only can we not do so, he writes, “but we are far from certain how we should take it.” Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 97–​98.

3

Art and Creation

Modern aesthetics divides roughly into two camps: “analytic” aesthetics, which, as the name suggests, is an offshoot of Anglo-​A merican analytic philosophy, and “continental” aesthetics, which is much more heavily influenced by the Hegelian-​Marxist tradition and by later continental thinkers such as Husserl and Heidegger. Neither school of thought has treated artistic creation as a major subject of interest and certain voices in the continental camp have even sought to neutralize the topic by suggesting that creation in art is largely illusory, the artist only ever achieving an elaborate form of imitation. Thus, Roland Barthes, in his well-​k nown essay The Death of the Author asserts that a text is a “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash,” and that “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.”1 In a similar vein, the American author, Fredric Jameson speaks of the contemporary “omnipresence of pastiche” and of “producers of culture [having] nowhere else to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.”2 Malraux’s thinking is quite different. The nature of artistic creation is a key aspect of his theory of art and he devotes one of the four parts of The

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Voices of Silence to a careful examination of the subject, reaching conclusions diametrically opposed to those of Barthes and Jameson. In Malraux’s eyes, art is inconceivable without a creative act in the full sense of the term –​creation ex nihilo –​and any suggestion that a true artist “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” is firmly excluded. The present chapter examines the key elements of this aspect of Malraux’s thinking (which, as part of their general neglect of Malraux, writers in philosophical aesthetics have mostly disregarded) and explains how they link up with the fundamental propositions examined so far. A preliminary word should be said about the nature of the issue at stake. The question is not, needless to say, how one might go about creating a work of art –​a question that Malraux, like most artists, would doubtless regard as futile.3 Equally, the issue is not creativity in a loose and general sense (“Her design of the curriculum showed creativity”). The question Malraux is addressing concerns art specifically: what kind of activity the artist is engaged in when he or she creates a work of art. Is it really just a form of imitation or pastiche, as Barthes and Jameson suggest? If not, why not? One well-​k nown view of the matter is that a person’s initial desire to paint, write, or compose has its origins in reactions to some aspect of “the world around us,” “reality,” or “life” –​such as a picturesque scene in the case of a painter, an interesting person or incident for a writer, and perhaps an unusual sequence of sounds for a composer. Seen in this light, the artist is someone who responds in a particularly sensitive way to aspects of his or her experience and then feels an urge to communicate those responses to others through a form of artistic expression. Biographers might disagree about which particular events triggered this urge for a given artist but the basic assumption, nonetheless, is that the desire to become an artist, whether one succeeds or not, originates in reactions to people, objects or events –​to aspects of “the world,” “reality,” or “life.” Not surprisingly, Malraux rejects explanations of this kind. For Malraux, as we have seen, the reality that art addresses is not a vaguely characterized “world around us” but the chaotic realm of fleeting appearances as defined earlier. Thus, the trigger for the desire to become a painter, writer, or composer, is never mere contact with “the world” or “life,” but an encounter with those objects in which chaos has been conquered –​those objects in which, to repeat Malraux’s words quoted earlier, an artist has been able to “wrest

Art and Creation | 29 forms from the world to which man is subject and make them enter a world in which he is ruler” –​that is, existing works of art. The painter, in other words, is first inspired by paintings, the novelist by novels, and the composer by music. Malraux encapsulates the point in a comment on a well-​k nown legend about Giotto. “An old story goes,” he writes, that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd-​boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But in true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting; but rather the paintings of a man like Cimabue.4

Malraux is not the first to suggest that existing works of art play a role in artistic creation. The idea is often employed by art historians, for example, who frequently stress the part played by artistic influences. What is important in Malraux’s thinking is that the proposition is not simply an assertion, but an integral part of a theory of art, flowing directly from the theory’s foundational propositions (and which, as we shall see, has further major implications). His comment on the Giotto legend encapsulates the point nicely. If “reality” or “the world around us” –​of which the real sheep are a part –​is, in the context of art, merely the incoherent world of appearances in which humanity lacks meaning or purpose (“the unknown scheme of things”), and if the works of a major artist such as Cimabue embody a rival world in which this incoherence has been overcome, it will be the world of art, not “reality” tout court, that naturally arouses the enthusiasm of someone with an aptitude for artistic creation (just as it will for the spectator who is beginning to develop a love of art). Malraux finds abundant evidence for his thesis in the history of art. “It is a revealing fact,” he observes, that, when explaining how his vocation came to him, every great artist traces it back to the emotion he experienced at his contact with some specific work of art: a writer to the reading of a poem or a novel, or a visit to a theatre; a musician to a concert he attended, a painter to a painting he once saw. Never do we hear of the man who became an artist by suddenly, out of the blue, so to speak, responding to a compulsion to depict some scene or surprising incident.5

It is not surprising, then, that Malraux rejects the familiar view, often associated with Romanticism but still widespread today, that the artist is

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someone who is “more sensitive to life” than others, and that the urge to be an artist arises from this sensitivity. “An artist is not necessarily more sensitive than an art-​lover,” he writes, “and is often less so than a young girl.” He or she possesses, however, a sensitivity of a different order. The artist is sensitive above all to art: “Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet poems and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a man who is thrilled by figures and landscapes. He is essentially one who loves pictures.” There is, in other words, no necessary correlation between “being sensitive” in the everyday sense and being an artist; and just as the supremely gifted artist is not necessarily unusually sensitive in that sense, so, Malraux argues, “the most sensitive man in the world is not necessarily an artist.”6 Malraux then takes his thinking a step further. Given that art, not “reality” or “life,” is the artist’s point of departure, every great artist “begins with the pastiche”7 –​that is, by imitating the style of the artist or artists he most admires, even if he is only vaguely aware of doing so. Again, the evidence is plentiful: Goya’s path led through Bayeu,8 the Impressionists’ path led through traditional painting or Manet; Michelangelo’s through Donatello, Rembrandt’s through Lastman and Elsheimer; El Greco’s through Bassano’s studio –​and precocity is simply the ability to copy at an early age.9

Genuine artistic creation, as distinct from the pastiche, only emerges, Malraux contends, when the painter, writer, or composer begins to feel that copying has ceased to suffice. No longer satisfied with imitation, he realizes that he is prisoner of a style, and that speaking in someone else’s language implies a form of servitude peculiar to the artist –​“a subjection to certain forms and to a given style.”10 Gradually glimpsing the possibility of a new coherent world he might bring into being, the artist starts to break free from the style or styles that had initially exerted such a powerful influence and begins, often haltingly, to develop another. Thus, Malraux writes, “it is against a style that every genius has to struggle” and “Cézanne’s architecturally ordered landscapes did not stem from a conflict with trees and foliage, but from a conflict with the art museum.”11 The ideas of struggle and conflict are important here and the vocabulary Malraux employs in this context regularly suggests a striving to overcome

Art and Creation | 31 and a search for emancipation. Paradoxically, he argues, the artist’s invention of his or her own style involves a form of destruction: What differentiates the man of genius from the man of talent, the craftsman or the dilettante, is not the intensity of his responses to the world around him, nor only the intensity of his responses to the works of other artists; it is the fact that he alone, among all those who are fascinated by these works, also seeks to destroy them.12

Surprising though this claim might seem at first sight, it flows naturally, once again, from the basic propositions we have considered. If, for the artist, “reality” or “the world around us” is merely the chaos of appearances –​at most a dictionary of forms –​the painter (or composer or poet) has only two choices: “the world never simply being a model, the painter can only copy another painter –​or make discoveries;” that is, he can only follow an existing path or blaze new trails.13 In seeking to emulate the achievements of the artist or artists he most admires, the painter must eradicate from his own work all trace of the styles of those very artists. In bringing a new, coherent world into being, he must struggle against and eventually destroy in his own work the very styles that elicited so much admiration and gave birth to the desire to be an artist in the first place.14 There is no middle way, no neutral path such as a “style-​less” representation of the world or a pursuit of nature’s “own style,”15 in which the artist might take temporary refuge. The options are simply the pastiche or discovery –​copy or blaze new trails. The proposition that there is no such thing as a “style-​less” representation of the world throws light on a further important aspect of Malraux’s thinking to be pursued shortly. First, however, it is worthwhile reflecting on certain objections that might be made to the arguments advanced so far. One criticism might be that in placing such a strong emphasis on the role of existing art, Malraux is giving the impression that the artist somehow works in a vacuum, oblivious to the shapes and colors of the world around him. Surely, one might protest, the world of objects and events must play some part in the creative process? This objection would misunderstand Malraux’s argument. While rejecting the conventional account that sees art as essentially a response to a vaguely defined “reality” or “world around us” (“some scene or surprising incident,” to borrow Malraux’s words in the extract quoted earlier), he fully accepts, as we have seen, that this same “reality” –​the world of

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fleeting appearances –​can serve as a dictionary of forms and be an important resource. The issue, however, is one of priorities. “The world of things and events,” he writes, can be rich in suggestions –​of color, of line, and of the form the artist is pursuing –​for the artist who is looking for them, and on condition that he is not looking for them as for a pre-​synthesized whole but in the same sense that great wellsprings, their levels having built up, look for a watercourse to follow as a river. Under these conditions, the part played by living forms can be immense; a vast Delacroix’s “dictionary” will emerge out of limbo.16

And illustrating the point by a concrete example, he adds: It was perhaps when he noticed that a meditative look comes over a face when the eyelids are lowered that a Buddhist sculptor was moved to impart that look of meditation to a Greek statue by closing its eyes; but if he noticed the expressive value of those closing eyes, it was because he was instinctively seeking amongst all living forms a means of metamorphosing the Greek face.17

Thus, the world of forms and colors can play a major role, but as servant not master, and the artist must already be in pursuit of a new coherent world, striving to break free from the style or styles that had initially impressed him or her. “There are rich treasures in the cavern of the world,” Malraux writes, summing up the point, “but if the artist is to find them, he must bring his own lamp.”18 Straightforward though it is, this aspect of Malraux’s theory of art has sometimes been misinterpreted. In a well-​k nown essay entitled “Indirect language and the Voices of Silence,” Maurice Merleau-​Ponty accuses Malraux of having misunderstood the nature of artistic styles and having claimed that style “could be known and sought after outside all contact with the world, as if it were an end.” In reality, Merleau-​Ponty writes, the work “is not brought to fulfilment far from things and in some intimate laboratory to which the painter and the painter alone has the key.” It is essential, he claims, to “put the painter back in contact with the world,” to understand that “there are no supermen,” that

Art and Creation | 33 there is no one who does not have a human being’s life to live, and that the secret […] of the writer, or of the painter, does not lie in some realm beyond his empirical life, but is so mixed in with his mediocre experiences, so modestly confused with his perception of the world, that there can be no question of meeting it separately, face to face.19

These comments –​which have influenced a number of critics –​appear, in some measure, to reflect Merleau-​Ponty’s own thinking about art; but to the extent that they purport to provide an accurate account of Malraux’s understanding of artistic creation, they are misleading. It is certainly true that Malraux believes that a new style –​a new coherent world –​is the artist’s key objective (once he or she moves beyond the pastiche) and that this is his “end,” to use Merleau-​Ponty’s term. But, as Malraux’s emphasis on the “dictionary” of the world makes clear, he nowhere suggests that this process takes place “outside all contact with the world” or “far from things” (even if, as is well-​k nown, the artist’s search is often somewhat solitary20). In one sense, it is also true that, in Malraux eyes, the artist’s “secret” lies “in some realm beyond his empirical life,” if we take that to mean that the artist creates a rival world different in kind from the realm of ephemeral appearances; but at no point does Malraux suggest that this somehow transforms the artist into a “superman” or someone “who does not have a human being’s life to live.” Nor does he deny that the artist’s discoveries, to the extent that they spring from the “dictionary” of the world, might, on occasion, spring from “his mediocre experiences,” whatever, precisely, that might mean. Broadly speaking, Merleau-​Ponty, not unlike Maurice Blanchot in the essay mentioned earlier, seems intent on suggesting that Malraux regards the artist as someone who turns his back on the world.21 But Malraux does nothing of the kind. Certainly, given that the artist’s fundamental goal is a new, unified, rival world, he or she will never be content solely with “empirical life;” but, at the same time, like the imagined Buddhist sculptor in search of a way of metamorphosing the Greek face, he or she will never lose sight of the potential for rich treasures in “the cavern of the world.” A further objection to Malraux’s account might be that he begs the question of first causes. If all art starts with the pastiche, how then did art begin in the first place? How did the “first artist” begin? Or to adapt his account of the Giotto legend, how was the first “Giotto” inspired if there were no “Cimabue”? Malraux is well aware of this objection but does not see it as

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compelling. On the one hand, he points out, “problems of first causes are not peculiar to art” –​and, indeed, it is not difficult to think of other examples: there is no consensus among paleoanthropologists or linguists about how or when language began; and the origins of human consciousness are, if anything, even more obscure.22 In reality, Malraux writes, “we know nothing about how a great artist who had never seen a work of art but only living forms, would proceed;” and research has not solved the mystery. “Delving into the past,” he writes, our quest for primitivism reaches the threshold of protohistory. But what painter, when he sees an Altamira bison, fails to recognize that this is a well-​ developed style? […] Always, however far back we travel in time, we guess at other forms behind those that impress us. The figures in the Lascaux caves (and so many others!), too large to have been drawn in one gesture, and so oddly placed that the painter must have worked either lying down or awkwardly bent backwards, were very probably “enlargements;” in any case, they are certainly not flukes or instinctive creations; and nor were they copied from models the artist had in front of him.23

In short, the origins of art, like the origins of speech and consciousness, are irretrievably lost in the mists of time, and no matter how far back we manage to go, we do not encounter a “proto-​art”24 but simply other styles which, as Malraux observes, often seem well-​developed and hint at previous traditions of some kind –​“other forms” that preceded them. Art, he suggests elsewhere, is an invention of a specific kind made by an animal whose long history bears witness to its inventiveness –​which is why he sometimes speaks of it in the same breath as the tomb and the use of fire.25 None of this, of course, explains how art began: it does not solve the problem of the “first Giotto” –​ and nor is it intended to. It does, however, place the issue in a realistic context and reminds us that we are necessarily in the realms of speculation, and that problems of origins are by no means limited to art. Let us now return to Malraux’s proposition, mentioned earlier, that there is no such thing as a style-​less representation of the world. This claim, we recall, flowed from his argument that the artist begins with the pastiche and that, in bringing a new coherent world into being, he must struggle against and finally destroy in his own work the style or styles that had originally impressed him. On Malraux’s account, there is no middle way –​no

Art and Creation | 35 intermediate position such as a style-​less representation of the world or a desire to copy nature “in her own style” –​in which the artist might take temporary refuge. Now, one might perhaps object here that Malraux is presenting an unduly restricted account of the artist’s options. Surely, there must be other alternatives apart from, on the one hand, the style of some previous artist (or a mixture of more than one existing style) and on the other, a new style that the artist has himself discovered? Is there not some neutral position –​ an “extra-​stylistic” option, so to speak –​that can, if only temporarily, provide an alternative? Malraux addresses this point directly and his response throws light not only on his understanding of artistic creation but also on his broader account of the nature of art. In particular, it provides a more concrete understanding of what he has in mind when he speaks of art as the creation of “another,” or “rival,” world. If the objection in question were well founded –​if there were really a neutral, intermediate position –​styles in general, Malraux points out, would need to be understood as “successive varieties of ornament added to an immutable substratum”26 –​that is, a kind of “surplus” which, in theory at least, could be jettisoned altogether if the artist so desired. This Malraux terms the “fallacy of the neutral style.”27 In visual art, it is the belief that there exists a “style-​less, photographic kind of drawing (though we know now that even a photograph has its share of style) which would serve as the foundation of a work, style being something added.” The basis of this view, he continues, is the idea that a living model can be copied “without any interpretation or expression.” In reality, he argues, No such copy has ever been made. Even in drawing this notion can be applied only to a small range of subjects: a standing horse seen in profile, but not a galloping horse […] Can one imagine a drawing of a rearing horse, seen from in front, in a style that is not that of any school, or of any innovator?

The notion of the neutral style, he adds, springs in large measure from the idea of the silhouette: the basic neutral style in drawing would be the bare outline. But any such method if strictly followed would not lead to any form of art but would stand in the same relation to drawing as an art as the bureaucratic style stands to literature.28

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The reasoning here follows directly from the arguments we have examined. If, for the artist, reality tout court (the so-​called “visible world” for the painter) is at most a “dictionary” –​an assemblage of elements capable of expressing meaning but combined in a manner that renders them incoherent –​and if the artist replaces this chaos with a rival, unified world, the creative act in art will always, necessarily, involve a process of sifting, selection, exclusion, and re-​ordering –​in short of transformation. A “neutral style” –​that is, a procedure which, in the name of a supposed “objectivity,” an “absolute realism,” or a desire to copy nature “in her own style,” refused to transform –​would not therefore be a “style-​less” art but no form of art at all. In other words, to the extent it is even conceivable, a neutral style would be a form of representation that had abandoned all but the last vestiges of the techniques available to art. In visual art, it would be at best (and then only in a limited number of cases) the bare outline or the silhouette. In literature, it would lead to the commercial or bureaucratic style where, similarly, language tends towards a limited range of standard, “lifeless” forms. To the extent it were possible, a neutral style would, in other words, lead merely to the sign –​that is, to those limited uses of visual forms or language that merely suggest, or “point to,” living forms (as a silhouette of a standing horse might be used to indicate the presence of horses), but it would stop well short of portraying any such form.29 None of this, of course, implies –​despite what some critics have alleged30 –​that Malraux disapproves of “realistic” styles and prefers nonfigurative or “abstract” art (a curious claim, incidentally, given the large number of “realistic” painters he admired). Malraux willingly agrees that the inclusion in a painting of forms evoking real objects is, like the varied uses of line and color, one of the tools and techniques available to the visual artist; but it is no more than that. As a form of endeavor –​as a category of human activity –​art is never essentially representation, even when it represents. (“It is for the non-​artist, not the artist,” he writes, “that painting is only a form of representation.”31) Art is the creation of a rival world, a world that depends for its very existence on a process of transformation of the “real world.” As noted earlier, Malraux defines an artist’s style as his or her means of creating this rival, unified world, and “we are beginning to understand,” he writes, “that representation is one of the devices of style, instead of thinking that style is a means of representation.”32 “Great artists,” he observes, “are not transcribers of the world; they are its rivals.”33

Art and Creation | 37 Which is why Malraux argues that “all art that seeks to represent involves a system of reduction.”34 Consider the case of the painter who, when seeking to depict a real object, is obliged to reduce three dimensional forms to two. Once we understand the painter’s task, not as an attempt to represent the world, but as means of creating another world –​a world whose creation requires a process of selection, exclusion, re-​ordering, and thus of transformation –​this apparent obligation is more akin to an opportunity. The very possibility of reduction makes art possible and is, one might almost say, a happy accident of human existence that affords the painter the means through which a transformed world can be brought into being. One might perhaps object that the argument does not hold good for sculpture since in this case the artist is not obliged to reduce three dimensions to two and can, if he or she wishes, makes an exact replica of an object. Malraux’s reply is that sculpture, also, involves a process of reduction –​a reduction of “all movement, implicit or portrayed, to immobility.” And although, we can imagine a still-​life carved and painted to look exactly like its model, we cannot conceive of its being a work of art: “Imitation apples in an imitation bowl are not a true work of sculpture.” Which, he adds, also explains why “colors applied to sculpture so rarely imitate those of the real world; and why everyone feels that waxworks figures (the only forms in our time that are completely illusionist) have nothing to do with art.”35 Malraux is not, of course, claiming that the mere fact of reduction results in a work of art. Reduction is a sine qua non, not a sufficient condition. Ultimately, an artist may never go beyond pastiche. He or she may always, consciously or unconsciously, remain an imitator of styles and never blaze new trails. The key point is that these are the only alternatives. There is no neutral style, no “purely objective” representation to which styles might be added as “successive varieties of ornament added to an immutable substratum.” Style is not an added extra or embellishment; it is, Malraux argues, the very substance of the transformational processes required by art, “no less necessary,” he writes, “when the artist is aiming at unlikeness than when he aims at life-​likeness.”36 This analysis reveals another crucial implication of Malraux’s account of artistic creation: it establishes that the genuine work of art (as distinct from the pastiche) is a creation in the full sense of the term –​that is, in the sense of something that seems to emerge “out of nowhere” like an irruption into being. This is not, of course, to deny that in practice the process of artistic

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creation is usually preceded by a long and laborious apprenticeship, and Malraux himself comments, as noted earlier, on the artist’s struggle to break free from styles he has been imitating. Sometimes, he writes, the artist needs “to expel his masters from his canvases bit by bit, their prestige remaining so strong that he seems only to edge his way into his works at the margins.”37 That said, the true work of art is a creation in the full sense of something that appears ex nihilo because its realization depends on the destruction of the style or styles from which it originated, with no intermediate, “neutral” position to occupy. It is for this reason that Malraux has so little enthusiasm for histories of art that are, to use his words, only “chronologies of influences”38 (as indeed many are). For Malraux, art, as distinct from the pastiche, begins precisely where influences cease. While acknowledging that every great artist begins by imitating, and that influences in this sense are the crucible out of which art emerges, a true work of art is only possible –​indeed only conceivable –​when those influences have been eradicated. This explains his frequent use of terms such as “decisive break,” “for the first time,” “without precedent,” “discovery,” and “invention,” and also why he writes that “the whole history of art, if we are speaking of genius [that is, when it is no longer simply a question of imitation] should be a history of breaking free [délivrance].”39 To explain art principally in terms of artistic influences is to deflect attention from what is essential. Once painting, writing, or musical composition ceases to be pastiche, the crucial consideration is no longer the effect of influences but the capacity of the artist to escape from them. We are clearly a long way from Roland Barthes’ claim that “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original,” or Fredric Jameson’s view that “producers of culture have nowhere else to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles” (and neither of these writers, one should add, supports their claim with anything resembling the careful argumentation Malraux provides). We are a long way, similarly, from the position of the analytic school of aesthetics which takes, at best, a sporadic interest in the question of artistic creation, as if it were a topic of secondary importance. Malraux, as noted, devotes one of the four parts of The Voices of Silence to the topic and the analysis of his arguments given here (which is only a summary of his major points) demonstrates the importance he places on it. In Malraux’s eyes, the artist cannot but be creative if a true work of art is to be the result, and this implies an act

Art and Creation | 39 of creation in the full sense of the term. This proposition, as we shall see, has further major consequences for his thinking. Before leaving the topic of artistic creation, it is useful to look briefly at one other issue raised by the points considered so far. We have seen that according to Malraux’s analysis, the initial urge to be an artist is aroused not by “the world around us,” “life,” or “reality” (nebulous concepts, in any case) but by art itself, and that the painter, for example, “is not primarily a man who is thrilled by figures and landscapes. He is essentially one who loves pictures.” We have seen also that the artist imitates the styles of the artists he most admires until he begins to experience this as a form of servitude –​“a subjection to certain forms and to a given style.” Now, in reply to this, one might perhaps object that the artist is, after all, likely to encounter a wide variety of styles and has greater freedom to choose among them than Malraux seems to imply. Malraux describes this idea as “one of the ‘logical illusions’ that distract the mind.” He writes: The word “choice” suggests the weighing-​up of comparable significances and qualities: the attitude of a buyer at a market. But have we forgotten the first contacts of our early youth with genius? We never chose anything essential; we had successive or simultaneous enthusiasms, even if they were incompatible with each other. What young poet ever chose between Baudelaire and Jean Aicard (or even Théophile Gautier)? What novelist between Dostoyevsky and Dumas (or even Dickens)? What painter between Delacroix and Cormon (or even Decamps)? What musician between Mozart and Donizetti (or even Mendelssohn)? Tristan did not choose between Isolde and the lady beside her. Every young person’s heart is a graveyard containing the names of a thousand dead artists, but whose only real denizens are a few mighty, and often antagonistic, spirits.40

These comments remind us of the importance Malraux’s thinking places on his basic proposition that art is a response to a fundamental emotion. As noted earlier, the questions at the basis of this emotion are not impersonal, philosophical inquiries; they are questions about a world of which the individual recognizes he or she is a part.41 The relationship of the artist with works of art is consequently of the same nature. It is not the response of a detached judge –​a “weighing-​up of comparable significances and qualities: the attitude of a buyer at a market” –​but a response manifested by

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strong enthusiasms, or the lack of them when a work makes little impression. “The painter may spend his time choosing and preferring,” Malraux goes on to say, “but once his relationship with art becomes crucial, much of the freedom has gone out of it.”42 This argument has implications for a key element of traditional aesthetics. For if the “logical illusion” in question here applies to the artist, it will also apply, as Malraux points out, to his or her audience. In his Introduction to the Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture), in the course of an explanation of his reasons for choosing the images he includes in this three-​volume work, he writes: Let us be wary of the word “choice” so equivocal when it comes to art. It suggests a freedom to do more or less as one pleases. I have shown elsewhere [the reference is almost certainly to the section of The Voices of Silence just considered] how unsatisfactorily the idea of choice describes the artist’s relationship with his masters, and how much, on the contrary, he seems to be summoned by them. Do we ourselves choose the art we admire any more than that?43

The comment provides a good illustration of the gulf separating Malraux’s theory of art from traditional aesthetics. Since the eighteenth century, and especially since Hume and Kant, one of the most firmly entrenched beliefs of Western aesthetics, still widely held today, has been that the individual’s response to a work of art takes the form of a judgment, conventionally called a “judgment of taste” or an “aesthetic judgment,” which, following Kant, is often described as “disinterested.”44 Malraux’s argument implies a rejection of this view. At the fundamental level, he is saying, our response to a work of art is not a judgment at all. Like that of the artist himself, our responses take the form of enthusiasms (or the lack of them), and far from being disinterested, are essentially of an emotional nature. This does not, of course, mean that Malraux is somehow encouraging a thoughtless, “emotional” approach to art. Equally, he is not referring to the successive emotional states –​sadness, hope, or joy, for e­ xample –​that a play or novel (for instance) might arouse in its audience or readers. Nor, importantly, is he denying that one might express a judgment post facto –​decide, for example, to see Puccini’s Madam Butterfly a second time, or purchase a copy of Hamlet but not of some other play one has seen. Malraux’s claim concerns the nature of the “hold” –​the fascination, to employ one of his terms –​that a work of art exerts on its

Art and Creation | 41 audience, whether it be a florid, Romantic opera such as La Traviata, or a work in a more restrained idiom such as a Braque abstract or a Song landscape. The different works we admire may well be “antagonistic” in that sense, as Malraux’s statement acknowledges, but the nature of their hold on us is always fundamentally the same. Essentially, it is of an emotional kind, not one based on a reflective judgment, because its effect on its audience, as on the artist himself, is due to the response it makes to the fundamental emotion to which all art is addressed.45 “We need only recall,” he writes, “the admiration, and the other less definable emotions, evoked by the first great poem we encountered; they stemmed not from any judgment but from a revelation.”46 One might certainly make judgments after the event but, fundamentally, Malraux is saying, the psychology of the response itself is not based on reasoned choices but on the power of that revelation –​the power of the work’s response to the fundamental emotion in question. Critics of Malraux’s books on art have said very little about this aspect of his thinking but it clearly represents a challenge to one of the most deeply entrenched assumptions of Western aesthetics. It is one of many areas in which his thinking can quite rightly be termed revolutionary.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 146. French source: Roland Barthes, “La Mort de l’auteur,” in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984). 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 17, 18. 3 Cf. the following statement (giving the full text of Malraux’s statement quoted in Chapter One): “Once the question ‘What is art?’ becomes serious, once it stops being occluded by the puerile question ‘How does one go about creating masterpieces?’, the question ‘What is man?’ is not far away.” 4 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 497. Cf. “No shepherd became Giotto by looking at his sheep.” (“Nul berger n’est devenu Giotto en regardant ses moutons.”) André Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 125. 5 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 497. 6 Ibid., 491, 494. 7 Ibid., 531.

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8 Francisco Bayeu (1734–​1795) was one of Goya’s early mentors. 9 Ibid., 526. Cf. “Rimbaud did not begin by writing a kind of vague, formless Rimbaud, but with Banville; and the same is true, if we substitute other names for Banville in the cases of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Nerval, Victor Hugo. A poet does not begin with something vague and formless but with forms he admires.” Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 155. 10 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 582. 11 Ibid. Malraux uses the term “genius” simply as a synonym for “great artist.” He does not intend it in any specialist sense. 12 Ibid., 582. Malraux’s emphasis. 13 Ibid., 537. 14 The point can, however, be exaggerated. One critic claims that, for Malraux, the artist “is essentially demonic, and his demonism is directed against the forms of his predecessors, which he is trying to devour.” John Darzins, “Malraux and the Destruction of Aesthetics,” Yale French Studies 18 (1957), 108. This is a distortion of Malraux’s thinking. 15 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 539, 540. 16 Ibid., 570. Here again, the analysis is not limited to visual art. Malraux uses the same concept of a “Delacroix’s dictionary” in the context of literary creation. See: Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 157. 17 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 573. 18 Ibid. 19 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993), 91, 92, 95. 20 How many great novels, paintings or symphonies have been created by more than one person? 21 Pierre Bourdieu also alleges that Malraux argues that the artist’s focus is limited solely to the works of previous artists. Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, une révolution symbolique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2013), 368, 369. 22 Previous discussion in Chapter One described Malraux’s answer to the question: what is human consciousness? But this is quite distinct from the questions of why and when it first emerged. 23 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 501, 502. 24 We do of course find signs, such as handprints and stick figures (which of course are still made today). But unless one claims that art and the sign are the same –​a view which, as we shall see, Malraux does not accept –​this does not explain the emergence of art; and appealing to processes of “transition” only begs the question. It is worth noting also that, given the archaeological evidence, dating

Art and Creation | 43 the emergence of art, even with an accuracy of tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years, seems virtually impossible. Lascaux is usually dated to about 17,000 BC; the caves at Chauvet (discovered after Malraux died) to about 30,000 BC. Yet these may be quite late developments. As one specialist notes, there is evidence that the Acheuleans, between about 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, were making use of ochres that they brought back to their habitats and sometimes transformed by firing, although the purposes for which they were used are unknown. Michel Lorblanchet, Les Origines de l’art (Paris: Editions Le Pommier, 2006), 74. 25 Cf. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 883. André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 37. 26 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 540. 27 Ibid., 534. Malraux’s emphasis. 28 Ibid. 29 As this analysis suggests, Malraux’s theory of art provides no support for the claim advanced by certain “semiotic” theorists that art is essentially a system of signs. Malraux agrees that art sometimes makes use of signs, but in itself the sign is, on his account, only an embryonic form of art. (Ibid., 534, 544.) The argument under consideration here also explains Malraux’s perceptive remark: “… thus there is no style of realism, only realistic orientations of various styles.” Ibid., 519. 30 See, for example, the comment by Stéphane Guégan in the next chapter claiming that Malraux denies the value of representation. 31 Ibid., 538. 32 Ibid., 553. 33 Ibid., 698. Malraux’s emphasis. Malraux uses this same statement as the epigraph for his final volume on art, L’Intemporel. Cf. also: “Like the painter, the writer is not the transcriber of the world; he is its rival.” Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 152. 34 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 490. Malraux’s emphasis. 35 Ibid. This would not of course preclude certain real objects–​“objets trouvés” –​ being regarded as art, either as parts of a sculpture or as the “sculpture” itself. A piece of driftwood displayed as art is not viewed as a representation of a piece of driftwood (as a wax model is of a particular person). It is not difficult, incidentally, to see how the idea of reduction also applies to literature, which involves a selection of incidents, kinds of characters, vocabulary etc. Music, likewise, “reduces” the world of sounds to its separate constituents –​pitch, rhythm, etc, thus enabling the creation of “another world” of sound.

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Ibid., 491. Ibid., 569, 570. Ibid., 879. Ibid. Malraux is not, of course, suggesting that the history of art should be based on the idea of artistic progress. His use of terms such as “discoveries” and “inventions” does not imply an accumulation of knowledge –​a progressive growth of skill. Each artist destroys the style or styles on which he or she builds; there is no question of an “advance” or a teleology. 40 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 535. Jean Aicard (1848–​1921), minor French poet, dramatist, and novelist. Fernand Cormon (1845–​ 1924), French Academic painter. Alexandre-​Gabriel Decamps (1803–​1860), French Romantic painter. 41 See Chapter One. 42 Ibid., 535, 537. 43 André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale: La statuaire, Écrits sur l’Art (I) ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 973. 44 See, for example, the First Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgment: “Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 53. Emphasis in original. 45 A modern aesthetician –​especially one belonging to the analytic school –​might object that an “emotional response” might turn out to be shallow and unreliable, and that this would hardly be a sound basis for distinguishing art from non-​art. Two points in reply: First, as indicated earlier, Malraux is not attempting to establish rules by which such distinctions might be made (assuming such rules were possible –​which, given the many decades of fruitless attempts, seems highly doubtful); his aim here is to explore the psychology of the individual’s response to works of art (assuming that there are at least some objects that can be appropriately so described). Second, even if the psychology of the response were explained as a “reflective judgment,” it would not follow in any given case that the judgment would necessarily be sound. 46 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 532.

4

Art and the West

The present chapter examines certain aspects of Malraux’s theory of art that link up with the history of art, and with history more generally. Before tackling this topic, however, it is important to clarify a general issue that arises in this context. As mentioned earlier, commentators have sometimes described Malraux as an art historian and although this designation (which he explicitly rejected) is quite erroneous, one can perhaps understand why a superficial reader might come to this conclusion. Modern aesthetics, both analytic and continental, is typically a rather abstract affair which avoids sustained contact with the concrete details of the world of art, a task it leaves to art history.1 Malraux’s books on art, by contrast, frequently discuss specific events in the history of art and his field of inquiry covers several millennia (even more, if one includes his comments on prehistoric art), concluding in the second half of the twentieth century (Malraux having died in 1976). Why is this so? Why does he not confine himself to the rather abstract approach typical of writers in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, perhaps providing a concrete example now and then? Why, also, do his books on art cover such a long period of time? Most philosophers of art today concentrate principally on modern and contemporary art. Why does Malraux not do likewise? Why,

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for example, do Egyptian sculpture, Byzantine mosaics, and Giotto’s frescoes seem to matter to him almost as much as Cézanne, Chagall and Picasso? The answer to these questions can be found in Malraux’s understanding of the creative process. Malraux argues, as we saw, that although all art begins with the pastiche, art itself is creation in the full sense of the term. Now, it follows from this that art (as distinct from the pastiche) can only exist in and through its specific manifestations. It is certainly true that art always involves the realization of the same fundamental ambition –​the creation of a rival, coherent world. But in the absence of a specific creative achievement, that statement only describes a possibility –​a potentiality and a hope not yet realized. And since, as creation ex nihilo, a true work of art carries nothing over from what has gone before, it can only move from possibility to existence to the extent that it is embodied in a specific work. In short, art is a series of inventions or it is nothing; or as Malraux phrases the point in The Voices of Silence, “the history of art is the history of forms invented as against those inherited.”2 Hence the importance of the history of art in Malraux’s thinking. Art is inseparable from its history because its very existence depends on its specific discoveries. This explains the superficial resemblance of the three volumes of The Metamorphosis of the Gods3 to a history of art: the discoveries have necessarily taken place in an historical order and, as a result, Malraux explains in his Introduction, “the very nature of artistic creation often obliges me to follow the history [of art] step by step.”4 Thus, while he has no interest in writing a history of art as such,5 art, in Malraux’s eyes, is never separable from the specific path it has taken across time. Which implies that an adequate general theory of art can never limit its focus to modern and contemporary art alone, or even to European art alone, but needs to consider, or at least be applicable to, large tracts of time across a range of cultures. In the same sense that an adventure is defined by the particular paths it has taken, the rest remaining nameless and unknown, art, for Malraux, is defined by its discoveries –​its “history” in that specific sense. Unlike most philosophers of art, in other words, Malraux does not regard the history of art as an incidental or marginal issue; history is part of the very core of his thinking. With that in mind, let us turn to an event in the history of Western art on which Malraux places special importance –​the emergence of the concept of art itself. At first sight, this topic might seem rather puzzling. The word and the concept “art” have been part of Western culture for so long and are

Art and the West | 47 so deeply rooted in our everyday patterns of thought, that we have difficulty imagining a cultural context in which neither the word nor the concept existed. Yet, as Malraux reminds us, this was unquestionably the case in numerous cultures of the past and in European culture itself prior to the Renaissance. The proposition is not, of course, that cultures such as these –​ ancient Egypt, Hindu India, and medieval Europe, for ­example –​were not rich in painting, sculpture, literature, and music,6 or that their works are not important. Indeed, one of the striking characteristics of Malraux’s thinking, which distinguishes it from many other art theorists, is the importance he places on works of other cultures, past and present. Malraux recognizes, however, that the practice of conceptualizing painting, sculpture, literature and music as “art” in the senses this word has acquired since the Renaissance (and there are two principal senses, as we shall see) is something specific to Western civilization, and is not a common denominator of all cultures, despite the apparently paradoxical fact –​which we shall examine later –​ that we today regard many works from non-​Western cultures, and from the pre-​Renaissance periods of our own, as “works of art.” Seen against this background, the emergence of the concept of art is clearly an issue that a comprehensive theory of art cannot afford to ignore. Modern aesthetics, especially the influential Anglo-​A merican analytic variety, has shown a marked reluctance to acknowledge that the concept of art is not a common denominator of all cultures, preferring either to avoid the matter altogether or, if pressed, to argue that historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to the contrary should not be taken seriously. Support for Malraux’s position is, however, not hard to find. The archaeologist Gay Robins writes, for example, that: as far as we know, the ancient Egyptians had no word that corresponds exactly to our abstract use of the word “art.” They had words for individual types of monuments that we today regard as examples of Egyptian art –​ “statues,” “stela,” “tomb” –​but there is no reason to believe that these words necessarily included an aesthetic dimension in their meaning.7

In a similar vein, the noted historian Paul Kristeller, in a meticulous study of the emergence of what he terms “the modern system of the arts” in Western culture, argues that there are major differences between the meaning the term art had acquired in Europe in the eighteenth century and the closest

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Greek or Roman equivalents.8 And the distinguished historian Jacques Le Goff writes that “in medieval texts, we find no term designating what we today call artists,” adding that at times the term “artist” designates “a person who studies or practices the liberal arts” and that from the end of the thirteenth century, it could also mean “a person possessing a particular technical ability.”9 There is ample further evidence of this kind so it is not at all surprising that Malraux can write in The Voices of Silence that “the Middle Ages had no more idea of what we now mean by the word art than Greece or Egypt, who had no word for it,” and later that “a major part of our art heritage has been bequeathed to us by people for whom the idea of art was not the same as our own, or by those for whom the very idea did not exist.”10 If this is so, how and why did the concept of art emerge? What was its meaning when it emerged? Has this meaning remained the same since then, or has it changed in some fundamental way, and if so, why and how? And how also do we explain the fact that we today include in our world of art large numbers of objects created in cultures in which the notion of art did not exist? These crucial questions are very seldom addressed by modern philosophers of art, partly no doubt because, as indicated, there is a widespread tendency to regard the concept “art” as a common denominator of all cultures at all times, despite the historical and anthropological evidence to the contrary, and partly because much modern aesthetics tends to steer clear of historical issues in anything but ad hoc ways. Malraux, however, recognizes that the questions are unavoidable. In accepting the historical and anthropological evidence, he also accepts the problems it poses. Malraux’s account of how and why the concept of art emerged begins with the Byzantine period. Like many other cultures, he writes, Byzantine civilization did not regard its sculpture, painting, and mosaics as “art.” Their images were not created to be admired by art lovers in an art museum (an institution which, of course, did not exist) but for the candle-​lit interiors of Christian basilicas where, for the assembled faithful, they evoked the mysterious presence of a loving God. This, Malraux argues, was the very raison d’ être of these objects, their “ fundamental purpose.”11 In keeping with the propositions examined in Chapter Two, they certainly sought to evoke “another world” –​a rival, coherent world –​but they were not created, experienced, or understood as “art.” Like the sculptures and frescos of medieval cathedrals, they were inseparable from an absolute (in the sense defined

Art and the West | 49 earlier), and the rival world they sought to evoke was the world of a revealed Truth –​the Truth of an Eternal God, far removed from the transitory human realm here below. Towards the end of the thirteenth siècle, however, something quite unprecedented began to take place –​a rapprochement between man and God. Byzantine faith had been severely dualist, Malraux explains, God was love but this was not human love, it was sacred love, and partook of the central mystery of the Eternal. The Revelation did not bring elucidation of the mystery, but communion with it. […] Although God was love, and although man had access to Him through love, the ultimate mystery of his being remained inviolate.12

Hence the unmistakable sense of the supramundane that pervades Byzantine images. No attempt is made to depict Jesus and Mary as individuals, Malraux points out, or even to standardize Christ’s physical appearance. Yet in one respect –​their otherworldliness –​these figures have a striking similarity, and this is equally true of the biblical scenes over which they preside. “For these scenes do not depict events that once took place on earth,” Malraux writes, “but episodes of the sacred.”13 The rapprochement between man and God began with Giotto. While still depicting sacred scenes, Giotto’s images “now become scenes in the life of Jesus”14 –​scenes that, this time, did take place on earth. Thus, Malraux writes, [Giotto] discovered a power of painting previously unknown in Christian art: the power of locating a sacred scene, without sacrilege, in a world resembling that of everyday life […] For the first time, sacred scenes related no less to the world of God’s creatures than to the world of God.15

This discovery opened the door to an entirely new visual world which Malraux describes as “pictorial fiction,” “the imaginary,” or “l’ irréel.” Giotto’s painting remained firmly in the service of Christian faith, but it nonetheless “[brought] the divine onto a plane nearer to man” replacing the hieratic forms of Byzantine art with a “solemn expression of the Christian drama.”16 The point merits emphasis. Art historians have often suggested that Renaissance art sprang essentially from an urge to imitate the “naturalism” or “realism” of Greco-​Roman predecessors, but Malraux regards this

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explanation as inadequate. A degree of naturalism played a necessary ancillary role because the events depicted by Giotto, and by those who followed in his footsteps, were taking place in “a world resembling that of everyday life.” But nature imitation was not the central objective. Giotto, no less than his Byzantine predecessors, was seeking to create “another world,” but this time it was a world that “related no less to the world of God’s creatures than to the world of God.” More was to follow as Giotto’s achievement sparked enthusiastic explorations of the possibilities he had opened up. Religious feelings did not disappear, Malraux writes, but they were increasingly complemented by an imaginary world “conveyed to the spectator by a power of the artist, distinct from his power of representing scenes from Scripture in that it no longer calls forth veneration, but, like the new power of sculpture, admiration.”17 In essence, humanity was now beginning to claim a share of the divine. And by the time of Botticelli, this new-​found power of the artist was encompassing Greek and Roman mythology whose heroes, gods and goddesses seemed ideal representatives of an exalted, imaginary world, and whose deeds, Malraux writes, provided a “repertoire of exemplary acts” befitting such a world.18 For Botticelli, especially in his non-​religious works, it was no longer just a question, as it had been for Giotto, of “locating a sacred scene, without sacrilege, in a world resembling that of everyday life;” the goal now was to create an earthly realm that rivalled that of the sacred. Thus, Malraux writes, the admiration inspired by a painting such as La Primavera, like that inspired by antiquity, and which antiquity now legitimized, is addressed to a demiurge which, for the first time, rivals the Christian demiurge, because for the first time it gives exalted expression to a fiction drawn from the realms of the profane.19

These developments, Malraux contends, conferred on art –​and progressively on the word art –​both a new function and an unprecedented prestige. The claim is a key point in his argument. The paintings and mosaics of Byzantium, like the works of other religious cultures, were images that responded to a sense of transcendence that pre-​existed them and that could, in principle at least, be experienced without them.20 They drew their authority and their very raison d’ être from a faith in another world –​an absolute –​that was already firmly in place. With Botticelli, there emerged an unambiguous

Art and the West | 51 depiction of a transcendent world –​a new absolute –​that came into being solely through the artist’s achievement. Christian faith was not under open attack (this occurred later) but, building on its newly discovered powers, painting began to construct “another world” (which, although often reliant on classical mythology, was happy to include events in the Christian story as well21) independent of any pre-​existing absolute –​a beauteous, imaginary world, Malraux writes, “outside of which man did not fully merit the name man.”22 Henceforth, writes Malraux, “the artist’s task will take place in a domain previously unknown to Christianity, because its prime objective will be the admiration it will need to evoke.”23 The term enlisted to describe this new transcendent world was “art” (which, as noted, had previously had quite different meanings) and artists gradually ceased to be perceived as skilled artisans and were instead regarded as possessors of a privileged power called “genius” through which this exemplary, exalted world could be brought into being. Beginning in Italy, this cultural revolution –​for it was nothing less than that –​quickly spread throughout Europe and was not, of course, limited to visual art. Shakespeare’s tragedies, Monteverdi’s operas, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and innumerable other works of the times belong to the same exalted world one discovers in Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea, Veronese’s Venus and Adonis, Poussin’s Orpheus and Eurydice and also –​since religious subjects were by no means excluded –​ Tintoretto’s San Rocco Crucifixion and Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents. And just as music was no longer confined to religious institutions but spread to palaces and opera houses, painting and sculpture discovered new domains, lending their visions of harmony and beauty to the courts of princes and potentates. Hence the proliferation of suitably ennobled images of kings and courtiers by artists such as Titian, Velasquez and Veronese, and hence also the alliance between art and aristocratic authority symbolized by the palaces and chateaux of the period and, above all, by the Palace of Versailles, built for a king for whom, as a recent historian writes, “music, theatre, architecture, painting, and poetry, would become, as much as his gold, his scepter, ermine, and the diamonds in his crown, the tangible signs of majesty.”24 Clearly, none of this can be explained simply in terms of a pursuit of “realism” or “naturalism.” As the English poet Sir Philip Sidney wrote in 1580, “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have

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done. Her world is brazen, and the poets only deliver a golden.”25 And the same was true of painting. The ambition of the Renaissance painter or sculptor was not simply to better mimic the world of appearances –​the brazen world of nature. The objective of “art” was to evoke a specific vision of human transcendence, an ideal realm of nobility, harmony, and beauty whose basic inspiration, even when depicting religious scenes, no longer stemmed from religious belief but from an imagined golden world in which humanity itself was touched by a spark of the divine. In a comment consistent with Sir Philip Sidney’s, Malraux writes: “While attaching so much importance to imitative technique, and to making figures seem real, this art was in no sense realistic; rather it aspired to be the most persuasive expression of a fiction –​of a harmonious imaginary world.”26 Not that this imaginary world –​this world of the irréel to use one of Malraux’s terms –​was necessarily idyllic. As some of the works mentioned above remind us, it was often a scene of sorrow and tragedy; but it was, nonetheless, an exalted, noble world –​one, as Malraux says, outside of which “man did not fully merit the name man,” even if that high ambition could only be achieved through suffering or death. It was not, in other words, a question of eliminating adversity but of giving adversity a meaning, as religious faith had once done, albeit in a different way. The artists of the period had discovered, Malraux writes, that “art is one of the most powerful rectifications of the world, a kingly domain where man escapes from the human condition to attain another where he is at one with the gods.”27 These are powerful and fertile arguments. They explain, among other things, the birth of the very concept of art, via the emergence of an entirely new form of painting and sculpture (and music and literature), directed to ends never previously envisioned. Malraux, as noted, is fully aware that, once we acknowledge the absence of the concept of art in other cultures, a satisfactory theory of art needs to explain its origins –​how and why it emerged; and his account of the part played by Giotto, Botticelli and other artists of the times, does precisely that. As we shall see a little later, Malraux argues that the meaning of the term “art” changed radically towards the end of the nineteenth century, but the episode examined here explains its initial appearance. The concept “art” emerged in Europe as a specific kind of ideal world that furnished a new absolute, gradually replacing a waning Christian faith. Many modern philosophers of art, like their Enlightenment forebears, simply

Art and the West | 53 take the concept of art for granted and have little or nothing to say about its origins. Malraux, by contrast, sees the emergence of art as a pivotal event that needs to be examined and explained with care. Malraux’s arguments also help us understand why artists and their works –​and the very word “art” –​were held in such high esteem from the Renaissance onwards. Conventional explanations rely heavily on the claim that Renaissance painters and sculptors were anxious to achieve a higher social status and campaigned to shake off their image as mere skilled artisans. By itself, however, the argument is not wholly convincing. First, the widespread modern belief that medieval artisans were systematically relegated to a lowly position on the social ladder is not entirely accurate. Some, especially skilled architects, painters, and sculptors, were held in high regard, and those with established reputations were often brought long distances to carry out commissions. Second, while there is certainly evidence that some Renaissance painters and sculptors made deliberate efforts to improve the social status of their calling, that does not necessarily explain why they were so successful. The change, after all, was quite dramatic. Previously artisans, they were now thought to be endowed with “genius,” and worthy of inclusion in a book such as Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Malraux’s account helps explain the magnitude of this transformation. A change took place in the very nature of painting and sculpture (and the other “arts”). They assumed a new function. No longer simply the product of specialized skills, highly valued though those skills often were, they were now, in effect, the manifestation of a new revelation, rivalling religious faith. “Art” showed the way to a kingly domain where man “is at one with the gods,” and artists were the torchbearers. Malraux’s analysis also throws an interesting light on traditional aesthetics. As he reminds us in The Voices of Silence, the discipline of philosophical aesthetics “emerged at a late date and was above all a justification.”28 That is, the reflections on the nature of art by seventeenth and eighteenth-​century figures such as Shaftesbury, Baumgarten, Hutcheson, Hume, Diderot and Kant were part of an intellectual program that took place well after the emergence of the concept of art during the Renaissance, and the task these thinkers undertook where art was concerned was essentially to provide a rationale for a concept that was, by then, well-​established –​a rationale typically framed, as one might expect, in terms of the post-​religious notions of

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“human nature” that underpinned so much of their thought. It is true that the Enlightenment added certain new elements to Renaissance explanations of art: in keeping with the importance they placed on education and refinement, Enlightenment philosophers typically argued that the human response to art depended on a “faculty of taste” (which, many believed, could be nurtured if necessary), and involved a particular form of delectation, christened aesthetic pleasure –​two ideas that remain very much part of aesthetics today. But the underlying concept of art remained the same –​the same concept that had its origins in Giotto’s discoveries, and which led, via figures such as Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Watteau to the revelation of a transcendent, golden world, encapsulated, by common consent, in the single word “beauty.” To the extent that modern aesthetics continues to rely on the idea of beauty in its explanations of art –​and it often still does –​it locates itself, consciously or not, within this same current of thought, even if its notions of beauty are often ill-​defined and diverge markedly from those of its Renaissance and Enlightenment forebears. Finally, it is important to stress that Malraux’s explanation of the concept “art” in its initial Renaissance form is fully consistent with his definition of the fundamental goal of artistic styles (irrespective of whether those styles were originally viewed as “art”). That goal, we recall, was to replace the chaos of appearances with a unified, rival world. In religious cultures such as Byzantium, medieval Europe, or ancient Egypt, this rival world was enlisted in the service of a transcendent world that pre-​existed it, and in cultures such as these, the concept “art” was unknown, and would have had no purpose. From the Renaissance onwards, in a cultural context in which religious faith was beginning to wane, the rival world of art assumed the quite different form of a transcendent world brought into being solely through the power of the images themselves. These two kinds of rival world are clearly not the same but both, nonetheless, are expressions of the same underlying impulse. Byzantine mosaics were manifestations of the Christian Revelation: their “other world” was already established, as was that of ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, or Hindu India. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or Veronese’s Venus and Adonis appealed to no pre-​existing revelation (Greek gods were then part of mythology, not religion) and the “other world” that works such as these brought into being depended solely on the nature and quality of the works themselves. The deep-​seated urge to create a rival coherent world can, in other

Art and the West | 55 words, manifest itself in different ways, and the Renaissance concept of “art,” important though it was, is only one of these. “How easy it is to imagine a history of art in which the Renaissance would only figure as an ephemeral humanist accident!” writes Malraux in The Voices of Silence.29 The comment is not intended as disparagement of Renaissance art, much of which Malraux admired greatly, but it reminds us that, across the millennia, artistic styles in the fundamental sense Malraux defines them, served many purposes that had nothing to do with what the Renaissance came to call “art.” We today use this term for all the objects we place in an art museum, irrespective of their provenance (we shall discuss why shortly), but large numbers of objects we encounter there were, as Malraux rightly says, created “for men for whom the very idea of art did not exist.”30 This account of the emergence of “art” is not, however, the end of the story Malraux has to tell about the fortunes of this concept in Western culture. There is an important second chapter which describes an event with consequences that are very much part of our lives today. The concept of art that emerged with the Renaissance left a profound impression on European culture and continues, even today, to exert a strong influence on the philosophy of art. (As mentioned, many philosophers of art continue to place major importance on the idea of beauty and on associated eighteenth-​century ideas such as a “sense of taste” and “aesthetic pleasure.”) But how confident are we that this concept accurately reflects what art means for us today? Do we still believe that its fundamental goal is to depict a world of nobility, harmony, and beauty? The answer is surely no. To begin with, our world of art today is far more varied and extensive than that of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, and even if we exclude modern painters whose works often seem to have little to do with a “golden world” (Picasso or Francis Bacon, for example), there is now a wide range of works from non-​ European sources such as Pre-​ Columbian civilizations, pre-​ colonial Africa, and the cultures of the Pacific which seem quite remote from anything resembling such a world. In other words, given that the domain of art today extends well beyond the tradition of artists such as Botticelli, Raphaël, Poussin and Watteau, are we justified in assuming that the word “art” still carries the same meaning it acquired during the Renaissance and which exerted such a profound influence on Enlightenment thinkers? Malraux’s response is clear: we still retain the word “art,” and it has lost none of its

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importance or prestige, but the meaning of the word has changed radically. A cultural transformation has taken place with implications no less profound than those triggered by Giotto, and the consequences have included a radical change in the meaning of the term “art,” the nature of the experience it elicits, and the range of works it encompasses. What is this new concept of art, and what caused its emergence? Malraux traces the root cause to the Enlightenment (which is not without a certain irony, given that philosophers of the period were still busily engaged in developing explanations of the concept of art they had inherited from the Renaissance). The key factors were the Enlightenment’s relentless attacks on religious belief, its insistence, motivated by the triumphs of science, that the path to truth lay solely through the empirical, observable fact, and a consequent skepticism about transcendence in all its forms. This event was decisive. Malraux writes in The Voices of Silence: “Something unprecedented was happening; something that would transform both art and culture.” Now, for the first time, he writes (echoing arguments in his earlier writings such as The Temptation of the West), a religion was being threatened otherwise than by the birth of another. In its various manifestations, ranging from veneration, to sacred dread, to love, religious feeling had changed many times. Science and Reason were not another metamorphosis of this feeling; they were its negation.31

“What was disappearing from the Western world,” Malraux continues, “was the absolute” (a term he is using in the sense explained in Chapter One). An Encyclopedist “was farther removed from Racine in his Port-​Royal retreat than Racine was from St Bernard; because that notion of retreat had ceased to mean anything to the Encyclopedists.” And despite the persistence of conventional forms of pious observance, “Eternity withdrew from the world,” and “our civilization became as unresponsive to the voice of Christianity as to the stellar myths and Druid trees.”32 As discussed earlier, there was then an interregnum of humanist belief, but this was soon to fade as well. “The hope that Victor Hugo, Whitman, Renan and Berthelot placed in progress, science, reason and democracy –​ their faith in man as master of the world,” Malraux writes, “soon lost its self-​ assurance.” For “when those hopes first arose in Europe there was nothing to give them the lie.” But this is no longer the case. Today, he observes,

Art and the West | 57 We know that peace in our time is as vulnerable as it ever was; that democracy can usher in capitalism and totalitarian policies; that progress and science also mean the atom bomb; and that reason alone does not provide a full account of man.33

The result is today’s agnostic culture, and among the causalities has been the Renaissance/​Enlightenment concept of art. Across the millennia, in cultures as various as Egypt, India, Pre-​Columbian Mexico and medieval Europe, the function of painting and sculpture had always been inseparable from an absolute; and this was still the case when, from the Renaissance onwards, the new absolute –​the exemplary world “outside of which man did not fully merit the name man” –​depended on art itself. But what might the function of art be in an agnostic culture? How could the artist continue to create visions of humanity touched by a spark of the divine when belief in all things divine was turning to dust? How could one believe in a golden realm, and reject nature’s brazen world when, in the wake of Newton and Enlightenment philosophers, nature and her “empirical” aspects seemed to be the only credible reality? The problem was fundamental, although some time was to elapse before its full implications made themselves felt. For a time, artists responded by creating a transcendent domain “closer to the earth,” so to speak, which is why the paintings of eighteenth-​century artists such as Watteau, Tiepolo, and Fragonard often remind us of the fantasy world of the theater rather than the sublime regions of earlier painters such as Michelangelo or Titian. But the wells were rapidly running dry, and although certain Romantic artists such as Delacroix and Turner added an admirable final chapter to the art of the irréel, the gravity of the crisis became obvious (at least to genuine artists) when there emerged what Malraux calls the “anti-​arts” –​Salon painting, or “official painting,” as he often terms it.34 Painters of this school, such as Cabanel, Bouguereau, and Meissonier, Malraux argues, simply accepted the disappearance of fundamental values and aspired to nothing more than an unthinking acquiescence to the world of appearances. Painting now aimed to depict the world simply as the eye sees it –​the eye without the mind, that is, without any attempt to create a unified rival world.35 In effect, this meant an abandonment of the fundamental ambition on which art rests, painters now producing an “art” of a reality not created but imposed –​an art that evoked neither veneration nor admiration

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but appealed solely to the pleasures of the senses. For some four hundred years, Malraux writes, European painting had made extensive use of different forms of illusionism but at no stage had this been allowed to undermine the work’s fundamental unity. “The medieval painter had matched his carefully painted saints to the painstaking detail of his backgrounds […] the Venetians had ensured that the sharp relief of their foreground figures matched the calligraphy of distant silhouettes.”36 The new forms of illusionism sponsored by “official” painting destroyed this unity, replacing it with a purely optical, “stereoscopic” relief based on the separation of planes like the scenery in a stage setting.37 Malraux comments: “All true painters, all those for whom painting is a value, were nauseated by these pictures –​Portrait of a Great Surgeon Operating and the like –​because they saw in them not a form of painting, but the negation of painting.”38 As noted earlier, Malraux defines artistic styles as significances that “[replace] the unknown scheme of things with the coherence they impose on all they ‘represent’.” “Official” painting, he writes, was a “universal antistyle”39 –​universal because it appealed simply to vision, not to the mind (and thus eliminated any question of values); and “antistyle” because it renounced any ambition of imposing coherence on the world of appearances, merely submitting to it. These “arts of gratification” (“arts d’assouvissement”40) as Malraux terms them, are “not just inferior arts, but operating as they do in the opposite direction to true art, might be called anti-​arts.”41 But if this development sounded the death knell of the art of the irréel, art could, nevertheless, be reborn in a different form, and in 1865, when painting was sinking more and more deeply into empty academicism, Manet’s Olympia made its startling appearance, sowing the seeds of something radically new. Manet, in Malraux’s eyes, occupies a place in the history of Western art no less important than that of Giotto. Giotto discovered a “power of painting previously unknown in Christian art” which led to the emergence of “art” in its first incarnation. Manet, who recognized that an art of that kind was no longer possible, and who rejected the vacuity of official painting, also discovered a new power of painting, but in his case, a power that abandoned the pursuit of a transcendent fictional world and simply became its own value. Manet, writes Malraux, discovered “the autonomy of painting,”42 a painting that relies exclusively on its own powers, and at this point a long chapter in the history of Western art, dating from the Renaissance, came to a close.

Art and the West | 59 Gone now was any attempt to conjure up an exalted world of nobility and ideal beauty such as that embodied in Titian’s Venus d’Urbino, whose subject Manet was audacious enough to borrow.43 No longer linked to any value outside itself, painting would now rely exclusively on its fundamental power to create a rival world. Divorced from any absolute and left to its own devices in an agnostic culture, art would fall back on what Malraux terms “its invincible element” (“sa part invincible”44) –​the irreducible power without which it would not even be a possibility: the capacity to create a unified world that stands for unity against the chaos of mere, given reality.45 This argument has often been misunderstood despite Malraux’s efforts to make it as clear as possible. He contrasts his position with that of the twentieth-​century artist and theoretician, Maurice Denis, who made the well-​k nown statement that “a picture, before being a war-​horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some kind, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”46 This statement has often been quoted as a useful definition of modern art but, for Malraux, it is only a half-​truth. It is correct in suggesting that art has ceased to be subordinate to an imaginary world and has become simply painting –​an “assemblage” of colors. Yet, Malraux asks, “To what end?”47 Denis omits the purpose of the assemblage –​which is not, as his formula might lead one to assume, simply to cater for the pleasure of the eye. For Malraux, the purpose remains, as always, to create a coherent rival world, but the crucial distinction between the modern artist and his predecessor is that for the former –​those artists who explore the new possibilities opened up by Manet –​that purpose has, for the first time, become the artist’s exclusive aim. Cut off from any other value, art discovers a fundamental value within itself which, Malraux writes, “is much deeper than a desire to please the eye.” It is “the age-​old urge to create an autonomous world, which, for the first time, has become the artist’s sole aim.”48 Thus, while Western culture continues to use the word “art” –​hallowed by centuries of use since the Renaissance –​its meaning has altered radically. As we shall see later, Malraux argues that this change was signaled not only by the nature of the art created (“modern art”) but also by the unprecedented range of works resuscitated. He argues that just as the Renaissance revived the works of antiquity, ignored for a millennium, there has now been “another renaissance” much broader in scope, which has extended the reach of our world of art to objects from the depths of prehistory and from the

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four corners of the earth. That, however, is to anticipate. For the present, the crucial point is that Malraux regards Manet as a major turning-​point in Western art. He marks the abandonment of the transcendent world of the irréel and signals the discovery of an art reliant solely on its capacity to build a coherent rival world. Malraux discerns this fundamental ambition behind all modern art from Manet onwards, in artists as diverse as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Chagall, Miró, and Picasso; and although he died in 1976, there is every reason to think he would also have considered it to be the underlying ambition in what is now often called “contemporary art,” despite the latter’s periodic recourse to shock tactics (not unknown in any case in modern art).49 Two common misunderstandings of Malraux’s position merit brief comment. Some critics claim that his explanation of modern art amounts to an extreme “formalism” that negates the value of representational art. Others contend that he is resorting to a “subjectivism” where nothing counts except, in one writer’s words, “the glory of the individual.” We will briefly consider both claims. A representative example of the first, briefly mentioned earlier, is a comment by the art historian, Stéphane Guégan, in a review in 2004 of Malraux’s collected Écrits sur l’art. Guégan writes: Malraux pushes the primacy of form even further than Maurice Denis, whom of course he quotes. He goes as far as denying not only traditional mimesis, but the value of all representation.50

The comment exemplifies the unfortunate tendency of some critics to skim-​ read Malraux rather than study his arguments with care. As we have seen, Malraux certainly quotes Denis, but Guégan omits to mention that he quotes him to disagree with him –​to suggest that his well-​k nown formula (not infrequently invoked in discussions of “formalism”) is inadequate. In fact, as we have seen, Malraux argues that modern painting cannot be understood simply as “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” because the formula forgets to ask: “To what end?” For Malraux, the purpose of modern art remains the creation of a coherent, rival world, the important qualification being that, in this case, the purpose is no longer linked to an absolute such as an exalted fictional world or a religious faith. This in no sense implies a ban on representational art, understood as painting that might include people or objects as part of its subject matter. Indeed, if it did, Malraux’s

Art and the West | 61 enthusiasm for painters such as Van Gogh, Renoir, Cézanne, and Degas, not to mention Manet himself, would be incomprehensible. Malraux, as we saw earlier, denies that art is essentially representation (because it is transformation, the creation of “another world”51) but this in no sense implies that he “denies the value of all representation.” The first point relates to the nature of art in general –​the kind of thing it is; the second concerns the nature of specific works an artist might create: two quite distinct issues. Malraux no more denies the value of all representation than he advocates a doctrinaire attachment to “primacy of form.” The suggestion that he is a “formalist” in the sense implied –​a suggestion Guégan is not the only one to have made –​is a serious misreading of his position.52 No less questionable are claims that Malraux regards art post-​Manet as “subjectivism” or “individualism.” Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, a prominent advocate of this view, argues that Malraux regards modern painting as a “movement towards the subjective and a ceremony glorifying the individual.” He writes: There is only one subject in today’s painting [Malraux] says –​the painter himself. Painters no longer look for the velvet of the peaches, as Chardin did, but, like Braque, the velvet of the painting. The classical painters were themselves without knowing it; the modern painter wants above all to be original and for him his power of expression is identical to his individual difference. Because painting is no longer for faith or beauty, it is for the individual.53

This comment is partly based on quotations from Malraux –​chiefly from The Psychology of Art –​but unfortunately Merleau-​Ponty separates them from their context and distorts their meaning. To begin with, it is worth noting that in the same section of The Psychology of Art from which Merleau-​Ponty is quoting, Malraux states in relation to modern art that “there is no question of straining after originality, since all art is original,”54 the comment no doubt referring to his argument, discussed earlier (and also contained in The Psychology of Art), that all art, as distinct from the pastiche, is creation in the full sense of the term, whether the painter be a Manet, a Picasso, a Giotto, or the unknown authors of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Merleau-​Ponty’s claim that, in Malraux’s eyes, “the modern painter wants above all to be original” suggests a lack of familiarity with this argument even though it is a key proposition in the book he is ostensibly interpreting. No less importantly,

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Merleau-​Ponty ignores the carefully phrased context of the argument he is discussing. There is room here for only a brief summary, but essentially Malraux’s explanation in the passages to which Merleau-​Ponty refers hinges on the ideas analyzed above (and also contained in The Psychology of Art) concerning the Renaissance idea of art and the transformation that took place after Manet. He asks us to imagine “what would have happened if Tintoretto had been compelled to paint three pieces of fruit on a plate, just that, without any sort of background,” and goes on: “We feel at once that his presence as painter would have stamped itself more forcibly on this still-​life than on any Baroque fantasy or Battle of Zara.”55 The basic thought here is the same as that already discussed –​that modern art is a manifestation of “the age-​old urge to create an autonomous world, which, for the first time, has become the artist’s sole aim.” The imaginary Tintoretto, hypothetically deprived of the fictional opportunities on which his art strongly relied, and forced, Cézanne-​ like, to paint “three pieces of fruit on a plate, just that” would, Malraux is suggesting, be compelled to rely much more strongly on what we (already) identify as specifically “Tintoretto” in his work. For in these circumstances, he continues, He would have had to transform the apples by painting alone. Being cut off from his transfigured world would not have resulted in his simply being dominated by his subject-​matter; on the contrary, while not transfiguring it, he would have annexed it. The fruit would have had to enter his own universe, [“son univers particulier”] just as, in earlier times, it would have entered a transfigured universe.56

Merleau-​Ponty, curiously, makes no mention of these passages but it is not difficult to see that there is no suggestion that the modern artist is simply attempting to affirm his “individual difference” or participate in “a ceremony glorifying the individual,” as if his chief aim were merely to distinguish himself from others. Malraux nowhere argues that modern art is driven simply by a desire to be “original” or “different;” he argues that it is driven by the urge to create an autonomous, coherent world. Essentially, as Malraux adds (in another comment that Merleau-​Ponty neglects to mention) it is a question of styles,57 bearing in mind his definition of styles as “significations [that replace] the unknown scheme of things by the coherence they impose on all they ‘represent,”58 the key point being that in art post-​Manet, painters’ styles are

Art and the West | 63 no longer in the service of anything beyond themselves and fall back on their own power alone. Merleau-​Ponty’s interpretation –​which in this instance, as in some others, seems to have influenced other commentators59 –​is, in short, seriously awry. Like any writer, Malraux can be made to say any number of things once the context of his statements is removed (and in this case, as we see, the gamut runs from “formalism” to “subjectivism”). Given the efforts he makes to provide contexts that will make his ideas as clear as possible, the method hardly does him justice. Finally, certain comments of a more general nature are in order. This chapter has examined Malraux’s account of the emergence of the concept of art during the Renaissance and then the transformation of this concept, triggered by Manet, that initiated modern art. The account has described three main phases: the Byzantine and medieval periods before the Renaissance when painting and sculpture served religious purposes and the concept of art did not exist (except with different meanings); the Renaissance itself which saw the emergence of art in the sense of the irréel; and the period from Manet onwards (which Malraux calls l’Intemporel60) which ushered in a new concept of art in which artists began to rely solely on their power to create an autonomous world. Given this analysis, one might be tempted to conclude that, despite his disclaimers to the contrary, Malraux is in fact offering us a history of art, and that, in the words of one critic, “There is, for Malraux, a true history of art in which he distinguishes three major periods: Le Surnaturel (The Supernatural), L’Irréel, and L’Intemporel.”61 The comment is, however, potentially misleading. First, we need to bear in mind that, for reasons discussed earlier, Malraux’s theory of art is, by its very nature, closely linked to historical developments, so we should not be surprised to find that his explanations of major issues such as those in question in this chapter have strong historical components. Second, the discussion here has focused on the periods of European history that saw the emergence and transformation of the concept of art because those events are of major relevance to modern circumstances; but the scope of Malraux’s books on art is much broader than this and is by no means limited to these periods of time or to European culture. Finally, and most importantly, a coherent history of art would necessarily involve some form of unifying historical principle (such as a telos where, for example, modern art might be seen as a culmination) and any such account of art is out of the question for Malraux because it would imply an absolute –​a principle

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that conferred direction and meaning on historical events or, at a minimum, on those that relate to art. Viewed in that light, art would be part of an intelligible historical process, as it is in the narratives provided by Hegelian or Marxist theory, for example. But the foundations of Malraux’s thought, as we have seen, are not of that kind. His theory of art is based solely, as we saw in Chapters One and Two, on the fundamental human capacity to call the world into question and this reveals no comprehensible scheme of things such as a History with direction and meaning. We will return to this issue later, but it is important to stress here that the narrative examined in the present chapter is not a history of art, or even part of one. Malraux’s theory of art includes descriptions of a number of different historical episodes (we shall consider another when we discuss the emergence of the Buddhist art of Gandhara) but in each case these are episodes in a narrative that has no overarching historical meaning and no end-​goal. Malraux’s theory of art, to repeat a comparison used earlier, takes the form of an adventure that knows nothing of what lies ahead, and in which everything, apart from the specific paths taken so far, remains nameless and unknown. Malraux’s account of the emergence and transformation of art is nevertheless highly enlightening. Given that, unlike many philosophers of art, he willingly accepts the evidence that points to the absence of the concept of art in other cultures, his theory of art obviously needs to include an explanation of why and how that concept emerged. And it clearly does. Malraux does not rely simply on the conventional view that Renaissance artists were seeking to improve their social and economic status –​which begs the questions of why they were so successful, and why painting and sculpture (and their counterpart art forms) took on a new and unprecedented function. Malraux’s explanation, which centers, precisely, on this change in function, provides answers to both questions. Doubtless the efforts of painters and sculptors to gain greater social prestige played a contributory role, but the invention of the transcendent world that earned the name “art” was fundamentally a creative achievement, led by figures such as Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and long line of successors. Unknown in Byzantine and medieval times, when painting and sculpture served quite different purposes, art, Malraux’s argument implies, was an invention of Renaissance artists themselves, intent on creating a rival coherent world of a kind never seen before.

Art and the West | 65 Malraux’s account also needed to explain the profound transformation in the nature of art that emerged after Manet, and this he also provides. In effect, his theory of art, as it relates to events in Europe from the Renaissance to the present, is an explanation of both the emergence and the transformation of the concept of art. Again, neither explanation is part of a history of art. Both derive from his fundamental proposition that all styles, whether serving “artistic” or religious ends, involve the creation of rival coherent worlds and this is clearly not a principle that can give meaning to the course of historical events. There is, one should perhaps add, no suggestion that art as Europe came to know it is a “better” or “more advanced” form of creation than the painting and sculpture of previous cultures (so that, for example, Titian or Manet would be advances on the mosaics at Ravenna or Egyptian sculpture). Such ideas are quite foreign to Malraux’s thinking and there is nothing in his theory of art that would lend them the smallest support. Finally, Malraux’s analysis also throws light on the quandary in which modern aesthetics finds itself where the idea of beauty is concerned. As explained, for some five centuries from the Renaissance onwards, the term “art” was synonymous with a world of nobility, harmony and beauty in the special sense discussed, and this understanding of art –​traditionally summed up in the single word “beauty” –​became the central element in the philosophical aesthetics developed by Enlightenment thinkers that continues to exert a powerful influence today. Not surprisingly, however, contemporary philosophers of art are increasingly questioning the importance of beauty, given the obvious difficulties reconciling it with our vast and varied modern world of art. Some, certainly, still adhere to versions of traditional thinking, although these usually depend on highly abstract, not to say abstruse, definitions of beauty unrelated to any historical period or style; but there are others who cast about for alternative solutions in which beauty plays a lesser role or even none at all. Viewed in the light of Malraux’s analysis, the cause of this discord is not difficult to identify. The idea of beauty still exerts a powerful influence because it is central to the thinking modern aesthetics has inherited from eighteenth-​century figures such as Kant and Hume, who have long been regarded as key authorities in the field. But the emergence of a radically different concept of art in the modern world has clearly generated concerns among some philosophers of art that the ground has shifted beneath their feet and that something fundamental has changed. One leading figure in

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the analytic aesthetics school of thought writes that philosophical aesthetics today “is literally disintegrating [into] semi-​autonomous intellectual domains […] at best only loosely gathered under the heading of aesthetics, at worst barely recognizable as aesthetics at all.”62 Growing concerns about the discipline’s continued reliance on the concept of beauty, and the philosophical tradition associated with it, are doubtless major factors in this crisis.

Notes 1 In passing, it is interesting to note that the situation with respect to literature is quite different. Generally speaking, there is no university discipline of “literary history” separate from literary studies. 2 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 582. The same thought lies behind his comment “There is no such thing as art in itself.” Ibid., 880. 3 Which, unlike The Voices of Silence, follows a broadly chronological order throughout. 4 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 37. 5 Which in any case could take a wide variety of forms. It is sometimes forgotten that the nature of any given history of art depends largely on its underlying theoretical assumptions, acknowledged or not. See the further discussion of this point in Chapter Eight. 6 This is not intended as an exhaustive list. There are obviously other art forms such as dance and architecture. For convenience, the present study generally limits the list to painting, sculpture, literature, and music. 7 Gay Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 12. 8 Paul Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I),” in Essays on the History of Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992), 11, 13. The analysis includes a discussion of both Plato and Aristotle. Many thinkers in the continental tradition also tend to ignore the issue at stake here. Consider, for example, Walter Benjamin’s narrative of art history in which “the earliest artworks originated in the service of ritual –​first magical, then religious,” which subsequently, during the Renaissance, was linked to a “cult of beauty.” This lasted three centuries, Benjamin argues, until the invention of photography and the advent of the idea of “pure art.” Nowhere in this account is there an acknowledgment that the

Art and the West | 67 concept “art” itself was absent in earlier cultures. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (second version),” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24. 9 Jacques Le Goff, L’Homme médiéval (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 237. 10 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 248, 331. As we shall see later, Malraux argues that our modern sense of the term art is the consequence of a radical change that took place after Manet. The phrase “by men for whom the idea of art was not the same as our own” doubtless refers to the period pre-​Manet, which we are about to consider, when the meaning of the term was different. 11 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 133, 140. Malraux’s emphasis. 12 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 133. See also Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 707. 13 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 133. 14 Ibid., 316. 15 Ibid., 318. Malraux’s emphasis. 16 Ibid., 319, 320. 17 Ibid., 328. Malraux is not, of course, suggesting that the works of Giotto and those who followed were superior to those of Byzantium (a claim often made by later writers such as Vasari, Taine, Bernard Berenson and even at times E.H. Gombrich). Here as elsewhere, there is no question for Malraux of artistic “progress.” See also note 39, Chapter Three and note 43, Chapter Five. 18 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: L’Intemporel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 657. 19 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: L’Irréel, Écrits sur l’Art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 481. 20 In principle and in practice. Malraux notes, for example, that Christianity and Buddhism took some five centuries to discover styles befitting their teachings. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 643. 21 Malraux writes: “While, in the thirteenth century, fiction was banished from religious art, by the seventeenth century, all religious art was fiction.” André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Skira, 1947), 87. 22 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 657. 23 Malraux, L’Irréel, 480. 24 Philippe Beaussant, Louis XIV artiste (Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages, 2005), 9. Beaussant could have added dance, in which Louis XIV excelled. 25 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 85. 26 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 268.

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27 André Malraux, Saturne: Le destin, l’art et Goya (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 93. 28 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 282. Malraux’s emphasis. 29 Ibid., 389. 30 Ibid., 248, 331. 31 Ibid., 720–​22. Malraux’s emphasis. 32 Ibid., 707, 722, 723. 33 Ibid, 784, 785. Cf. Malraux’s comment in an interview in 1975: “In the nineteenth century, when the most eminent minds were asked to confront science with essential metaphysical problems, they knew full well that science wasn’t solving them. But they didn’t say: science is incapable of solving them. They said science will solve them, and a mind like Victor Hugo could write: ‘The key point about science is what it will bring us, and it will be the twentieth century that finds the true meaning of science.’ It’s obvious everyone thought the world was heading towards the United States of Europe and universal peace. Well, it’s clear we didn’t arrive at the United States of Europe at all but at crematory ovens and concentration camps. If someone had said to Victor Hugo that there would be gas chambers one day in the future, he would have said ‘You’re utterly mad!’ Well, we’ve discovered –​we, our century –​that science has both a positive and a negative –​that, certainly, it can achieve medical wonders, but also that it produces the atomic bomb.” André Malraux, Dialogue imaginaire avec Picasso: “La Tête d’obsidienne” (Television series: Journal de voyage avec André Malraux.) (Paris: Interviewer: Jean-​Marie Drot, 1975). 34 Malraux uses the term “official” to highlight the powerful influence at the time of the French Ministry of Fine Arts and Academy of Fine Arts. 35 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 713. 36 Ibid., 717. A good example is Tintoretto’s Massacre of the Innocents. 37 Ibid., 715–​26. 38 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 735. 39 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 746. 40 The French art historian and critic Stéphane Guégan writes that Malraux condemns “what he calls l’art d’assouvissement with hints of the kind of Puritanism that would have made Bataille smile.” Whether or not Malraux’s argument would have made Bataille smile, Guégan’s suggestion that Malraux’s analysis is puritanical in some way is quite mistaken. Malraux is not speaking of mere subject matter (and l’art d’assouvissement, in any case, was not always prurient in nature); he is speaking of the fundamental nature of this art –​that fact that it was an anti-​art. Guégan’s comment trivializes the issue at stake. Stéphane Guégan, “La pensée sur l’art d’André Malraux: est-​elle toujours utile?,” Beaux-​ Arts Magazine, no. 245 (2004), 89.

Art and the West | 69 41 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 771. The term “anti-​art” has sometimes been applied to the Dada movement and aspects of Surrealism on the grounds that they involved a protest against the very idea of art. This semi-​political meaning is quite different from Malraux’s usage. 42 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 669, 670. 43 And which, to highlight the contrast, Malraux reproduces in L’Intemporel side by side with Olympia. Ibid., 668, 669. “Official” painting did not, of course, die overnight. 44 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 737. 45 Malraux argues that poetry underwent a similar transformation at about the same time. In La Psychologie de l’art, in his description of the developments outlined here, he writes: “Poetry shared in the great adventure and was similarly transformed; with Baudelaire, it discarded the ‘story,’ although official poetry continued wallowing for years in narratives and dramas.” Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire, 73. It would not be difficult to argue that the other arts were similarly affected. 46 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 787. 47 Ibid. Cf. “If it was just for the sake of ‘colors assembled in a certain order’, why would Cézanne sacrifice everything for it?” Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 33. 48 Les Voix du silence, 870. The French reads: “c’est la très vieille volonté de création d’un monde autonome, pour la première fois réduite à elle seule.” Malraux’s emphasis. Jean-​Pierre Zarader notes that in one form of his well-​k nown statement, Maurice Denis writes that “a picture, before being a representation of something, is a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order, for the pleasure of the eye.” (Emphasis added). Zarader believes that it was this form of Denis’s statement that Malraux was responding to, which, in the light of the comment quoted here, seems quite probable. Jean-​Pierre Zarader, André Malraux: Les Écrits sur l’art (Paris: Les Editions du cerf, 2013), 139. Malraux quotes Denis’s statement again later in L’Intemporel rewriting the final words to read: “assembled in an order that will free them from time.” (Malraux’s emphasis.) The significance of this will become clearer in the next chapter. It is obvious again, however, that Malraux is not thinking of the mere pleasure of the eye. Malraux, L’Intemporel, 807. 49 In L’Intemporel, Malraux speaks briefly about Duchamp –​sometimes seen as a harbinger of “contemporary art” –​and includes a reproduction of Seche-​ bouteilles. Nothing he says there suggests that he sees Duchamp as a fundamental break from the new conception of art under discussion here. Malraux, L’Intemporel, 934–​45.

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50 Guégan, “La pensée sur l’art d’André Malraux: est-​elle toujours utile?,” 89. A not dissimilar view is expressed by another critic who claims that “For Malraux, the whole question of modern art resides in the question of representation, understood in the sense of imitation; and the break between traditional and modern paintings consists of a transition from a representational to a non-​representational form of art.” Thomas Tam, “The Death of Art: Bataille, Malraux, Hegel,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 26, no. 1 (2005), 164. E.H. Gombrich leans towards the opposite view, writing that Malraux is not interested in “abstract art” (Gombrich’s quotes) but in “non-​illusionistic representations, especially of the human figure.” In all three cases, we see the curious consequences of skim-​ reading Malraux. E.H. Gombrich, “Malraux’s Philosophy of Art in Historical Perspective” in Malraux: Life and Work, ed. Martine de Courcel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 175. 51 See Chapter Three. 52 See also the brief discussion of this point in Chapter Two. 53 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993), 84, 88. Merleau-​Ponty’s emphasis. 54 André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire, Paris, Skira, 1947, 79. 55 Ibid., 83. Malraux’s emphasis. 56 Ibid. Malraux is using the phrase “transfigured world” to signify the world of the irréel –​as exemplified in this case by Tintoretto’s paintings. 57 Ibid. 58 See Chapter Two. 59 In a discussion of Merleau-​ Ponty and Malraux, Alex Potts, for example, repeats the claim that Malraux argues that the modern artist pursues an art that is “entirely individual and subjective in character.” Alex Potts, “Art Works, Utterances, and Things,” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 95. The editors of an English translation of Merleau-​Ponty’s writings on aesthetics claim that: “Malraux’s fundamental thesis throughout [The Voices of Silence] was that modern painting is a ‘subjectivism’ that breaks with the attempts of ‘objectivism’ among the Renaissance classical artists.” Galen Johnson and Michael Smith, eds., The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, 19. (The significance of the quotation marks is not clear since Malraux himself rarely uses the terms “subjectivism” and “objectivism,” and certainly not in the senses implied in this statement.)

Art and the West | 71 60 The meaning Malraux ascribes to this term is discussed in the next chapter. 61 Zarader, André Malraux: Les Écrits sur l’art, 13. 62 Peter Lamarque, “The Disintegration of Aesthetics,” in Scruton’s Aesthetics, eds. Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 269.

5

Art and Time

Among the many important contributions André Malraux has made to the theory of art, his explanation of the relationship between art and the passage of time is perhaps the most remarkable. Here, the word “revolutionary” as a description of his thinking is, without doubt, fully merited, and although most philosophers of art, in both the analytic and continental schools, seem unaware of it, this aspect of his theory of art poses major challenges to traditional, post-​Enlightenment aesthetics and its various contemporary formulations. The issues at stake in this context are not always clearly understood and it is important to begin by outlining exactly what is involved. To begin with, a fundamental distinction needs to be made. The key question Malraux asks has nothing to do with the function of time within works of art –​for example, the different ways in which the passing of time might be represented in a film or a novel, or the role of tempo in music or dance. Those topics are, of course, perfectly valid, and many theorists of art –​Malraux included, on occasion –​have explored aspects of them. The issue at stake here is the external relationship between a work of art and time: the effects of the passing of time –​of history in a broad sense of the term –​on those objects, whether

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created in our own times or in the distant past, that we today call “works of art.” In the face of the processes of inexorable change over the centuries and millennia, Malraux asks, how have works of art responded? We are well aware that the customs and beliefs of past cultures have not resisted the corrosive effects of time, and we know that even if we manage to decipher the writing of an ancient culture –​Egypt, for e­ xample –​its religious practices and traditions seem little more than curiosities –​beliefs that belong to what Malraux aptly calls the “charnel house of dead values.”1 But the art of the past? Is it, too, a mere curiosity, devoid of life? And if not, if it is somehow able to live on and defy time, in what way does this occur, and what general conclusions can we draw about the nature of art and its relationship with the passing of time? Consider a specific example. Today, as Malraux reminds us, we can hardly hope to share the emotions of an ancient Egyptian as he placed offerings before the statue of his God-​K ing to aid him in the afterlife. Indeed, we have no reliable way of knowing what those emotions were, since the beliefs on which they depended now seem hollow and lifeless. But if the statue happens to be the work of a sculptor of genius –​for example, the austere, imperious image of the Pharaoh Djoser, dating from about 2000BC, now in the Cairo Museum –​does it also strike us as lifeless? Do we see it simply as an historical phenomenon like a belief in mummification, or the god Seth, or an object such as an old arrowhead or a shard of pottery? Malraux’s response is clear. There is a crucial difference between an historical phenomenon and a work of art. The former may certainly be a source of interesting information about the past, but it belongs wholly to the past. Djoser, however, like many other outstanding sculptures from ancient civilizations, has escaped the times in which it was created and is alive for us in the present moment. Our response to it is of the same order as our response to The Victory of Samothrace, the sculptures on the Royal Portal at Chartres, or Picasso’s Girl with Skipping Rope, despite differences in our reactions in each case. As Malraux writes, works such as these are “the presence in life of what should belong to death.”2 They seem to speak to us here and now, and we welcome them without hesitation into our art museums.3 Works of this kind have defied –​transcended –​time: they have escaped “the charnel house of dead values” and survived as living presences. Which leads to two obvious questions: What kind of transcendence is this? And what is its source?

Art and Time | 75 Before examining Malraux’s answers, it is important to place these issues in historical context. Modern aesthetics pays at best sporadic attention to the relationship between art and the passage of time and, as a result, often gives the impression that the topic has never played an important part in Western thinking. This view is seriously misleading, and once we reflect a little on the history of art, we immediately see why. The question of how art transcends time assumed major significance in European culture when the Renaissance invented “art” and, in so doing, rediscovered the sculpture of antiquity which had been ignored or despised for a thousand years. This event confronted Renaissance minds with a major dilemma: how was it possible that these ancient works, created by civilizations long dead, still seemed vital and alive? Why did they not seem empty and worthless like the pagan beliefs that inspired them? The response the Renaissance gave, which has rung down the centuries and exerted a profound influence on Western culture, was, as Malraux reminds us, that the essence of art is beauty, and beauty, like its tutelary goddess, Venus, is immortal.4 The response removed all doubt: like all things divine, art is proof against the forces of change: it is eternal, immortal, timeless.5 This was a decisive moment in European cultural history. One might even say, Malraux writes, that “the Renaissance was less about antiquity than it was about the birth of immortality. The latter had never existed.”6 The consequences of this event are not difficult to discern. Europe embraced the idea of art’s immortality with enthusiasm. It is a leitmotiv in the poetry of the time –​in Shakespeare, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Spenser, Ronsard and many others; and in the eighteenth century, when the discipline of philosophical aesthetics was taking form, the proposition that art is immortal was accepted without question. David Hume, for example, assures us, in his well-​k nown essay Of the Standard of Taste, that there is a “catholic and universal beauty” found in all true works of art, and that the forms of beauty thus detected will “while the world endures […] maintain their authority over the mind of man,” a proposition he supports by his familiar dictum that “The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London.”7 “The same Homer” –​that is, an unchanging, immortal Homer exempt from time who, throughout the ages, has retained the same meaning and the same significance. For reasons we shall examine shortly, Malraux rejects this explanation of the temporal

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transcendence of art, but he nonetheless recognizes that it has played an immensely important role in Western thought. The Enlightenment accepted it without question and the Romantics in their turn embraced it with enthusiasm, Malraux citing as an example the familiar stanza from Théophile Gautier’s poem “Art”: All things pass. Sturdy art Alone is eternal; The sculpted bust Outlives the State.8

Even today, the idea is far from dead, especially in the Anglo-​A merican analytic school where the thinking of eighteenth-​century philosophers continues to play a central role. “There is a tendency among scholars and non-​scholars alike,” comments one writer of this persuasion, “to think that art works, or more specifically, great art works, are in some sense immortal,” adding that he himself sees “some truth in the view.”9 Important though it was for centuries, however, the concept of immortality eventually encountered a powerful current of thought that called it into question. Fascinated by the idea of history, many nineteenth century thinkers concluded that, like all human activities, art is inseparable from the historical situation from which it emerges, a proposition whose advocates included such well-​k nown names as Hegel, Marx and Taine. The latter assures us that To understand a work of art, an artist, or a group of artists, one must determine precisely the general state of mind and the beliefs of the times to which they belong. Therein lies the first cause which determines the rest.10

Modern defenders of this idea (principally found in the continental school of aesthetics) usually formulate it in more nuanced ways,11 but the basic proposition remains the same: art and history are closely intertwined and any suggestion that art might lead an existence exempt from historical change (as the theory of immortality requires) must be ruled out. Even Raphael, Marx argues, was a product of his historical context: Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organization of society and the division of

Art and Time | 77 labor in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labor in all countries with which his locality had intercourse.12

Yet propositions of this kind pose a major problem. Once one rejects the idea that art is exempt from time, one abandons the only available explanation of how it transcends time. And interestingly enough, Marx himself was one of the first to draw attention to this dilemma when he wrote in the Grundrisse (in an observation that deserves to be quoted more frequently) that The difficulty is not so much in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It lies rather in understanding why they should still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.13

Marx’s formulation of the problem suggests a degree of deference to Classical antiquity that we today would probably not share (in this respect, he seems to have accepted the standard Enlightenment view that the art of Classical times had an exemplary status), but his underlying claim is, nonetheless, difficult to gainsay. If one believes that art is closely linked to its historical context (the “forms of social development”), what principle can one invoke to explain the fact that certain works transcend that context and remain vital and alive centuries afterwards when historical circumstances have changed? In short, theories of this kind –​and they are numerous in some areas of modern aesthetics –​pose a major conundrum. Even if we credit them with explaining how art is influenced by time, they tell us nothing about why and how it escapes it. In broad terms, then, this is the historical background to the question of the temporal transcendence of art. Since the Renaissance, there have been two main currents of thought: the claim that art is timeless and the claim that it is closely bound up with its historical context. What, then, is Malraux’s position? Two general points to begin with: First, the question of the temporal transcendence of art, which modern aesthetics, especially the analytic variety, has marginalized for many decades, is, as indicated earlier, a central theme in Malraux’s books on art. The issues we are about to examine are therefore of the first importance in understanding and evaluating his thinking. Second, while acknowledging the powerful role that the belief in the

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immortality of art has played in the intellectual history of the West, Malraux unambiguously rejects it. If we today are seeking a convincing explanation of how art transcends time, he argues, we need to look elsewhere because, as he commented in a television program in 1975, “for us today the idea of immortal beauty is simply preposterous […] To talk about ‘immortal art’ today, faced with the history of art as we know it, is simply hot air.”14 Why is Malraux so sure of this? And why does he say, “faced with the history of art as we know it”? Why would the claim that art is immortal be incompatible with the history of art? In considering these questions, one needs to keep in mind that Malraux is speaking of the world of art we know today, which encompasses a wide range of cultures, ancient and recent, not the much narrower world of art familiar to Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant, which was limited to Renaissance and post-​Renaissance Europe, and Greco-​Roman antiquity. With this in mind, let us test Malraux’s thesis by looking at a particular case, choosing as our example the celebrated sculptures of biblical figures on the Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral; and since Malraux’s wishes to base his claim on the history of art, let us think briefly about the history of these works. Today, the sculptures on the Royal Portal are widely considered to be among the masterpieces of medieval art and, as such, one of the high points of our extensive modern world of art. Historical research tells us, however, that this opinion was not shared in the twelfth century when the statues were created, for the simple reason that, at that time, the notion of “work of art” did not exist and the importance of these figures was inseparable from the Christian faith to which the cathedral was dedicated. The history of art also tells us that although we today unhesitatingly include these works among the treasures of our modern world of art, the same sentiments were not shared by European civilization over the four or five centuries prior to the twentieth century. From the Renaissance until the late nineteenth century, the sculptures at Chartres, like all “Gothic” works (a term originally intended as derogatory), were strictly excluded from the rubric art and relegated to a limbo of indifference, if not contempt, from which they only began to emerge towards the end of the nineteenth century.15 In short, if, as Malraux suggests, we look carefully at the history of art, we see immediately that the fortunes of these sculptures across the centuries has had nothing to do with immunity from time and change, and that, pace Hume (who would doubtless have shared his century’s contempt

Art and Time | 79 for everything “Gothic”), the meaning and importance of these works have certainly not been “the same” (to use Hume’s word) since their creation. These statues have survived physically, thanks no doubt to the vague religious respect they elicited (which did not, however, save many others), but the history of their survival has been marked by profound changes. Far from being exempt from time, their life across the centuries has been inseparable from major transformations in significance. And Chartres, of course, is only one example among many. Art museums today abound in works, from civilizations as various as ancient Egypt, Buddhist India, pre-​colonial Africa, and Byzantium which, like the sculptures of the Royal Portal, began their lives as religious figures in cultures with no equivalent for the term “art,” but which, today, have become “works of art” after centuries or even millennia of indifference or disdain. These works have most certainly transcended time: the modern world does not see them merely as historical objects like a potsherd or an old arrowhead; they are living presences, like a Van Gogh painting or a Picasso sculpture (or Macbeth or a Mozart piano concerto, to look beyond visual art). But the history of their survival is self-​evidently not compatible with the idea of immunity from historical change. Plausible though it once seemed, when the European world of art was much more limited in scope, the concept of the immortality of art has ceased to make sense. To defend that concept today is, as Malraux puts it, “simply hot air.” Clearly then, we require a new explanation of the power of art to transcend time, and this is precisely what Malraux provides. In our analysis of the fundamental aspects of his thought, we saw that all artistic styles are responses to the sense of chaos and insignificance at the heart of “the fundamental emotion man feels in the face of life,” and that art replaces this chaos by unity –​by a rival world composed solely of elements present for a reason. As part of that analysis, we also saw that an absolute, such as a religious faith, responds to the same sense of chaos, but in a different way. The difference was this: unlike an absolute, which asserts that all things exist, and are as they are, for a reason (such as the will of God), art speaks only of its own rival world, leaving the question of the fundamental nature of things unanswered. Art, in other words, unifies the world but does not assert that there is only one world, one immutable Truth, an unchangeable scheme of things created “once and for all.” Thus, while the worlds created by art are coherent, they are

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never permanent, never definitive. They are worlds born to metamorphosis –​ worlds of which the power of metamorphosis is an inherent characteristic; or as Malraux phrases the point in L’Intemporel, metamorphosis “is the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics.”16 In short, far from being exempt from change, art transcends time from within the world of change, with all the unpredictability that implies. This explains the theoretical foundations of Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis, but it is vital to recognize that we are not dealing simply with an abstract argument. One sees immediately that his thinking is directly applicable to the history of art and readily overcomes the serious historical difficulties facing the idea of immortality. Reflecting on the sculptures at Chartres, we saw that the history of these works is incompatible with the idea of timeless existence, given that they began their lives as religious figures in a culture in which the concept of a “work of art” did not exist, then fell into oblivion for some five centuries, and were later resurrected as “works of art.” Such a sequence of events fits readily, however, with the notion of metamorphosis –​that is, with a capacity of a work to acquire different meanings at different periods (and at certain stages, perhaps, to have no meaning at all), the transformations occurring not simply as consequences of chance events (for metamorphosis, as Malraux stresses, is an inherent power of art and “is not an accident”17) but as manifestations of the work’s own nature –​its capacity for metamorphosis. Thus, the destiny of any great work, Malraux writes in The Voices of Silence, is inseparable from a dialogue, though at times a dialogue of the deaf, between the changing human present (including its art) and the work’s own, continually changing significance: We have learnt that if time and change cannot permanently silence a work of genius it is not because the work prevails against them by perpetuating its original language but because it constrains us to listen to a language constantly modified, sometimes forgotten –​like an echo answering each century’s changing voice –​and what the great work of art sustains is not a sovereign monologue, but an invincible dialogue.18

Commentators occasionally accuse Malraux of writing about art in an unnecessarily “literary” way, the implication presumably being that he sacrifices accuracy for the impressive verbal flourish. Specific examples are rarely provided, which makes the accusations rather difficult to refute, but

Art and Time | 81 a passage such as this perhaps exemplifies what critics who make this complaint have in mind. If we read the passage with care, however, we quickly see that any such criticism would be quite misplaced and that, in reality, Malraux’s so-​called “literary style” allows him to express his ideas with precision and force. A true work of genius, he reminds us, is never reduced to permanent silence: it endures; it has a life in time. But it does not endure as an eternal presence, “perpetuating its original language.” The language it speaks –​the significance of the rival world it embodies –​is “constantly modified” because it is in a state of continual metamorphosis as history moves on. The language is “sometimes forgotten” because there may be periods when, like ancient Egyptian sculpture during the long centuries of Christian belief, or Byzantine mosaics after the Renaissance, it is no longer understood.19 But the work survives, nonetheless, like “an echo answering each century’s changing voice” (even if, on occasion, the response is silence) because this is a dialogue between its capacity to change significance and the shifting values of each passing era, not a monologue –​not simply the unchanging, authoritative voice of a work whose meaning and importance have been established once and for all. And it is an “invincible” dialogue, not because the work accedes to an eternal realm isolated from the vicissitudes of circumstance, but because it is capable of resurrection –​of returning to life and defying time, even though speaking a language different from the one it had originally spoken. A work of this kind –​the Victory of Samothrace or one of the solemn sculptures at Chartres, for ­example –​is not simply an “historical object” belonging entirely to times gone by; it has returned to life: it is “in our time, in our lives today, and not just in our memories,” as Malraux writes.20 But it returns to life through a process in which time and change –​ the movements of history with its shifting values and beliefs –​plays a vital role. As Malraux commented in the television interview mentioned earlier, in a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, the work of art alone is “subject to time and yet victorious over it”21 –​“subject” because inseparable from history; “victorious” because, even though not eternal, it is born to metamorphosis and capable of resurrection.22 The challenge this explanation poses for traditional thinking is well illustrated by the well-​k nown event we call the Renaissance. According to the familiar explanations often provided by historians of art, the new “naturalistic” forms of Renaissance art were inspired by the Greco-​Roman statues

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discovered during excavations in Roman ruins. But what exactly does “discovered” mean here? Malraux asks.23 The conventional explanation is based on what, in the passage above, he terms a “sovereign monologue” –​that is, the proposition that certain works, in this case Greco-​Roman sculpture, possessed such a high degree of excellence that they exerted an overwhelming influence on the artists who saw them, leading to a new “naturalism” or “realism” to replace what we came to be regarded as old-​fashioned Byzantine “rigidity.” This time-​honored explanation, it is worth noting, has always involved an embarrassing historical difficulty given that many works of antiquity had remained in plain view throughout the thousand years of Byzantium.24 But in any case, Malraux argues, the decisive factor was never just physical discovery. For a millennium, Greek and Roman works represented a pagan world that Byzantium, like Romanesque Europe, had resolutely rejected, and, with rare exceptions, they were treated with indifference or disdain. These works became important again once they began to participate in a dialogue –​that is, once their capacity for metamorphosis, and their responses to the emerging forms of Renaissance art, gave them a voice again, even if in a language quite different from the one they had originally spoken. (For although central to the “repertoire of exemplary acts” of the new Renaissance art,25 the gods of antiquity had lost their original significance and had now become, as Malraux reminds us, divinities “to whom no one prayed.”26) Thus, here as elsewhere, the notion of a monologue –​a one-​way influence –​would lead us astray. The crucial discovery for the event we call the Renaissance was not simply the unearthing of the classical sculptures, but the discovery in those objects of a quality previously undetected (to be rapidly included in the category “art” in the sense that word acquired during the Renaissance) –​ the same quality that the Renaissance itself was discovering in the harmonious imaginary world hinted at by Giotto and pursued so vigorously by artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian.27 Thus, Malraux writes, “What the Renaissance gave Europe was not just a new art of the living but also a new art of the dead” (a new art of the dead because it was a quality that Classical antiquity itself had never known).28 In a sense, then, the concepts of dialogue and metamorphosis stand conventional explanations of the Renaissance on their heads. The idea of a simple, unidirectional influence is ruled out. “It is at the call of living forms,” Malraux writes, “that dead forms

Art and Time | 83 are recalled to life.” Or more specifically: “In art, the Renaissance produced antiquity as much as antiquity produced the Renaissance.”29 But the most dramatic example of such a metamorphosis, Malraux points out, has taken place in our own times over the past century, which has seen the resuscitation, as works of art, of objects from a wide variety of cultures and from the depths of human history, large numbers from peoples to whom the concept of art was quite unknown. Once again, Malraux argues, the key development was not simply the physical discovery of the objects, many of which, like Pre-​Columbian figurines, African carvings, and Egyptian statues, had been known to Europe for lengthy periods of time. The decisive factor was the new direction taken by European art itself after Manet which recalled these objects to life through a process of dialogue and metamorphosis, resulting again not only in “a new art of the living but also a new art of the dead.” This event, which has played a fundamental role in shaping our modern world of art, and which Malraux does not hesitate to call “another renaissance” is explored in the next chapter. The key element, however, is the conception of the temporal nature of art underlying Malraux’s thinking. There is no question of eternity since so many of the objects concerned –​ African fetishes or Egyptian gods, for e­ xample –​far from being exempt from the vicissitudes of time, were ignored or despised for long periods, and their resuscitation has been accompanied by a major transformation in significance. Nor, obviously, is one speaking merely of historical phenomena, since unlike the values and beliefs (for example) originally associated with these objects, they now “live again” albeit with a changed significance. Thus, in the same way that the works of Greece and Rome were resurrected during the Renaissance, so modern art has resurrected the vast range of works from other cultures that form a major part of our world of art today; but it has done so only through a metamorphosis. The significance of Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and the passing of time has rarely been fully appreciated; indeed, most modern philosophers of art have simply chosen to ignore it. Yet it clearly represents a revolutionary step in the theory of art. First, it provides a solution to an intellectual impasse. As discussed, the traditional belief that art is exempt from time is incompatible with the facts of the history of art as we now know them, while, in addition, arguments stemming from the Hegelian-​Marxist tradition to the effect that art is the creature of its historical context provide

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no explanation of the capacity of art to transcend time –​the dilemma Marx himself identified in the Grundrisse. These are serious problems and, in the absence of an alternative explanation of the temporal transcendence of art, they would be insoluble, and we would simply have no viable account of how art defies time. Malraux shows the way out of this impasse. He provides an explanation that overcomes the difficulty Marx identified and which, unlike the notion of immortality, is compatible with the facts of art history. Malraux’s theory of metamorphosis is, in other words, a decisive breakthrough in the theory of art. He gives us a thoroughly credible explanation of a key (if widely neglected) aspect of art where none existed before. Second, Malraux’s explanation emerges in a fully systematic way from the fundamental elements of his theory of art. As noted earlier, critics sometimes allege that his theory of art is merely a series of disconnected impressions, lacking intellectual cohesion –​in effect, not a genuine theory of art at all. The prominent English art historian E. H. Gombrich suggested that The Voices of Silence was only “a mere string of accumulated aperçus, sometimes brilliant, sometimes vacuous”30 and Pierre Bourdieu, in one of his periodic outbursts of invective, claimed that the author of The Voices of Silence combines a cultural patchwork with Spenglerian metaphysical bric-​a-​brac, imperturbably associating the most contradictory “intuitions”, hasty borrowings from Schlosser or Worringer, rhetorically exalted platitudes, purely incantatory litanies of exotic names, and insights which are called brilliant because they are not even false.31

Neither of these commentators apparently thought it necessary to support their views with evidence,32 but they are, in any case, demonstrably wrong. In previous analyses, in Chapters Three and Four, we saw that Malraux’s arguments linked up directly with the basic ideas outlined in Chapters One and Two, and the topic currently under discussion provides a similar example. Malraux’s reasoning proceeds directly from his original proposition that the objects we today call “works of art” are essentially unified rival worlds –​ worlds which “stand for unity as against the chaos of mere, given reality.” This proposition implies that, unlike the worlds of an absolute, created once and for all, the worlds of art are never definitive and permanent, and their significance is always in a state of metamorphosis. The argument is perfectly clear and comprehensible, and far from being a mere “aperçu,” “metaphysical

Art and Time | 85 bric-​a-​brac,” or a “rhetorically exalted platitude,” is a perfectly intelligible and highly illuminating explanation of the temporal nature of art. Here as elsewhere, Malraux’s thinking is both lucid and systematic. Regrettably, the same cannot be said of the kinds of hasty, unsupported judgments offered by critics such as Gombrich and Bourdieu. It goes without saying, of course, that Malraux does not have a monopoly on the term “metamorphosis,” a word that has been used on many occasions by other writers. There is, however, a major difference between the use of the term simply to capture the general idea of a transformation in form or style and its use as an explanation of the relationship between art and time –​an explanation of what Malraux calls “the very life of the work of art in time.” The point is important because critics occasionally claim (usually without arguing the case) that there is nothing original in this aspect of Malraux’s theory of art and that he has simply borrowed (less charitable words are sometimes used) the idea of metamorphosis from other thinkers. There is no room here for a comprehensive review of these claims, but one writer from whom Malraux is often said to have borrowed the term is the art historian Henri Focillon in his book The Life of Forms in Art, and it is worthwhile pausing briefly to consider this allegation. Focillon uses the idea of metamorphosis as part of an argument, regrettably rather vaguely formulated, that “plastic forms” (it is not always clear whether he limits this idea to art alone) “constitute an order of existence” and that “this order has the motion and the breath of life.” Forms, he contends, are “subject to the principle of metamorphosis, by which they are perpetually renewed,” which implies that a work of art is “motionless only in appearance” since, in reality, forms are able to engender “a great diversity of shapes” and are “primarily a mobile life in a changing world.”33 These propositions bear only a superficial resemblance to Malraux’s position, who never suggests, for instance, that forms (a notion he uses sparingly in any case) are “an order of existence” possessing “the motion and the breath of life” (whatever precisely that may mean), or that the work of art somehow initiates its own metamorphoses into “a great diversity of shapes” –​ideas which, one is tempted to say, almost verge on the mystical. But the differences become even starker when Focillon begins to speak specifically about time. His argument here revolves principally around a dispute with certain theorists –​Taine, in particular –​ whom he sees as imposing too strict and simplistic a link between art and

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historical forces. Seeking to loosen these ties, Focillon envisages a process of “endless action and reaction” in which there is “an immense multiplicity of factors” at work, and where, in certain cases, the “time that gives support to the work of art […] is quite capable of slipping back into the past or forward into the future.”34 However plausible or implausible this claim might seem, it is obviously a world away from Malraux’s thinking. Focillon’s key concern is essentially a quarrel with determinism, not the temporal transcendence of art. In particular, there is nothing to suggest that his occasional use of the term “metamorphosis” signifies anything resembling the process of dialogue and resurrection we find in Malraux, or, indeed, that Focillon is even interested in addressing the issue of resurrection. (He even suggests at times that the work of art is “immortal” and that it “belongs to eternity.”) In short, the frequent claims by critics –​typically unsubstantiated –​that Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis is borrowed from Focillon are quite without foundation, a state of affairs one encounters repeatedly in suggestions that Malraux’s arguments are not original. In her recent study of Malraux’s books on art, the French critic Dominique Vaugeois, suggests that Malraux’s explanation of the relationship between art and the time would be more readily comprehensible if it were placed in the context of the views of certain contemporary French writers on the subject, such as Michel Ribon, Mikel Dufrenne, and the art historian George Didi-​ Huberman. The proposition merits brief comment, not because (as we shall see) it sheds any useful light on Malraux’s thinking but because, once again, it exemplifies the kinds of misunderstandings that often surround this aspect of his theory of art. For, in fact, none of these writers squarely addresses the questions at the heart of Malraux’s thinking, and although we will need to make a minor detour to establish this point, there is value in considering it briefly.35 In his book A la recherche du temps verticale dans l’art (In Search of Vertical Time in Art) published in 2002 (to which Vaugeois refers us), Michel Ribon draws a distinction between what he terms “horizontal time” and “vertical time,” the first being “that of dreary repetition, the mechanical linking of cause and effect […] the time of tedium, of melancholy, of anguish …,” while the second, vertical time, “stands before us imposing its gaze on ours in the singular and exceptional experience of a sensation-​revelation.” Ribon’s explanation of the relationship between art and these two forms of time is

Art and Time | 87 by no means clear but he assures us that, among other things, “through the singularity of its epiphany, the work of art is an absolute,” that art “certainly seems to afford the surest access to eternity,” and that “all meditation on time leads to the idea of eternity?”36 Somewhat cryptic though they are, even these few samples of Ribon’s argument are perhaps enough to show that we are a long way from anything resembling Malraux’s thinking. Malraux’s position is, after all, quite straightforward. There is no question of two forms of time of the kind Ribon describes, and there is certainly no suggestion that “the work of art is an absolute” or that all meditation on time “leads to the idea of eternity.” Essentially, Malraux speaks about art and the passage of time in a quite uncomplicated way. First, he draws our attention to the obvious fact that all aspects of human culture –​beliefs, traditions, customs, institutions –​eventually fall prey to time and become part of “the charnel house of dead values.” But art, he reminds us, is an exception. Art transcends time: it has a capacity to endure. The key question is: what kind of transcendence is this? Is it, as Europe believed for centuries, the transcendence of an eternal object, immune from change; or is it something else? Malraux replies that art transcends time through a process of metamorphosis. Now, there is nothing of this in Ribon’s book, and nothing even resembling it. The closest he comes to a comment on the way art transcends time is his assertion (supported by very meager argumentation) that art is eternal, a proposition that Malraux categorically rejects, while Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis is ignored.37 Vaugeois suggests that Ribon is a representative of “recent aesthetic thinking” (she appears to be thinking of France) where the question of art and time is concerned. If this is so (and it is certainly not so in the Anglo-​A merican context where the issue is mostly ignored), those orientations hardly seem promising and, contrary to Vaugeois’ claim, throw no useful light at all on Malraux’s thinking. Let us turn now to Mikel Dufrenne, whom Vaugeois also recommends as a useful resource for a better understanding of Malraux. Here, the situation seems initially to be a little more promising. In his book The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (to which Vaugeois refers), Dufrenne, unlike Ribon, mentions Malraux several times and, for the most part, favorably. (In one case, he defends Malraux against certain criticisms by Maurice Blanchot). In addition, he devotes a section of his book to “The aesthetic object in time” and seems aware that this topic inevitably poses the problem of the temporal

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transcendence of art. But the analysis proves disappointing. Despite an apparent acknowledgment that a genuine work of art is not imprisoned in its historical context, Dufrenne gives no clear explanation of how it escapes that context, apart from asserting at one point that the work’s “form” bestows on it “something of the eternal proper to its essence.”38 (Curiously, Dufrenne briefly considers the idea of metamorphosis, but does so in a different section of his book where the relationship between art and time is not the focus of attention.) Worse still, he mingles this discussion with references to the ability of art to resist damage or destruction, as if physical survival, which, of course, has nothing to do with the problem of the temporal transcendence of art, were part of the same debate.39 In short, Dufrenne’s analysis of “The aesthetic object in time” is of limited value. Here and there, he makes an interesting comment –​usually more interesting than Ribon’s –​but it is not at all obvious, despite Dominique Vaugeois’ recommendation, that his book makes a useful contribution to an understanding of Malraux’s thought. Vaugeois also suggests that our understanding of Malraux’s explanation of the relationship between art and time would benefit from comparison with the 2013 book L’Album de l’art à l’ époque du “Musée imaginaire” (The Art Album at the time of the “Musée imaginaire”) by the prominent, contemporary French art historian and theorist, Georges Didi-​Huberman. This suggestion is also very questionable. We will refer to Didi-​Huberman’s book again later, but it is worth saying here that his comments on the aspect of Malraux’s theory of art presently under discussion are decidedly superficial and, oddly enough, even seem to reveal a lack of familiarity with Malraux’s arguments. One example will perhaps suffice. Didi-​Huberman alleges that, for Malraux, art is an “absolute” and exists “like eternity faced with the relativisms of the historical world,” a view he repeats a little later when he claims that, in Malraux’s eyes, art is “an eternal presence, present because it acts every time we enter the ‘Musée imaginaire’; eternal because it has always acted –​since the ‘prehistoric caves’, across ‘millennia’ –​and will always act as long as men are men.”40 The misunderstandings here are doubtless self-​evident. The term “absolute” has a clear and perfectly comprehensible meaning in Malraux’s thought, and art is definitely not an absolute. The suggestion that art exists “like eternity faced with the relativisms of the historical world” flies directly in the face of Malraux’s quite explicit rejection of the notion that art endures eternally (a rejection linked, of course, to his replacement of this notion with

Art and Time | 89 the concept of metamorphosis –​a concept about which Didi-​Huberman has little to say). The claim that, for Malraux, the term “presence” simply means the action of images within the musée imaginaire is also unsatisfactory. In the context of his explanation of the relationship between art and time, “presence,” for Malraux, refers to the difference between a work with the power of art and a mere historical object. Works such as the horses at Lascaux and Chauvet are “present” for us: they are vital and alive; a flint cutting tool lying on the cave floor is an historical object which, interesting though it may be as historical evidence, belongs wholly to the past. This is a basic distinction in Malraux’s thinking –​and one that any theory of the temporal transcendence of art must surely confront –​but Didi-​Huberman’s comment suggests he has not understood it. And finally, the claim that, for Malraux, art is “eternal” because “it has always acted […] and will always act as long as men are men” is doubly wrong. First, it appears to assume that because a work endures it must necessarily have done so eternally; and second, it ascribes that view to Malraux. In short, Didi-​Huberman’s account of Malraux’s explanation of the relationship between art and time is seriously flawed (and this, we shall see later, is not the only aspect of his account of Malraux’s thinking of which this can be said). Vaugeois’ suggestion that L’Album de l’art à l’ époque du “Musée imaginaire” throws useful light on this element of Malraux’s theory of art is one that can be safely disregarded. Another well-​k nown writer who discusses Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time is Maurice Blanchot, and his comments, which seem to have influenced several other writers,41 are also worth considering briefly. In the course of his essay “Time, Art and the Museum,” mentioned earlier, Blanchot claims that, in Malraux’s eyes, the artist is “sole master of the eternal,” and that, for Malraux, [art] bestows a meaning on history, and guarantees beyond the perishable and across the death of time, the life and eternity of this meaning. Art is no longer the anxiety over time, the destructive force of pure change. It is bound to the eternal, it is the eternal present which, through the vicissitudes and by means of metamorphoses, maintains and ceaselessly recreates the form in which “the quality of the world through a man” was once expressed.42

Blanchot’s comment is somewhat unclear at points but, among other things, he appears to be claiming that art, according to Malraux, “bestows a meaning

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on history” and ensures “the life and eternity” of this meaning. Already we see problems. There is no suggestion anywhere in Malraux’s writings on art that art gives a meaning to history –​an idea that one might perhaps associate with writers such as Sartre or Walter Benjamin, but which Malraux does not espouse, and which plays no part in his theory of art. Nor, of course, as we know, does Malraux suggest that any such meaning would be rendered “eternal” by art, the notion that art is eternal also being quite foreign to his thinking. These errors are serious enough, but things get worse in the remainder of the passage. Despite an apparent recognition that art transcends its context through a process of metamorphosis, Blanchot nevertheless claims that, according to Malraux, the artist is “sole master of the eternal,” that art is “bound to the eternal,” and that it is the “eternal present” –​propositions that are all obviously incompatible with Malraux’s notion of metamorphosis. Adding to the confusion, Blanchot then links the concept of metamorphosis to the idea of something “ceaselessly [recreated],” which could presumably imply that metamorphosis resurrects the original meaning of a work, another proposition at odds with Malraux’s thinking since his theory of metamorphosis argues that the work survives only at the cost of a transformation of its meaning.43 Blanchot is correct in suggesting that, for Malraux, art resists “the destructive force of pure change” (assuming we are not speaking of physical destruction) but Malraux nowhere suggests that it does so as an object exempt from change. Blanchot’s errors here are not unlike Didi-​Huberman’s and in both cases seem to reflect an unwillingness to read Malraux with care. “I am not speaking about eternity; I am speaking about metamorphosis,” Malraux comments in the course of a discussion of Egyptian sculpture. “Egypt has reappeared for us; it had disappeared for more than fifteen hundred years.”44 And, as we have seen, these resurrections, such as those of the Pharaoh Djoser, or the statues at Chartres and countless others, are inseparable from a change in meaning. We today, Malraux writes, “admire Romanesque Virgins as we do fetishes, but they were not admired in the nineteenth century, and those who sculpted them did not admire them either, they prayed to them.”45 The process of resurrection and transformation is at the heart of Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time but Blanchot’s comments tend, unfortunately, to obscure this fact rather than clarify it.46 Jean-​François Lyotard introduces a misunderstanding of a different kind when, puzzlingly, he seems to suggest that Malraux believes that art does

Art and Time | 91 not transcend time at all. Lyotard quotes Malraux’s comment in The Voices of Silence that that “the whole history of art, when it is the history of genius, should be seen as a history of deliverance,” a proposition which, as we saw, flows directly from Malraux’s explanation of artistic creation.47 Lyotard adds however: Does this mean a history emancipated from the world of history? A music and song freed from sensitive and sentimental expressivities? Of course not: the work of art never gets clear of anything, never escapes its subjection to the world. It is a first step beyond, the beginning of an entry into the desert: the exodus out of Egypt of the senses is not and must not be accomplished.48

Here again, unfortunately, the thinking is somewhat opaque. It is not entirely clear, for example, what Lyotard means by “a history emancipated from the world of history,” or why he foregrounds ideas such as “the senses” and “sentimental expressivities” which are not major elements in Malraux’s thought. But however that may be, Lyotard apparently wishes to claim that, according to Malraux, art is never able to escape its historical context (“never gets clear of anything, never escapes its subjection to the world”) a proposition that is manifestly incompatible with Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis. The very point and purpose of that concept is, after all, to explain the capacity of art to transcend its historical context, and if this were not the case, the concept would simply be unintelligible. Like the comments of Blanchot and Didi-​ Huberman, Lyotard’s claim offers yet another example of the unnecessary confusions that often surround Malraux’s explanation of the relationship between art and time. Malraux chooses the word “metamorphosis” for a perfectly obvious reason: an organism that undergoes a metamorphosis continues living but does so in a different form. Malraux makes the same claim for art: a work of genius continues living (sometimes after periods in a limbo of indifference) but with a different meaning.49 Such a work is obviously not exempt from change: it does not lead a timeless existence; but unlike the mere historical object, it is also not a mere victim of time –​a candidate for the “charnel house of dead values.” This is why Malraux writes, in a statement that might perhaps displease certain art historians (and he places the whole sentence in italics) that “the history of art does not provide a sufficient account of the world of art”; because, as he writes in the following sentence, “the great work of art belongs to history, but it does not belong to history alone.”50

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This also explains why Malraux introduces the term intemporel into his theory of art. A number of critics –​Didi-​Huberman is a recent case –​seem to assume that Malraux, who, as mentioned, is sometimes accused of employing an unnecessarily “literary” style, uses the term intemporel simply as an imposing synonym for “eternal,” as a kind of literary flourish. This assumption is improbable even on the face of it. First, despite what is sometimes said, Malraux always chooses his words with care and if he uses intemporel rather than “eternal,” one can feel quite confident that he does so for a good reason (and we shall shortly see what the reason is). Second, if this assumption were correct, one would surely have difficulty understanding why Malraux’s last book on visual art, which is largely concerned with modern art, is called L’Intemporel. The notion that art lasts eternally was the explanation that reigned supreme during the period covered by the previous volume, entitled L’Irréel; but Malraux argues, as we have seen, that this explanation is no longer viable and that a new explanation of the relationship between art and time is required –​which he provides in the concept of metamorphosis. If intemporel, for Malraux, simply meant “eternal,” he would surely be caught in a strange self-​contradiction: having said that the traditional idea that art endures eternally is now defunct, he would nevertheless be using that idea as the title for his last book on visual art which covers a period of time during which, as he himself argues, the inadequacy of the idea of eternity has become quite plain. The meaning of the term intemporel can, in any case, be explained quite simply. Once one accepts the concept of metamorphosis, one accepts that works of art (whether they began as “works of art” or not) are able to defy time without being exempt from it –​without being “eternal,” “immortal,” or “timeless.” Thus, the term “eternal” and its equivalents become inappropriate and misleading. But art is, nonetheless, qualitatively different from the mere historical object which lives only in time and which is therefore “temporal” in every respect. Art, in other words, is qualitatively different from the merely “temporal” object, even though not eternal. The word Malraux chooses to describe this condition is, quite reasonably, intemporel (which unfortunately does not have an exact equivalent in English51). While not eternal, the work of art is nonetheless able to defeat time: it is intemporel. There is no question here of a mere stylistic flourish. Malraux uses the term in question for a perfectly sound reason and not as a synonym for eternal.

Art and Time | 93 In her recent study, Dominique Vaugeois suggests, as other critics sometimes have, that Malraux is only a “compiler” of the ideas of others, and that, in any case, his thought is “obsolete” and “outdated.”52 The analysis in this and previous chapters suggests that the truth is quite otherwise. In the present chapter and the one preceding it, for example, which have examined the fortunes of the idea of beauty and the relationship between art and the time, what strikes us most forcefully is the profound difference between Malraux’s positions and the ideas derived from traditional aesthetics that so often underpin the modern philosophy of art. In considering the idea of beauty, we noted that despite the immense changes since Manet that have dethroned beauty from its sovereign position, large areas of the philosophy of art seem unwilling to part company with the Enlightenment patterns of thought that still give it a central role. Where the relationship between art and time is concerned, Malraux has confronted and solved a problem that both analytic and continental aesthetics, far from solving, have not yet brought themselves to seriously confront.53 The analytic school still clings uneasily to the untenable idea that art endures timelessly; the continental school, when not still toying with the same idea (as Ribon and Dufrenne do, for example) seems reluctant to confront the obvious fact that art does transcend time, preferring to focus on the claim (often now in somewhat watered-​down forms) that art is a product of its historical context. And to make matters worse, the analysis in the present chapter reveals that critics of Malraux’s explanation of the relationship between art and time –​including prominent figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Georges Didi-​Huberman and Jean-​François Lyotard –​often appear not to have understood his arguments, making elementary mistakes such as confusing the idea of metamorphosis with the idea of eternity. Given this situation, accusations that Malraux’s theory of art is “obsolete” and “outdated,” or that he is simply a “compiler” of the ideas of others, seem to be on very shaky ground indeed. What do seem “outdated,” however, are modern philosophies of art that ignore, or attempt to circumvent, the major issues he confronts, despite their obvious importance and their relevance to the modern world. In the two areas mentioned here, as in many others, Malraux offers us radically new explanations, free from traditional pieties (beauty, eternity, taste, etc), and takes the theory of art into wholly new territory. “Obsolete” and “outdated” are the very last epithets that come to mind.

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The originality and importance of Malraux’s concept of metamorphosis, in particular, can scarcely be overestimated. Previous discussion has outlined the two explanations of the temporal nature of art that have dominated European thinking since the Renaissance: the proposition that art is eternal and the quite different claim that art, like all other human activities, is immersed in the ongoing flow of historical change. Now, these are the only two propositions that have made a major impact on European culture where the temporal nature of art is concerned. Different writers have, of course, presented them in different ways: the Enlightenment’s view of the eternity of art –​Hume’s, for e­ xample –​is somewhat different from that of the Romantics, who liked to link the idea to the belief that the artist is the privileged possessor of divine powers. Similarly, Hegel’s account of the link between art and history is different from that of Marx, and both are different again from those of Hippolyte Taine and a number of more recent post-​Marxist thinkers. At times there have even been attempts to blend the two ideas, an ambition that is arguably responsible for some of the apparent contradictions one finds in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, for example.54 Variations such as these aside, however, these propositions remain the two idées maîtresses that have governed European thinking about the temporal nature of art over the centuries since the Renaissance. Effectively, the West has said that art is either eternal or a creature of history. The two ideas have been interpreted in different ways but there are no others.55 Thus, the suggestion that there might be another alternative –​that art might endure through a process of metamorphosis –​is an event of no small moment in Western intellectual history. As Malraux reminds us, the belief that art is eternal was born with the Renaissance; and the idea that art belongs to history emerged in the nineteenth century. If we accept the arguments outlined in the present chapter, the proposition that art endures through metamorphosis constitutes one of only three major contributions to an understanding of the relationship between art and time advanced since the Renaissance; and if we confine ourselves to explanations of how art endures, it is the only alternative advanced since the Renaissance, the only alternative to the traditional view that art endures eternally. The significance of this is obvious. If the idea of metamorphosis is sound, it is a landmark in the history of Western thinking about art –​an example of a true intellectual

Art and Time | 95 revolution. And if that is so, needless to add, claims that Malraux’s thought is “outdated,” or that it consists of “hasty borrowings” as Bourdieu alleges, are patently false.56 This chapter has provided a relatively detailed examination of Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time, and in an analysis of this kind one can easily lose sight of the deeper human significance of the ideas in question. Malraux himself, however, does not lose sight of them and in the final sections of The Voices of Silence, he expresses them in a form that achieves a kind of lyrical intensity. He begins one of his concluding paragraphs by alluding to the metaphysical foundations of art discussed earlier in Chapters One and Two –​the proposition that, at its deepest level, art is a response to humanity’s underlying sense of transience and futility, or as he describes it here, the “inexorable sense of subjection of which death is the constant reminder.” This sense of ephemerality can sometimes, he suggests, seem overwhelming: “Feeble indeed,” he writes, “is that brief survival of man that cannot last long enough to see the light die out from stars already dead!” Nevertheless, no less feeble is the nothingness that beats man down if the dust of thousands of years is unable to stifle the voice of a great artist once laid in his coffin … Death has no final victory in the face of a dialogue scarcely begun, and survival is not measurable by duration. Survival is the form taken by a victory of a man over destiny and, once the man is dead, that form begins its unpredictable life. And the victory that created that form will give it a voice of which the artist himself is unaware.57

Critics accustomed to the neutral, rather clinical style of much modern aesthetics, might purse their lips at a passage such as this. The emotive tone, they might think, is out of place when speaking about art, and smacks of what E.H. Gombrich scornfully dismissed as Malraux’s “rhapsodies about art.”58 Yet seen in the context of the analysis in the present chapter, the ideas Malraux is expressing are perfectly comprehensible, and the tone wholly appropriate. Viewed against the backdrop of “the unknown scheme of things” and the sense of insignificance and dependence it engenders (in Malraux’s shorthand, le destin), human life seems a feeble, short-​lived affair. Yet survival is not a matter of mere duration. True survival is the capacity to triumph over this crushing transience, and the achievement of a great artist is

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just such a triumph because, although he himself is ultimately laid in his coffin, his creations live on through a dialogue with humanity over the ages to come. The life on which a work embarks is unpredictable, and the artist himself cannot foresee the different “voices” –​the different human meanings –​ it will assume. (A twelfth century sculptor at Chartres, for example, little suspected that, by the sixteenth century, his lovingly crafted figures would be disparaged as “Gothic,” or that, three hundred years later, they would return to life and be admired as art –​a concept unknown to him –​alongside statues created for other faiths which he would have doubtless despised as idolatrous.) There is survival nonetheless, and the same creative act –​the same victory that initially brought the form into being –​ensures future resurrections, even if interrupted by periods in limbo. The next paragraph, even more challenging perhaps, recasts these ideas in a slightly different form. “For a religious believer,” Malraux writes, this long dialogue of metamorphoses and resurrections no doubt seems to belong to the province of divine things, for man only becomes man in the pursuit of his highest aspirations; yet it is an inspiring thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the ironic silence of the nebulae the music of the spheres59 and cast it to the fortunes of the centuries to come, speaking languages yet unknown. In that evening stillness when Rembrandt is still sketching, all the illustrious Shades of the past and even the unknown artists of the prehistoric caves, follow the movements of the tentative hand that is preparing their new resurrection, or their new sleep …60

For a religious person, Malraux acknowledges, the power of art to transcend time might seem to be a manifestation of things divine since, like religion, art asserts that man is more than an ephemeral presence in an impassive universe. Yet although art, unlike religion, stakes no claim on eternity, its power is hardly less extraordinary since from mere chaos and indifference (“the ironic silence of the nebulae”) the artist wrests forms that live on across the centuries for other men and women, albeit speaking languages yet unknown. The images of “the tentative hand” of a living painter, and Rembrandt still sketching, present these ideas in a concrete and striking way. The painter may be discovering a new style and, as he does so, Rembrandt and other artists of the past watch attentively because, although long dead, as artists all

Art and Time | 97 are still instinct with life, and the creative achievement of the living painter may, through the effects of metamorphosis, enable them to speak in new and unforeseen ways, unless, Malraux adds, it consigns them to a period in limbo –​to a “new sleep.”61 The tone of these lines is certainly emotive –​even impassioned –​but it is not difficult to see why. Malraux’s aim is to convey a full sense of what it means for art to survive across the centuries as a living presence, and this naturally calls for prose that, among other things, evokes a sense of admiration and wonder. A literal-​minded reader may baulk at the image of a dead Rembrandt “still sketching” while a host of other dead painters watch the brush strokes of the living artist; but the image provides an excellent means of suggesting art’s limitless possibilities for metamorphosis and its inexhaustible capacity to live on long after the artist has been laid in his coffin. Rembrandt the man is dead but Rembrandt, the painter, is not, because his works are still capable of new and unexpected meanings. At certain periods perhaps, if humanity is searching for something Rembrandt cannot provide, the potentialities of his works will be of little avail, because even his creations are not eternal, and there is no work of art immune from a descent into obscurity (and Rembrandt, it is worth remembering, did not always enjoy the status he has today). But equally, the tentative movements of the living artist’s hand may resuscitate an artist whose works have been forgotten, giving him or her a voice never previously guessed at. The course of metamorphosis is always unforeseeable but the key point Malraux is making in these vivid, final passages is that “this long dialogue of metamorphoses and resurrections” implies a capacity to speak to generations of men and women across the centuries when all else has succumbed to the tides of time and history. It is not a triumph over physical death for “this animal who knows that he must die,” but it is certainly a triumph over the obliterating power of time, and an affirmation of a capacity in man stronger than the mute indifference that beats him down. It is a capacity, one is tempted to say, that borders on the miraculous (although Malraux himself does not use that word), and one readily understands why, in the concluding sentence of The Voices of Silence, he describes it as an expression of “the power and the honor of being man.”62 We are a long way here from the traditional post-​Enlightenment view, still reflected in most modern aesthetics, that either situates art in an unchanging, eternal (or perhaps atemporal63) world and regards it simply as a source

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of refined delectation, or submerges it in the flow of history and sees it as a product of transitory political and social forces or as a lever to influence them. For Malraux, as these closing passages reveal again, the significance of art is intimately connected to the significance of man; and the power of art to transcend time is, in his eyes, a revelation of something in humanity –​including modern humanity, so unsure of its worth –​that can inspire genuine admiration. His purpose is not to foster the kind of semi-​deification of the artist one associates with Romanticism, and nor is it (pace Merleau-​ Ponty) to portray the artist as a “superman.” What matters for Malraux is the human achievement represented by the true work of art and “it is in us and through us,” he reminds us in The Voices of Silence, that this achievement makes itself known and comes alive.64

Notes 1 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 890. 2 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 778. 3 Or our musée imaginaire when they are not movable. Malraux’s concept of the musée imaginaire is discussed in the next chapter. 4 André Malraux, Promenades imaginaires dans Florence. (Documentaire: Journal de Voyage avec André Malraux.) (Paris: Interviewer: Jean-​Marie Drot, 1976). Needless to say, the issue under discussion in this chapter has nothing to do with the physical survival of works of art. In a 2005 book entitled What Good are the Arts, the critic John Carey writes that “No art is immortal, and no sensible person could believe it was. Neither the human race, nor the planet we inhabit, nor the solar system to which it belongs, will last forever. From the viewpoint of geological time, the afterlife of any artwork is an eyeblink.” Comments of this kind are quite beside the point. The belief that a true work of art endures, whether or not we use the term “immortal,” has nothing to do with the idea that it might somehow be able to resist damage or destruction. Indeed, given that works of art are often fragile, they may frequently be more at risk than other objects. The capacity to endure in question in the present discussion concerns a work’s meaning and significance (assuming that it has physically survived). John Carey, What Good are the Arts? (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2005), 148.

Art and Time | 99 5 The term chosen often varies according to author and context, but the meaning of all three is the same: exempt from time, proof against the vicissitudes of time and change. “Immortal” and “eternal” are often used interchangeably, as in Edmund Spenser’s lines: “What trophy then shall I most fit devise,/​In which I may record the memory/​Of my loves conquest …?/​Even this verse, vowed to eternity,/​Shall be thereof immortal monument …” When modern anglophone philosophers of art refer to this issue, they usually choose the more prosaic term “timeless,” but the meaning is the same. 6 André Malraux, Du Musée (Paris: Editions Estienne, 1955), 3, 4. The comment means, of course, that the notion of immortality had never existed in relation to statues and paintings. The idea of immortality and eternity had certainly existed before but exclusively as attributes of God or the gods. Malraux adds: “According to legend, Charles V picks up Titian’s brush for him […] because the Emperor knows that the man whose brush he picks up paints for immortality.” See also: André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: L’Intemporel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 769, 770. 7 David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, and other essays, ed. J.W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1965), 9. 8 In French: Tout passe. L’art robuste Seul a l’éternité; Le buste Survit à la cité. 9 Christopher Perricone, “Art and the Metamorphosis of Art into History,” British Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 4 (1991), 310. I have discussed the position of analytic aesthetics in Derek Allan, Art and Time (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 22–​25. Jean-​Luc Nancy, also argues (surprisingly enough, given that he is a continental philosopher) that the beauty of art is eternal. See Jean-​Luc Nancy, La Beauté, Les petites conférences (Montrouge: Bayard, 2009), 39. 10 Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’Art, Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1948), 7. 11 Although not always. Pierre Bourdieu writes, for example, that “what people call ‘creation’ is the meeting between a socially constituted habitus and a certain existing or possible position in the division of labor in cultural production.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Mais qui a créé les créateurs?,” in Questions de sociologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), 210. The similarity between this comment and Marx’s statement quoted below is striking.

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12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. E. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), 430–​32. 13 David McLellan, ed. Marx’s “Grundrisse,” 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan Ltd, 1980), 45. 14 Malraux, Promenades imaginaires dans Florence. 15 Interest in Gothic art from an archaeological point of view had begun somewhat earlier in the nineteenth century. Its admission into the world of art, however, took longer. Malraux writes interestingly: “How comprehensively Gothic art was ignored by the nineteenth century! Théophile Gautier, passing by Chartres around 1845, wrote: ‘I have not had the time to make the detour to visit the cathedral.’ The distance from the road to the cathedral then was four hundred meters.” André Malraux, Du Musée, 5. 16 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 971. The complete sentence is “Metamorphosis is, I repeat, the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics.” The “I repeat” is doubtless a reference to the fact that Malraux had already made the point emphatically in The Voices of Silence and The Psychology of Art. 17 The statement reads in full: “Metamorphosis is not an accident, it is the very law of the life of a work of art.” Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 264. 18 Ibid. 19 This is not, of course, to suggest that many Byzantine works –​religious mosaics and frescos, for ­example –​did not continue to command a level of respect as religious images. But they were not regarded as art in the sense that concept assumed from the Renaissance onwards. For Vasari, for instance, they were the “old style,” which he describes in very unflattering terms. 20 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 778. 21 Malraux, Promenades imaginaires dans Florence. 22 Nicolas Righi describes the process well: “… works survive as something other than what they were originally, and possess a strange privilege. They live unexpected lives –​lives that are both unpredictable and by no means assured of being eternal.” Nicolas Righi, “L’Humanisme de Malraux,” Le Philosophoire 2, no. 23 (2004), 202. 23 Malraux, “Appendice aux ‘Voix du silence’: Premières ébauches inédits,” Écrits sur l’Art (I), 904. 24 Malraux himself speaks of “the odd idea” that the works of antiquity had all disappeared, citing Trajan’s column as an obvious exception. Les Voix du silence, 210. 25 See Chapter Four. 26 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 490.

Art and Time | 101 27 Cf. “Who caused the antique statues to reappear, the excavators or the Renaissance masters who opened their eyes?” Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 263. And he adds: “Who rendered the Gothic works dumb, if not Raphael?” 28 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 24. 29 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 261, 484. 30 E.H. Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1978), 78 31 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 329. The original French version was published in 1979. The French critic Dominique Vaugeois writes of Bourdieu’s statement: “In a few precise and striking phrases, these lines paint a devastating picture of [Malraux’s] writings on art.” The comment is questionable to say the least. Given that Bourdieu provides no evidence at all for his claims, extreme though they are, one might better describe them simply as unsupported opinion, expressed in rather intemperate terms. Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps: L’Art à l’ épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-​Michel Place, 2016), 42. The same, incidentally, could be said of Bourdieu’s equally unfavorable comment on Camus on the same page of his book. 32 In a footnote, Bourdieu quotes a passage from The Voices of Silence which he compares to “that other fabricated image of petit bourgeois culture, Postman Cheval’s Ideal Palace” (a fantasy palace in a bizarre mixture of styles, built of stones and other material by a postman named Ferdinand Cheval in Hauterives in south-​eastern France). It is difficult to make sense of Bourdieu’s claim. The passage he quotes from Malraux simply makes the point that certain works from earlier periods (Malraux gives examples) were originally linked to absolutes, and we today can still sense this. (This issue is discussed in the next chapter). Bourdieu’s strange reaction (which, however, Dominique Vaugeois seems to take seriously) seems entirely irrelevant. It is worth adding that Bourdieu has nothing at all to say about the crucial element of Malraux’s theory of art under discussion in the present chapter and, indeed, provides no critical analysis of any significant element of Malraux’s thought. Not surprisingly, his comments are next to valueless as a contribution to an understanding of Malraux’s theory of art. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 379, 380. 33 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Elizabeth Ladenson (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 41, 44. 34 Ibid., 141, 152, 154, 156. 35 Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps: L’Art à l’ épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-​Michel Place, 2016), 97, 98. Vaugeois’ observation

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was in response to a comment in my book Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art where I wrote that “Very little has been written in recent times about the general relationship between art and time.” (I was thinking mainly, though not exclusively, of Anglo-​A merican analytic aesthetics.) Vaugeois argues that my treatment of this issue “would have been more profound and convincing if I had been able to situate Malraux’s arguments within recent aesthetic thinking” such as that represented by the continental theoreticians discussed here. That proposition, as we shall see, is dubious to say the least. 36 Michel Ribon, A la recherche du temps verticale dans l’art (Paris: Editions Kimé, 2002), 12, 28, 42, 305. Ribon’s emphases. 37 Vaugeois says that Ribon “owes much to Malraux.” The debt is far from obvious. Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 98. 38 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 165. Dufrenne explains in a footnote, rather puzzlingly, that he intends the word “eternity” in a metaphorical sense. 39 Ibid., 214–​19. See also the discussion of this point in note 4 in the present chapter. 40 Georges Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’ (Paris: Hazan: Louvre éd., 2013), 80, 85, 88. Didi-​Huberman’s emphases. 41 Including Georges Didi-​Huberman. See, for example ibid., 92, 94. 42 Maurice Blanchot, “Time, Art, and the Museum,” in Malraux, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​Hall, 1964), 159. Blanchot does not give the source or context of his quotation “the quality of the world through a man.” 43 Cf. “a history of art (and not a chronology of influences) could no more be a story of progress than one of eternal return.” Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 879. 44 André Malraux, “Postface aux ‘Conquérants’,” in Œuvres Complètes (I), ed. Pierre Brunel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 278. And then there is Malraux’s statement quoted earlier: “To talk about ‘immortal art’ today, faced with the history of art as we know it, is simply hot air.” 45 Malraux, L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 19. 46 The critic Thierry Laurent expresses the point succinctly: “[Malraux] takes good care to differentiate ‘metamorphosis’ and ‘immortality’; immortality does not exist. It is simply the case that certain works of art are capable of resurrection.” Thierry Laurent, “André Malraux, Théoricien de l’art,” Literatūra (Vilnius) 58, no. 4 (2017), 49. 47 See Chapter Three.

Art and Time | 103 48 Jean-​François Lyotard, Soundproof Room, Malraux’s Anti-​ Aesthetics, trans. Robert Harvey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 98. 49 Dominique Vaugeois suggests that Malraux should have chosen a term “less confusing than the too-​famous term metamorphosis.” The comment is puzzling. Famous or not, the word, as indicated here, is exactly the right one and expresses Malraux’s thought precisely. One would be very hard pressed to find a more appropriate term. Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 27. 50 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 778. Malraux is not, one should stress, suggesting that art history is useless; he is simply saying that it is not sufficient by itself. In fact, Malraux read widely in the history of art and was well aware of its value. Certain art historians –​Didi-​Huberman is one, E.H. Gombrich another –​seem to have concluded, quite mistakenly, that in drawing attention to the limitations of art history, Malraux was denying its value. The misreading probably explains some of the hostility of art historians towards him. 51 One possibility might be “undying” –​the suggestion being that while sometimes inert and apparently lifeless, the work is able, given appropriate circumstances, to return to life. 52 Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 32, 35, 69, 193. 53 Analytic aesthetics occasionally addresses the issue of the so-​called “test of time” which claims that a given work should be classified as a “work of art” if it has lasted for a sufficient period of time (a notion that is typically left vague). As I have explained elsewhere, this line of thought is a red herring which, among other things, distracts from the key issue of how a work endures. See: Allan, Art and Time, 122–​25; Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, 213–​15. 54 I have discussed this matter in Allan, Art and Time, 35–​45. 55 The idea of “eternal return” has played no significant part in the philosophy of art, and Malraux certainly dismisses it. See also note 43, this chapter. 56 As discussed earlier in this chapter, other writers such as Focillon have sometimes used the term “metamorphosis.” Malraux, however, is the only art theorist who has made it the centerpiece of an entirely new account of the relationship between art and the passage of time. 57 Malraux, Les Voix du Silence, 899. 58 Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 78. 59 Malraux’s phrase is “le chant des constellations.” 60 Malraux, Les Voix du Silence, 899, 900. 61 Despite the clear indications throughout the passages under discussion that Malraux is speaking of a process of metamorphosis and resurrection, not eternity, Georges Didi-​Huberman asks, “What after all is this hand ‘whose tentative movements are watched by the millennia?’,” and he replies: “It is the

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hand of art itself, Art with a capital letter as eternal presence.” (Didi-​Huberman’s emphasis). One seems entitled to wonder if Didi-​Huberman is simply unaware of the difference between the concepts of eternity and metamorphosis, fundamental though it is to Malraux’s theory of art. Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire,’ 88. Moreover, as Jean-​Pierre Zarader points out, Malraux “never speaks of Art with a capital letter.” Jean-​Pierre Zarader, Malraux: Dictionnaire de l’ imaginaire (Paris: Klincksieck, 2017), 84. 62 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 900. 63 Analytic aesthetics refers so infrequently to the relationship between art and the passing of time that it is not always clear whether it is still clinging to the Enlightenment belief that art is timeless (eternal, immortal), or whether it simply dismisses the relationship as an irrelevance and consigns art to a motionless, atemporal realm where history does not exist and change never occurs. 64 Ibid., 889.

6

The First Universal World of Art

The observation that the Renaissance was accompanied by a revival of the works of Greco-​Roman antiquity is little more than a commonplace. As we saw, Malraux’s explanation of this event differs markedly from traditional accounts, but the simple fact that from about the fourteenth century onwards, Europe showed increasing interest in, and admiration for, the works of Greece and Rome, and that these works were progressively incorporated into the world of “art” as that term was coming to be understood, is something that histories of Western art have long regarded as well-​established and uncontroversial. It is by no means a commonplace, however, to suggest that an event of a similar kind, though of far greater magnitude, has taken place in our own time, over the past hundred or so years. Art historians, and to a lesser extent philosophers of art, have, of course, recognized that the rubric “art” today encompasses much more than Renaissance and post-​Renaissance Western art plus the works of Greece and Rome, and that our modern world of art takes in the works of cultures as various as Hindu India, Japan, pre-​ colonial Africa, Byzantium, and the early civilizations of Mesopotamia. The event itself, however –​the fact that the domain of art underwent a vast and relatively sudden expansion from the early twentieth century onwards, and

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the reasons why this occurred –​is a subject that receives very little attention and is rarely discussed in any depth. Malraux is an exception to this rule. For Malraux, the transformation that took place over the last century is nothing less than “another renaissance” and one far larger in scope than the Renaissance itself. This event, which is a key element of his theory of art, is the subject of the present chapter. Towards the beginning of The Metamorphosis of the Gods, Malraux asks us to imagine that when Baudelaire put down his pen after completing his poem Les Phares (The Beacons), “a demon security guard (in the form of a cat)” appeared and invited him to visit the Louvre as it is today. Malraux pictures Baudelaire’s astonishment. Les Phares, published in 1857, is a homage to the artists Baudelaire regards as the greatest of all time, those who, he writes, are “like beacons on a thousand citadels” that “bear clearest witness […] to our nobility, like an impassioned cry that rolls through the ages.” The names he chooses are Rubens, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Goya, and Delacroix –​that is, no one outside the field of European painting and no one earlier than Leonardo and Michelangelo. “Neither Giotto nor Van Eyck is mentioned,” Malraux writes, and although Baudelaire refers elsewhere to Mexican, Egyptian and “Ninevite” works, he regards them, Malraux notes, as examples of a “childish barbarism” and an “urge to see things on a grand scale.”1 Similarly, medieval sculpture was seen at the time as “a province of archaeology,” its resuscitation as art, like that of Egyptian sculpture, coming substantially later. “Never,” he writes, “did Baudelaire make mention of Chartres.”2 Malraux admired Baudelaire greatly as art critic as well as poet, and his comments are in no sense intended to suggest that Baudelaire was artistically insensitive or that any of his “beacons” is not a great artist (with the probable exception of Puget). Malraux is, however, reminding us that, as late as the mid-​nineteenth century, even a mind as acute as Baudelaire’s considered the domain of art to be confined solely to the works of Renaissance and post-​ Renaissance Europe (with the addition, of course, of certain works of antiquity). Objects from non-​European or pre-​Renaissance sources were outside the boundaries of that domain and would remain so for some time to come. The deficiencies of such works were considered self-​evident and were ascribed, Malraux writes, “to the barbarism of the society for which the artists worked, to their faithfulness to revered but clumsy models, […] and above all to their

The First Universal World of Art | 107 lack of skill.”3 Some made their way into cabinets de curiosités, and later into archaeological or ethnological museums, but they were unthinkable in an art museum alongside the works of the artists on Baudelaire’s list, or of other European artists such as Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Poussin, and Watteau. Art –​often called “fine arts” (les beaux-​arts) at the time, in deference to the central importance of beauty –​consisted solely of the works of the artists in this tradition; the rest simply did not count. If, however, we reflect on what art means for us today, Malraux points out, we see immediately how radical the change has been. Today, he writes, the word “art” conjures up for everyone, even if only vaguely, his or her own ideal art museum. Les Phares tells us Baudelaire’s, which included no work prior to the Renaissance. But we today would add the statues of Djoser and Renefer, the Koré of Euthydikos, and the Lady of Elche, selected images of Shiva and certain Buddhist figures, the Eagle-​Knight of Mexico, the Dogon mask in the Musée de l’Homme, the Chartres Kings, the Beau Dieu at Amiens, the Bamberg Eve, the Saviour of St Cosmas and Damian, or the Theodora at Ravenna, Notre-​Dame-​de-​la-​Belle-​Verrière at Chartres, the Avignon Pieta … and how many others! [including] Vermeer’s Lacemaker, Chardin’s La Pourvoyeuse [The Return from Market], Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio …4

One is tempted to wonder if this statement might be one that Pierre Bourdieu has in mind when he accuses Malraux of “purely incantatory litanies of exotic names”5 –​implying, presumably, that Malraux is merely out to impress. If so, Bourdieu would be quite mistaken. Malraux has simply chosen a number of representative examples to highlight how dramatically the domain of art has expanded over the past century, his list going well beyond Western art (which, of course, is not excluded) to encompass works from ancient Egypt, Hindu and Buddhist cultures, Pre-​Classical (and no longer only Classical) Greece, the unknown fourth or fifth century BC culture that produced the Lady of Elche, Pre-​Columbian Mexico, Africa, medieval Europe, and Byzantium. For some five hundred years, Malraux is pointing out, “art” had signified painting and sculpture (confining ourselves here to visual art) from specific periods of European culture. Within a few short decades from the late nineteenth century onwards, its reach had extended to objects from a wide range of other cultures stretching back into prehistory.

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What precipitated this vast and sudden expansion? Why did it happen, and why did it happen when it did? One obvious temptation is to regard it as the consequence of Europe’s increasing contacts with other cultures during the nineteenth century, together with a growing body of historical and archaeological research. Malraux, however, is not satisfied with this explanation. Among other things, he points out, it ignores the fact that many of the cultures whose works began to enter art museums in the early twentieth century had been known to Europeans for long periods of time6 (and Byzantine and medieval works had, of course, always been in plain view). The works in question had, however, always been seen simply as idols, fetishes, curiosities, or clumsy, botched creations –​never as art. Malraux writes: We would have become aware earlier of the world-​of-​art that came into being with contemporary civilization if we had not confused it with a previous development –​if we had not seen it as the inevitable consequence of our colonial conquests, our explorations and our archaeological expeditions. But did the West discover African art when it discovered bananas? It certainly did not discover Mexican art when it discovered chocolate. What African explorers found was not African art but fetishes; the conquistadors found Aztec idols not Mexican art.7

It is true, of course, that many objects lying outside the previously accepted boundaries of art were not discovered until well into the twentieth century. Numerous Mesopotamian artifacts now regarded as treasured works of art were not unearthed before the 1920s; the Palaeolithic cave paintings at Lascaux were not discovered until 1940, and there are many similar examples. But such objects would not have been accepted as works of art, Malraux argues, without the radical transformation in the response to such objects that was already under way: If, in the nineteenth century, which knew nothing of Sumerian civilization, some archaeologist had dug up the Warka Head, he would have classified it among Chaldean idols and seen it in terms of the historical interest that such works had through their vague links with the Bible. Idols become works of art when they change their frame of reference, entering a world of art that no civilization has known before ours.8

The First Universal World of Art | 109 The decisive factors, in other words, were not simply exploration and an increase in knowledge, any more than the Renaissance enthusiasm for Greco-​ Roman sculpture resulted simply from the excavations. What mattered fundamentally was the new frame of reference that the West adopted over the decades after 1900. The vast expansion in the domain of art involved nothing less than a new way of seeing the objects in question. “The metamorphosis of the past” that took place, Malraux writes, was from the outset a metamorphosis of our way of seeing. Without an aesthetic revolution, the sculpture of early times, mosaics, and stained-​glass windows, would never have come to rank beside the painting of the Renaissance and of the great [European] monarchies; and without that, the ethnographical collections, no matter how extensive they might have become, would never have crossed the barrier that kept them out of art museums.9

What was the nature of this “metamorphosis of our way of seeing” and what caused it? Malraux’s response is clear. The event was the direct consequence of the discovery by Manet and subsequent painters, discussed earlier, of an art no longer linked to any value outside itself, an art reliant solely on its power to create a rival coherent world –​an art dependent exclusively on “the age-​old urge to create an autonomous world, which, for the first time, has become the artist’s sole aim.”10 Just as the Renaissance had brought about a metamorphosis of the sculpture of antiquity, so the birth of modern art led, albeit for different reasons, to a metamorphosis of the works of all cultures, including those of the pre-​Renaissance centuries of the West itself. The Renaissance had not resuscitated Greco-​Roman works as religious works but as part of its new world of the irréel. Now, at the close of the nineteenth century, another, different metamorphosis commenced, this time reviving and transforming works from all cultures, once again divorced from their original significances (there was no question of making ritual offerings to the many gods now entering art museums) but integrated into a new and greatly enlarged world of art made possible by modern art –​made possible because, as Malraux writes in a crucial sentence, “in ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art was revealing the presence of that same creative power throughout the whole history of art.”11 The “metamorphosis of our way of seeing” of which Malraux speaks is thus a newly-​revealed awareness of this creative power in the works of a wide range of cultures past and

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present. In an unprecedented development –​in the strict sense of the word unprecedented –​we today have discovered what Malraux calls the “first universal world of art,”12 a world in which “a Mexican god becomes a statue, not a mere fetish, and Chardin’s still-​lifes join the Chartres Kings and the gods of Elephanta in a common presence.”13 Moreover, we can now see why this dialogue with works of the past and other cultures had previously been a dialogue of the deaf, and why a universal world of art had never been possible before. “In the twelfth century,” Malraux writes, there could have been no question of comparing a Weï statue with a Romanesque statue: one would have been comparing an idol with a saint. Similarly, in the seventeenth century a Song painting would not have been compared with a work by Poussin: one would have been comparing a strange-​ looking landscape with a noble work of art. Yet if that Song landscape were not seen primarily as a work of art, it was nothing at all. Its significance was repudiated not by Poussin’s talent but by the conception of art for which that talent catered and from which it was inseparable.14

In other words, for the faithful who first worshipped before the Romanesque statue, or for seventeenth century admirers of Poussin, a comparison between these works and sculptures and paintings of other cultures would have been a comparison between objects of different kinds –​objects that could not sensibly be compared. For the cultures in which they were created, Romanesque statues, like Byzantine images, were not “works of art;” they were manifestations of a revealed Truth, and as such, images besides which all those of other cultures were worthless products of error and delusion. For Poussin’s contemporaries, his paintings were certainly “works of art,” but in the specific post-​Renaissance sense in which they, also, stood for an absolute –​the golden world of the irréel. The paintings of other cultures, such as that of the Song dynasty, could at best be a failed attempt to achieve the same goal. In both contexts –​the Romanesque and the seventeenth century –​as in so many others, painting and sculpture were enlisted in the service of an absolute that was both source and guarantor of the rival world they embodied. There could be no question of placing such objects on equal footing with those of other cultures, as one does in an art museum today. Images from foreign cultures, unconnected as they were with the only “other world” that counted, could

The First Universal World of Art | 111 only be products of superstition or clumsiness, and as such, beneath serious notice; or as Malraux puts it, “nothing at all.” Previously, Malraux writes, “no art was distinct from the exclusive, and not specific, values it served –​and which made all the arts that did not serve them invisible.” Our very different modern approach, in which “each art is inseparable from a particular significance now evident to us” seems quite natural and unremarkable today but, he cautions, “Let us not forget that we are the first to accept this: forms that previously did not belong within a preconceived significance of art […] were not linked up with other significances, but cast out into limbo.”15 For the first time in human history, in other words, one culture –​modern Western culture –​possesses a frame of reference into which it fits not only its own works but those of other cultures as well. Each work is now seen, first and foremost, in terms of the particular, coherent world it embodies –​ effectively, in terms of its style since this, as we saw, is Malraux’s definition of style.16 The modern world of art is thus made up not only of works created in our own time but of a vast range of resuscitated and transformed works, drawn not just from two specific cultures, as in the Renaissance, but from any culture in which objects possessing the creative power in question have originated. “The decisive metamorphosis of our time,” Malraux writes, summing up the point, “is that we no longer apply the term ‘art’ to the forms it assumed in this or that time or place, but that we accept from the outset that there are no longer any such boundaries.”17 Some brief points of clarification are in order. First, when Malraux writes, in the sentence quoted above, that “in ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art was revealing the presence of that same creative power throughout the whole history of art,” he is speaking not only of the art of non-​Western cultures and of periods of Western culture prior to the Renaissance, but of the works of the Renaissance and post-​Renaissance Western tradition as well. That is, he is arguing that the effects of the aesthetic revolution brought about by modern art were not limited to works previously excluded from the art museum but encompassed existing inhabitants as well. His reasoning in both cases is the same. The absolute to which works of artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Poussin, Watteau et Delacroix were devoted –​the exalted world of the irréel –​is now as enfeebled as the religious absolute it replaced, and today the works of artists such as these are also seen in terms of the specific coherent worlds they embody –​that is, in

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terms, first and foremost, of their styles. The consequences, Malraux points out, have varied according to the artist in question. Many have retained their importance but are seen in a new light: “What do we care about the identity of the Man with the Helmet or the Man with the Glove?” he asks. “For us their names are Rembrandt and Titian”18 –​implying that we no longer care if these are suitably ennobled portraits of the persons who sat for them, but that now, in each case, as for all the works of the irréel, we are conscious above all of the transformative power of the artist, embodied in his style. For certain other artists, such as El Greco and Grünewald, the metamorphosis of our way of seeing brought about by modern art had more dramatic consequences and meant rescue from semi-​oblivion: “It is not research work that has led to an understanding of El Greco,” Malraux writes. “It is modern art.” And later: “It is in the light of those pathetic candles that Van Gogh, already mad, placed on his hat to paint the Café d’Arles by night that Grünewald has re-​ emerged.”19 And finally, there were many previously popular artists who fell from grace and whose works were often quietly moved into storerooms. In short, once the impact of modern art began to be widely felt and accepted, it affected the whole history of art, and Renaissance and post-​Renaissance Western art were not exempt. It should be stressed also that Malraux is not arguing that the art of the past has been revived simply as “form.” As we saw earlier, it is a mistake even to claim that he understands modern art in these terms,20 and it would be equally wrong to conclude that the metamorphoses of the art of the past brought about by modern art can be understood in this way. For Malraux, the key characteristic of modern art is that it relies solely on its power to create a rival, coherent world –​art’s “invincible element,” as he terms it –​and his argument in the present context is that modern art has revealed the presence of this same creative power in numerous works throughout the whole history of art. This is not an argument about “form” (an inherently slippery concept anyway, which Malraux uses sparingly) but about a power –​the fundamental power one discovers in works ranging from the horses of Lascaux to the Café d’Arles and beyond, to create a unified, rival world, a world which “stands for unity as against the chaos of mere, given reality.” There is no suggestion either that the art of the past has somehow become “the same as modern art.” Many Gothic and Sumerian figures, for instance, have been resuscitated as works of art because we discover in them the same

The First Universal World of Art | 113 power to create an autonomous world we find in modern art, but the resuscitation has occurred via a metamorphosis –​a metamorphosis of what were, at their origins, religious images. Malraux explains: A Gothic head we admire does not affect us merely through its “volumes,” and we discern in it across the centuries a distant gleam of the face of the Gothic Christ. Because that gleam is there. And we have only a vague idea of what the aura emanating from a Sumerian statue consists of; but we are well aware that it does not emanate from a Cubist sculpture.21

Thus, although the significance of such objects today is no longer the same as it was for their creators, they have not been somehow transformed into modern art. They are now viewed first and foremost as “autonomous worlds” but they are, nonetheless, autonomous worlds of specific kinds –​and in the cases Malraux discusses, ones that retain something of their religious origins. Malraux is not suggesting, of course, that “the metamorphosis of our way of seeing” brought about by modern art has resulted in a response to art that is in some way superior to those that preceded it or held sway in other cultures. Nothing in what he says implies, for example, that we today are somehow “more sensitive” to the works of the past than were their original audiences, or that we “find more” in those works than the cultures for which they were originally created.22 Nor, to anticipate an issue considered more fully later, does Malraux regard our contemporary response as definitive –​as a “final stage” or apotheosis of art. The development he describes, crucial though it is, has been sparked by two linked, historical events: the emergence of an agnostic culture, and the discovery by Manet of an art that is “its own object” –​that is, an art that dispenses with all forms of transcendence outside itself. Malraux nowhere suggests that this state of affairs is superior to those that preceded it, or that it was somehow historically inevitable. The result has certainly seen the birth of an unprecedented world of art –​“the first universal world of art” –​but Malraux does not argue that this world of art is somehow more advanced than the one that preceded it, or that it is an historical culmination. Finally, certain writers argue (though not solely in reference to Malraux) that the inclusion of the works of other cultures in a “universal world of art” involves an act of “appropriation” because removal from their original cultural contexts deprives them of their “true” or “authentic” meaning

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and improperly co-​opts them to Western purposes. The art historian Hans Belting, for instance, takes exception to the notion of “world art” and writes that, “the so-​called Imaginary Museum that André Malraux propagated after 1945 when accumulating world art –​in texts and photographs on the printed pages of a book –​was a European idea with a European meaning,” adding that an “appropriation” of this kind involves “aestheticizing [non-​ Western art] so as to insert it seamlessly into a Western concept of art.”23 The comment tends unfortunately to conflate the ideas of the “universal world of art” and the musée imaginaire,24 but even leaving that aside, Belting’s proposition is open to serious question. First, “world art” –​the universal world of art –​is by no means just “an idea;” it is a concrete reality, as we cannot fail to recognize every time we cross the threshold of a major art museum whose collections extend beyond Western art (or, indeed, when we peruse histories of art which include non-​Western art –​a fact of which Belting, as an art historian, would surely be aware). This was not always so, of course. The art of other cultures, and of the pre-​Renaissance periods of our own, were once, as discussed earlier, beyond the pale of art and only began to enter art museums in the early years of the twentieth century. But art museums around the world today frequently contain works from non-​Western cultures past and present, as well as from Byzantine and medieval times, and to suggest, as Belting does, that “world art” is nothing more than an idea –​a concept in Malraux’s or someone else’s mind –​is to misrepresent our modern world of art and seriously underestimate the significance of what is at stake. It is worth remembering also that the expansion that has taken place in our world of art over the past century has not been limited to the art of other cultures but has, as mentioned, included European art from pre-​Renaissance periods such as Byzantine, Romanesque, and later medieval.25 So, if this “European idea” has involved an “appropriation,” as Belting suggests, Europe must presumably, over the past century, have appropriated much of its own art –​a decidedly curious proposition. Belting’s comment also seems to suggest that “world art” (or the musée imaginaire, to accept his conflation of the two ideas for the moment) is in some way Malraux’s own invention –​something that would not have existed, or called for serious consideration, had it not been for Malraux’s books on art. Again, this is a misleading. Malraux nowhere remotely suggests that our first universal world of art is his invention. He is simply describing the extensive

The First Universal World of Art | 115 world of art in which we live today. Certainly, he does this in a more forceful and emphatic way than many other writers (most modern philosophers of art have little or nothing to say about the topic), and unlike many others, he offers an in-​depth explanation of why this development occurred; but he is in no sense suggesting that he, or his books on art, is somehow responsible for the emergence of this vast, new world of art –​a proposition he would doubtless have regarded as preposterous. Moreover, Malraux would certainly not wish to deny that the emergence of our universal world of art has resulted from developments in European culture. The very nature of his explanation implies that “the metamorphosis of our way of seeing” that took place from Manet onwards, and enabled a new world of art to take form, was a development that began in Europe and which transformed an existing European (and, more generally, Western) concept of art. For better or worse, in other words –​and Malraux is simply describing a state of affairs, not making a value judgment –​the universal world of art we encounter in today’s art museums is something that had its germination in Europe and which, as Malraux reminds us, has never existed in any other context in human history, including European culture itself, prior to around 1900. The origins of this extensive modern world of art are therefore hardly a matter of debate. The important point is knowing what conclusions to draw from this and avoiding unwarranted assumptions. One needs to bear in mind, for example, that the metamorphosis of our way of seeing has, as noted, affected perceptions of previous Western art as much as the art of other cultures: it has, as Malraux says, affected “the whole history of art.” In addition, and most importantly, there is, as we have seen, no implication in Malraux’s explanation that the contemporary Western response to works from other cultures is in some way superior, and he is certainly not suggesting that, where there are still communities for whom a work still holds its original sacred significance, the modern Western response should somehow take precedence. In cases where a culture of origin is still extant, and where the object in question still performs its intended cultural function (cases probably becoming increasingly rare), the object may well evoke two quite different kinds of response simultaneously depending on its “audience”: Western eyes –​assuming Westerners are able to view it –​may perceive it first and foremost as a work of art, emerging as such via the process of metamorphosis Malraux describes. Members of the culture for whom it was

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created may well, by contrast, believe that the object is invested with a sacred significance and is not “art” at all. Once we view the matter in this light, we see that simply asking whether the placement of the object in a Western context “appropriates” it to Western purposes and denies its authentic nature, misrepresents the situation and fosters confusion. Neither significance –​the original sacred significance or the significance in a Western context as art –​ rules out the other, any more than viewing ancient Egyptian or Sumerian statues as works of art denies their vanished significance as sacred objects. Where Egypt and Sumer are concerned, the original cultures have long since disappeared and, with them, the original significances of the objects concerned and those who believed in them. In the case of non-​Western communities still extant, this may not be the case and there is obviously (as Malraux would be the first to agree) an obligation to respect those communities’ religious beliefs and the status this might confer on the objects in question –​a status that might well, if the communities so decide, rule out their inclusion in an art museum. If one accepts the notion of metamorphosis, therefore, the idea of one “true” or “authentic” meaning is a red herring. The Western observer, if he or she is permitted, may perceive in such objects “the age-​old urge to create an autonomous world” of which Malraux speaks, just as he or she may discover the same urge in statues at Luxor, figures from Uruk, sculptures at Chartres, or the paintings of Titian or Picasso. For a culture in which the objects in question still play a part in a living system of beliefs, their significance may be quite different, and that significance may well be incompatible with the idea that they can be regarded as works of art and displayed in an art museum. Both significances, Malraux would argue, are “authentic,” but neither is definitive. Works of art, as he frequently reminds us, have a life in time. Part of that life is their original significance, which may sometimes be as sacred objects, but their capacity for endless metamorphosis may, over time, see them pass through a number of different significances, none of which, including their modern significance as works of art, is definitive. Seen in this light, comments such as those of Hans Belting are needless distractions.26 Before leaving the topic of the present chapter, it is worth reflecting briefly on an issue of a more general nature. Critics of Malraux’s books on art sometimes claim that where the facts of art history are concerned, he is not always a reliable source, Georges Duthuit, as noted, accusing him of

The First Universal World of Art | 117 ignorance, negligence and even fraud. The reliability of these accusations themselves is a subject to which we will return at a later stage, but in the present context it is worthwhile considering whether there is historical evidence to support the general picture Malraux paints of the emergence of the first universal world of art. Was there such an event? Is he inventing facts to suit his argument? Or is it possible that, in this context at least, he may not only be correct but a more enlightening source than some of his critics? “The varied nature of our modern world of art,” Malraux writes, “is so familiar to us today that we forget how recent it is.”27 And, indeed, many philosophers of art and art historians do seem to have forgotten. Philosophers in both the analytic and continental schools seldom focus on the issue, seemingly happy to accept it, as Malraux suggests, simply as a self-​evident commonplace. It is true that art historians today often expand their horizons beyond Renaissance and post-​Renaissance European art and include the works of other cultures but, not unlike philosophers of art, they usually treat the fact of this expansion as undeserving of extended comment or analysis. As a result, it is by no means easy to find an historian or philosopher of art who recognizes clearly, first, that the works of other cultures (as well as pre-​Renaissance European works) only became “art” over the past century, and second, that this unprecedented development calls for an explanation (which, as Malraux points out, needs to rely on more than the consequences of archaeological and historical research). It is interesting to note, moreover, that in this context art historians today seem often to have forgotten the testimony of their own predecessors in the discipline. The magnitude of the changes that took place in the early twentieth century is described vividly by Hans Tietze, a well-​k nown art historian of the times, who, as E.H. Gombrich reports, wrote, in 1925, of the great revision of art history that had occurred since 1910, of the “daily discoveries of new worlds, the hourly transvaluation of all values.” Even the once familiar took on a new intensity: “Classical Antiquity, Gothic and Baroque suddenly entered our lives with an undreamed-​of immediacy, and the works of the Far East and Negro artists breathed a complete humanity that stirred the very depths of our being.”28

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And the noted art historian Élie Faure highlighted the same development in his History of Art: The Spirit of the Forms, published in 1927, writing in the opening paragraph: In appearance, an abyss lies between the Negro or Polynesian idol, for instance, and Greek sculpture at its apogee. Or between that idol and the great European painting of which the Venetian School has revealed to us the mean and the possibilities.

“And yet,” he continues, one of the miracles of this time is that an increasing number of minds should become capable not only of tasting the delicate or violent savor of these reputedly contradictory works and find them equally intoxicating; even more than that, they can grasp, in the seemingly opposed characters, the inner accords that lead us back to man and show him to us everywhere animated by analogous passions …29

Malraux would no doubt have had reservations about certain aspects of these remarks (such as Faure’s suggestion that man is everywhere animated by analogous passions) but he would certainly have sympathized with the references to “one of the miracles of this time” and “daily discoveries of new worlds, the hourly transvaluation of all values.” As Malraux points out, the diversity of our modern world of art is second nature to us now but as the comments quoted here suggest, informed art historians of the early twentieth century saw it as a seismic shift in the world of art, if not a watershed in the cultural history of the West. The resulting transformation of art museums took place gradually over three or four decades (although that, of course, is a very brief period in the history of world art) and attracted much less public attention than more “newsworthy” contemporary events such as the advent of abstract art and surrealism.30 But one has only to compare the exhibits of major art museums around the world in, say, 1900 with those of 1950 or later to see the immense differences. The face of “art” changed radically over that period, progressively building the universal world of art we know today. It is one of the many virtues of Malraux’s theory of art, shared by very few other writers in the philosophy or theory of art, that he recognizes the importance of this event and provides us with a convincing explanation of why it happened, and why it happened when it did. In this case at least, his grasp on

The First Universal World of Art | 119 historical events seems more perceptive than that of the many writers who like to call his reliability into question, and pass over this unprecedented development –​“one of the miracles of this time” –​in silence.

Notes 1 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 8. 2 Ibid. In a similar vein, Malraux wrote elsewhere (in the 1950s): “Let us not forget too quickly that scarcely a century ago, for all historians as for all artists, art meant Western art –​with some documentary exceptions.” André Malraux, “Appendice à ‘La Métamorphose des dieux’: deux ébauches de préface,” in Écrits sur l’art (II), op. cit., 1058. 3 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 9, 10. 4 Ibid., 26, 27. The collection of the Musée de l’Homme [Museum of Man] to which Malraux refers is now largely housed in the Musée du quai Branly-​ Jacques Chirac. 5 See Chapter Five. Bourdieu himself is vague about the specific “litanies” he has in mind. 6 One example among many is the Asiatic art collection in the Rijksmuseum. From the seventeenth century onwards, Dutch traders to the Far East had brought large numbers of Asian artifacts back to Europe but it was not until 1918 that a “Society of Friends of Asiatic Art” was founded in Holland with the express purpose of building a collection of items chosen for their artistic value rather than their decorative appeal, ethnographic significance, or curiosity value. By 1932, the work of the Society had led to the establishment of a Museum of Asiatic Art in Amsterdam, and this collection eventually became the nucleus of the Rijksmuseum’s collection of Asiatic art, first established in 1952. Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, ed. Asiatic Art in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/​Landshoff, 1985), 7–​22. Of the pre-​twentieth-​century situation, Scheurleer writes: “The Netherlands had to wait until 1932 for a museum of Asiatic art, even though it might have been thought that, with their foreign trade in the seventeenth century, their contacts with the Far East and their Eastern colonies, the Dutch could have started much earlier. Not so –​ objects there were in plenty, but there was no background from which to judge their quality. There existed collections of a historical and/​or ethnographical

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nature and hidden among them were examples of real art, but these were neither acknowledged nor appreciated as such.” Ibid., 9. 7 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 24. Malraux is not, of course, denying the value of historical and archaeological research. But in this context, he argues, it was not the decisive factor. 8 Ibid., 24. The Warka Head is a life-​size, Sumerian female head in alabaster from Uruk (Warka) dating from 3500–​3000 BC, discovered in 1939. Malraux includes a reproduction in his three-​volume work Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), Plate 11. 9 Malraux, Le Surnaturel, 25. 10 See Chapter Four. 11 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 871. Emphasis added. 12 Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux, 25. In the English translation, this phrase is rendered as “the first world of a truly universal art.” (Italics in translation.) This is misleading. It is not a question of a new form of art –​a “universal art.” Malraux’s claim is that, for the first time, the category “art” encompasses works from all cultures. This is one of several errors in the English translation. See André Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods trans. Gilbert, Stuart (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), 21. 13 Ibid., 25. Hans Belting makes the strange suggestion that Malraux wanted to extend the world of art to include objects from other cultures (“artefacts ethniques” in Belting’s terminology) to assuage a sense of guilt arising from the episode in Indochina in the 1920s when he was arrested (wrongly in Malraux’s view) for removing Khmer statues. Of all the improbable accusations art historians have launched against Malraux’s theory of art –​and there have been many –​this must surely rank among the most far-​fetched. Hans Belting, “Le musée de l’art mondial,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, 606 (2013), 73. 14 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 864. 15 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 866, 871. Malraux’s emphasis. 16 See Chapter Two. 17 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 882. It might perhaps be objected that Malraux is not the only one to have discussed the transformation of works from other cultures into art in the modern Western sense. Arthur Danto writes, for example: “Picasso discovered […] the fact –​known or not –​that the master carvers of Africa were artists and that artistic greatness was possible for them, not simply within their own traditions but against the highest artistic standards anywhere. It was a discovery in the same sense that Columbus discovered America, or Freud discovered the Unconscious, or Roentgen discovered X-​ rays …” The problem such a statement poses is that, while acknowledging the

The First Universal World of Art | 121 transformation in question, it provides no explanation of it –​no reason why it should have occurred, or why it occurred when it did. (And simply calling it a “discovery” does not advance the matter, even if one invokes names like Columbus.) Malraux, by contrast, provides an explanation –​one based, as noted, on his fundamental propositions about the nature of art. In passing, one might also query Danto’s comment that “the master carvers of Africa were artists and that artistic greatness was possible for them not simply within their own traditions …” This appears to assume that within the African traditions the “greatness” in question was viewed as “art” –​an assumption which, as we have seen, is highly questionable, and which also obscures the full significance of the metamorphosis that occurred. Arthur Danto, “Artifact and Art,” in Art/​ Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, ed. Susan Vogel (New York: The Centre for African Art, 1988), 19. 18 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 204. More recently, The Man with the Helmet has sometimes been attributed to “Rembrandt’s circle” rather than to Rembrandt himself. The point Malraux is making in the present context remains, however, unaffected. 19 Ibid., 263. 20 See Chapter Four. 21 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 260. This statement contains one of Malraux’s rare uses of the term “aura.” Despite what critics have occasionally suggested, the meaning Malraux attaches to this word is quite different from Walter Benjamin’s. Malraux does not argue that the original of a work of art possesses a special “aura” qua original. In the present context, the term is linked to the idea of metamorphosis and its effects. Thus, while the original meaning of the Sumerian sculpture is lost to us, metamorphosis does not transform it into the equivalent of a modern work of art. Something of the original sense of sacredness survives, which Malraux describes here as an “aura” –​an aura, in this specific sense, which a modern work of art does not possess. There is, of course, no suggestion that the ancient work is in some way superior. Malraux is simply distinguishing the effects of works of art of different kinds –​works created in different contexts for different purposes. In general, one should add, Benjamin’s influence on Malraux has been greatly exaggerated and the present discussion provides a good example: there is nothing in Benjamin’s writing that resembles Malraux’s theory of metamorphosis (a crucial element of his thought) and in fact Benjamin’s account of the relationship between art and the passing of time is rather confused and problematic. See Derek Allan, Art and Time (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 35–​38. Jean-​Pierre Zarader also argues that Malraux’s use of the term “aura” is quite

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different from Benjamin’s. See Jean-​Pierre Zarader, Malraux: Dictionnaire de l’ imaginaire (Paris: Klincksieck, 2017), 45, 46. 22 The contrary view has been advanced by certain American philosophers of art. See for example: Jerrold Levinson, “Artworks and the Future,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 180, 181. A similar argument is advanced in Danto, Art/​Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, 19. See my criticisms of these arguments in Allan, Art and Time, 126, 127. 23 Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 66,197. Dominique Vaugeois likewise suggests that Malraux’s theory of art implies an “appropriation” of non-​Western works. Dominique Vaugeois, “Dernier inventaire avant liquidation,” Critique LXX, no. 805–​806 (2014), 536. 24 The musée imaginaire is discussed in the next chapter. 25 As late as 1865, Hippolyte Taine, echoing views that had been standard at least since Vasari, was still describing the remarkable Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna as an art that was “like a sick man suffering from fatal consumption; he will languish and die.” Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art, Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1948), 20. 26 As noted, Belting also writes that Malraux wishes to “aestheticize” the works of other cultures. The term “aestheticize” is inherently vague and Belting makes no attempt to clarify what he means by it. If it means “treat as art,” the answer to that is provided in the explanation given here; if it means “treat as beauty,” the claim is obviously inconsistent with Malraux’s account of the metamorphosis of the works of other cultures brought about by modern art, which has nothing to do with beauty. 27 Malraux, L’Intemporel, 1015. 28 E.H. Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1978), 79. The source Gombrich cites is an essay by Tietze entitled “Die Krise des Expressionismus,” Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft, Vienna, 1925, 40. Gombrich himself seems to have been less than enthusiastic about the new horizons that were opening up. Cf. his remarks at the end of the article cited here where he comments that “we may come to see that our fathers and grandfathers were not quite wrong, after all, when they thought that we understand certain styles better than others. That a Rembrandt self-​portrait or a Watteau drawing ‘means more’ to us than an Aztec idol or a Negro mask.” Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 85.

The First Universal World of Art | 123 29 Élie Faure, History of Art: The Spirit of the Forms, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), ix. Another interesting source of evidence is the histories of major Western art museums that were in existence in the early twentieth century or before. Wherever collections include items from non-​ Western cultures, one finds that they only entered the museums and found a place within general collections, during the first half of the twentieth century. I have examined this issue in more detail in Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 239, 240. See also note 6 in the present chapter. 30 Two other factors may have played a part in mitigating the “shock effect” of the transformation. First, modern philosophers of art tend to shy away from investigating historical developments such as the one under discussion here, and consequently had little or nothing to say about it; second, the expansion in question took place in stages, commencing with more “familiar” works such as medieval and Egyptian sculpture.

7

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire

Modern theorists have sometimes seen art museums in a gloomy and negative light. Theodor Adorno writes that The German word “museal” (museum-​like) has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship, and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art.1

Similar ideas have colored the views of some of Malraux’s own critics. As part of his attack on The Voices of Silence, Georges Duthuit speaks of objects in art museums as “trophies in exile.” In art museums, he writes, these objects are “forever separated. They are far away –​from that through which we feel and are touched –​our sensibility.”2 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, pursuing his claim discussed earlier that Malraux has forgotten that the artist must be “in contact with his world,” and that his “secret” does not lie “in some realm beyond his empirical life,” writes that

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The museum gives us a thieves’ conscience. We occasionally sense that these works were not after all intended to end up between these morose walls, for the pleasure of Sunday strollers or Monday “intellectuals.” We are well aware that something has been lost and that this meditative necropolis is not the true milieu of art –​that so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labors were not destined one day to reflect the museum’s mournful light.3

And in a similar vein, Maurice Blanchot, in the essay on Malraux quoted previously, argues that “when all these works enter the Museum, in fact or in idea, it is precisely life that they renounce; it is from life that they divorce themselves.”4 Malraux’s own position is very different, but before entering into that discussion, it is worth noting that views of this kind, which imply that art museums somehow divorce art from reality, are arguably divorced from reality themselves, at least in one sense of that equivocal word. Given that art museums around the world today attract millions of visitors annually, and that visitation figures show no sign of decreasing, it seems likely that large numbers of people do not share the view that they are merely “necropolises” or that the works they display are “forever separated [from] our sensibility.” So, in this sense at least, Malraux is perhaps closer to what Merleau-​Ponty calls “empirical life” than his critics.5 More fundamentally, the views expressed above, especially those of Merleau-​Ponty and Blanchot, once again raise the problem of what one means by such apparently innocuous terms as “the world,” “empirical life” and “life” in the context of art. Neither Merleau-​Ponty nor Blanchot address this issue, which rather suggests they have nothing more in mind than nebulous notions such as “the world around us” or “everyday life” (with “so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labors,” as Merleau-​ Ponty phrases it). But we have already noted the problems posed by vagueness of this kind and Malraux (who, ironically, is sometimes accused of being obscure) is much more precise. Malraux has not “forgotten” the world of which Merleau-​Ponty is speaking, and does not think that, when they enter the art museum, works of art abandon the “life” of which Blanchot writes; he simply believes that, unless clarified, such notions are of little use in the context of the theory of art. For Malraux, “empirical life” is not “the true milieu” of art, except in the special sense of a “dictionary” discussed earlier.

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  127 The true milieu of art –​more accurately, its true adversary –​is the incoherent world of appearances which the artist replaces with a rival unified world, the proposition fundamental to, and clearly stated in, the book –​The Voices of Silence –​that Merleau-​Ponty and Blanchot are ostensibly analyzing. Malraux is proposing a comprehensive theory of art and that necessarily implies a theory of the nature of the “world” or “reality” to which art is addressed. Merleau-​Ponty, Blanchot and many other critics seem happy to ignore this problem and leave the concept in question unanalyzed and undefined. The quality of their comments suffers as a result. Malraux’s understanding of the role of the art museum is, as intimated, very different from those of Adorno, Duthuit, Merleau-​Ponty and Blanchot. Far from being “a necropolis,” or “a family sepulchre” as Adorno would have it, the art museum, in Malraux’s eyes, is the context in which, in contemporary Western culture,6 works of art come most fully to life. The reasoning here follows directly from the principles we have examined. In their previous incarnation prior to the twentieth century, art museums and private collections were governed by the overarching ideal of beauty initiated by the Renaissance, and the objects they displayed, strictly limited to Renaissance and post-​Renaissance works plus selected sculptures from Greece and Rome, responded far less to each other than to this well-​established “preconceived significance of art” to borrow Malraux’s phrase.7 In today’s art museum, where “each art is inseparable from a particular significance now evident to us”8 and the ideal of beauty no longer enjoys its previous status, the situation is quite different. Today, works are no longer in the service of an overriding ideal but are engaged in a dialogue with a world constituted solely by other works of art –​that is, by any work of any period and any culture that exhibits the fundamental creative power revealed by the metamorphosis of our way of seeing discussed in the previous chapter. The art museum, by its very nature, facilities this: it places a variety of works in close proximity and in so doing fosters the process of dialogue and metamorphosis through which the meanings of each work are most powerfully revealed, accentuating both the newly discovered common language of art and the specific features of the autonomous world that each work embodies. Thus, far from being “trophies in exile,” as Duthuit suggests, the varied exhibits of the art museum are animated –​in the two senses indicated –​by the context in which they are placed. Which is why Malraux calls the art museum “a confrontation

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of metamorphoses.”9 In the words of one of his more perceptive critics, the art museum, as Malraux understands it, enables us to see works of art as forms “that assume very different significances according to the conditions in which we are brought to admire them, to confront them.”10 The very reverse of a “necropolis,” in short, the art museum is a vital part of the dynamic of our modern world of art –​the locus of an ideal colloquy in which participants from all cultures speak the same language (for the first time) and where new light is thrown on each contribution by the contributions of the others. The same is true, of course, of the musée imaginaire, which, broadly speaking, is the art museum writ large; but the concept of the musée imaginaire, which is the aspect of Malraux’s thinking that has attracted the most frequent attention from critics, and which has often been misunderstood, calls for more extended comment. At one level, as Malraux makes clear, the musée imaginaire is simply a recognition of practical realities. Given that the breadth and diversity of today’s world of art far surpasses the capacities of any art museum –​or even several –​and that, in any case, many of the world’s most outstanding works are not movable (Giotto’s frescos at Assisi, the Romanesque tympanum at Moissac, the frescos at Ajanta …), the musée imaginaire is an imaginary collection of all the objects, both inside and outside present-​day art museums, that we today regard as important works of art –​ranging from contemporary works, to those of Renaissance and post-​Renaissance European culture (re-​ordered as we have said by the post-​ Manet revolution), to pre-​Renaissance works such as those of Byzantium and Romanesque Europe, to works from a wide variety of non-​Western cultures stretching back to the earliest times. One can of course ask, “Who is ‘we?’ ” in this proposition. Is Malraux setting himself up as an “aesthetic authority,” as Georges Didi-​Huberman alleges?11 The answer is no, and Malraux makes his position in this respect quite clear. In Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, published in 1952, he provides some seven hundred images of works he would include in his own ideal museum of world sculpture, but in his Introduction, he writes: “No doubt others might have made a selection different from mine. But whoever, today, knows what a work of art is […] would accept three quarters of them; and the fourth quarter would not be the same for everyone.”12 There is, in other words, no question of posing as an “aesthetic authority.” Malraux is happy to acknowledge that everyone for whom art is important will have their own musée imaginaire, although,

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  129 reasonably enough, he anticipates large areas of agreement. It is worth adding that this issue is hardly new. The Renaissance and post-​Renaissance European culture that raised artists such as Raphael, Leonardo, Poussin, and Rubens to prominence and excluded Byzantine and Gothic art together with all non-​ Western styles, also involved a “we” –​a rough consensus, albeit constructed on quite different foundations. The important change today, Malraux points out, is that “the metamorphosis of our way of seeing” initiated by Manet has radically altered the basis on which the consensus is built. Today’s musée imaginaire, as distinct from collections of the preceding centuries, entails a way of seeing and a conception of art that welcomes a vast range of works which our forebears –​little more than a century ago –​would have disqualified on the spot.13 Critics have often obscured the significance of the musée imaginaire through a misunderstanding of the role of photographic reproduction. Malraux was a tireless traveler throughout his life and there were probably few works in his own musée imaginaire that he had not seen in situ. He willingly recognizes, however, that photographic reproduction plays an important part in familiarizing people with the works of other cultures (and, of course, with works of the Western tradition scattered throughout the art museums of the world), and that everyone’s musée imaginaire, including his own, is indebted to a greater or lesser degree to illustrated art books, to television programs featuring works of art, and to the internet.14 It is vital to recognize, however, that contrary to what many writers have claimed, Malraux nowhere suggests that the musée imaginaire is simply a vast collection of photographic reproductions or, in the words of an American art historian, Donald Crimp, a collection of “any work of art that can be photographed;15” and, indeed, if it meant nothing more than that, one might well wonder why the idea would merit more than passing interest. Ultimately, the concept of the musée imaginaire has a vital human significance, and to appreciate it fully one needs to reflect briefly on certain key elements of Malraux’s thought discussed earlier. At the fundamental level, the musée imaginaire is the selection of works which, in our contemporary agnostic culture, responds most powerfully to the “unknown scheme of things.” To borrow the title of the final section of The Voices of Silence, the musée imaginaire is “the small change of the absolute.” It is not an absolute itself (unlike a religion or the Renaissance notion of art); it offers no permanent Truth, and the works it contains are in Malraux’s

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words, only “a series of transitory responses to an invincible question.”16 But art is, nonetheless, within its limits, a means by which humanity “denies its nothingness”17 and the musée imaginaire is a selection of works that powerfully expresses this denial. Seen in this light, the tendency of certain critics to limit the concept of the musée imaginaire to the idea of photographic reproduction seriously underestimates its importance. Photographic reproduction certainly plays a major role: it is “the printing press of visual art,” as Malraux writes.18 But, to borrow his term again, it is “the means” –​the vehicle –​of the musée imaginaire;19 it is not the thing itself. To suggest that the musée imaginaire is the collection of “any work of art that can be photographed” or that, as another critic claims, it is “the recurring issue of reproduction”20 –​which suggests that it is little more than a well-​stocked library of art books –​is a trivialization of Malraux’s thinking. It should be stressed also that, despite what some critics suggest, Malraux does not regard the musée imaginaire as in some way his own creation. Donald Crimp speaks of “Malraux’s super-​museum;” an English philosopher of art, Matthew Kieran, refers to “Malraux’s imaginary museum;” and it is not difficult to find other commentators who imply, even if unintentionally, that Malraux regards the musée imaginaire as something whose existence depends in some way on his own theory of art. This is misleading. Malraux certainly seems to have invented the phrase “musée imaginaire” –​which is well suited to his needs. But the thing itself, in his eyes, is simply a fact of modern civilization which has come into being quite independently of anything he might have thought or written. It is not “Malraux’s imaginary museum;” it is simply the way in which (if we accept his analysis) we respond to works of art in the modern world. A given work may, of course, be part of person X’s musée imaginaire but not of person Y’s –​although, as noted, Malraux believes there will be large areas of overlap. Due allowance made for these variations, however, the musée imaginaire is, at one level, simply the mental context in which we view works of art today, whether we are conscious of it or not. Malraux has certainly drawn attention to this in a clear and emphatic way –​and seems to have been the first to do so –​but nothing he writes suggests that he regards it as an artifact of his own theory of art or something that would not have existed in the absence of that theory. Despite the impression created by some critics, the musée imaginaire is not some theoretical novelty designed to promote a special Malrucian way of thinking about works of art. The phrase

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  131 is simply a convenient means of encapsulating the way the modern world –​or at least that portion of it for whom art is important –​responds to the works that make up today’s universal world of art.21 A further misconception is that Malraux regards the musée imaginaire as a replacement for the art museum. Hans Belting comments that “In his Musée Imaginaire, [Malraux] replaced the real art museum by a musée imaginaire.” Malraux’s argument, according to Belting, is that “real museums have limited the common understanding [la compréhension commune] of art,” which led him to replace the art exhibition with “a photographic panorama which reflected the idea of world art.”22 There are obvious problems here. First, as noted, the musée imaginaire is much more than a “photographic panorama,” a phrase that again risks placing undue emphasis on the issue of photographic reproduction. Second, the musée imaginaire is not an instrument designed to foster “the idea of world art.” To repeat, our universal world of art is not just an “idea;” it is a reality, and one we encounter each time we cross the threshold of a major art museum. Third, Malraux nowhere argues that art museums have “limited the common understanding of art.” He simply recognizes the self-​evident reality that, given the vast scope of our modern world of art –​in both geographic and temporal terms –​no museum or art exhibition can hope to do it full justice (and this is simply an acknowledgment of practical facts, not a criticism of art museums, as Belting seems to infer). And finally, as all this implies, Malraux in no sense regards the musée imaginaire as a “replacement” for the art museum. For the reasons discussed above, he believes that art museums play a vital role in our relationship with art (and of course provide access to the original works themselves); but, once again, our modern universal world of art far exceeds the capacities of any museum, which means that we necessarily depend to some degree on reproductions and, to the extent that the musée imaginaire makes use of this technology –​in books, on television screens, or on the internet –​it is an important supplement to the art museum, not a replacement for it. Belting, it must be said, seems to labor under the misapprehension, shared regrettably by a number of other art historians, that Malraux uses the concept of the musée imaginaire to promote some slightly exotic, novel notion of art –​a way of thinking about art that is somehow foreign to our contemporary experience. The very opposite is the case. In the sense that the musée imaginaire is our ideal collection of works –​our ideal museum embodied in originals and

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reproductions (or even just carried in our memories) –​the term is simply an acknowledgment of contemporary reality, and a recognition of the obvious fact that, for many people today, any such ideal museum is very likely to extend beyond European art and encompass the works of other cultures past and present. One might perhaps use Belting’s own term, “world art,” to describe this vastly extended domain of art, although Malraux’s phrase, our “universal world of art” seems quite appropriate, especially given that we are speaking of works stretching back over centuries and millennia, not just of the art of the present day.23 But the term one uses is far less important than a recognition of the reality itself. Art as we know it today knows no cultural or temporal boundaries: it includes masks from Papua New Guinea as readily as a Rembrandt self-​portrait; it includes the horses at Lascaux as readily as the fiery steed in Rubens’ Saint George and the Dragon; it includes a statuette of a Sumerian god as readily as Picasso’s La Femme à la Poussette. The musée imaginaire begins with a recognition of this fact: it is each person’s ideal collection of works drawn from our universal world of art. It does not “replace” the art museum; it does not replace anything. It is simply a key element of our modern relationship with art. It is worth adding, since the fact is seldom acknowledged, that Malraux is one of few art theorists or philosophers of art whose thinking embraces an explanation of the role of the art museum (and, of course, the musée imaginaire). Certain continental theorists, such as those mentioned earlier in this chapter, offer occasional comments, even if frequently negative in tone. Analytic aesthetics, for its part, pays limited attention to the topic and when it does comment, tends to confine itself to issues such as restoration and conservation, and to approach matters in a piecemeal way.24 Conspicuous by its rarity is a full-​blown explanation, as an integral part of a general theory of art, of the role of the art museum in the modern world –​a “philosophy” of the institution, so to speak, which helps us understand why it exists, what its basic function is today, how that differs from its earlier incarnation, and, just as importantly, why the institution did not exist in other cultures and in earlier phases of our own. In a cultural context in which art museums were only of minor importance, the lack of such an explanation would perhaps not matter greatly, but art museums today regularly welcome large numbers of visitors, and it seems hard to deny that they perform a major cultural function. A key feature of Malraux’s thinking is that it explains what this

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  133 function is, and does so as part of a unified theory of art. One may, of course, disagree with his explanation –​although, in doing so one needs to avoid misleading accounts of it, such as those of Hans Belting and Georges Didi-​ Huberman –​but he nonetheless provides a clear rationale for the art museum in the modern world. That said, a word of caution is in order. Important though the art museum is in Malraux’s thinking, the role he assigns to it needs to be kept in perspective. Maurice Blanchot writes that [Malraux] makes of the Museum a new category, a kind of force that, in our era, is simultaneously the end of history –​as it is expressed and achieved by art –​its chief conquest, its manifestation and even more. The Museum is the very conscience of art, the truth of artistic creation …25

Though somewhat unclear, the comment appears to suggest that, in Malraux’s eyes, the art museum is the decisive factor in shaping the world of art we know today, and that it functions (together, presumably, with the musée imaginaire) as the principal determinant of our modern response to art. Interpretations of this kind are quite widespread and they can lead to serious misunderstandings. It is certainly true that in the second paragraph of The Voices of Silence, in a passage that critics have quoted many times –​too many times, perhaps –​Malraux writes: [Art museums] have imposed on the spectator an entirely new relationship with the work of art. They have helped deliver the works of art they gather together from their function; to metamorphose them into pictures, even if we are talking about portraits. If we still see the bust of Caesar, or the equestrian portrait of Charles V, as Caesar and Charles V, the Duke of Olivares is now only Velasquez. What do we care about the identity of the Man with the Helmet or the Man with the Glove? For us their names are Rembrandt and Titian.26

Now, if one takes this statement in isolation, as it often has been, one may have little difficulty reaching conclusions of the kind Blanchot proposes. Art museums “have imposed on the spectator an entirely new relationship with the work of art;” ergo, the art museum must be the key to Malraux’s account of the modern response to art, and to his explanation of the world of art as we know it today. But this would read far too much into the passage in question

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and in doing so drastically short-​circuit Malraux’s theory of art, ignoring the major elements we have examined in previous chapters. If Malraux’s position is to be understood correctly, his comments need to be placed in context. As discussed, Malraux regards “the metamorphosis of our way of seeing” triggered by Manet as the starting point of our modern concept of art, which is based solely on the capacity to create a coherent rival world. The effects of this were revolutionary and sparked “another renaissance,” giving birth to today’s unprecedented, universal world of art. Now, these developments have certainly conferred a vital importance on the art museum and the musée imaginaire, but this has occurred as a consequence, and there is no suggestion in Malraux’s theory of art that the art museum, important though it is, has operated as a self-​contained, independent factor. Malraux certainly writes that art museums “have imposed on the spectator an entirely new relationship with the work of art” but they have done so as the natural instruments –​ the natural expression, one might say –​of a development that sprang from a deeper source: the aesthetic revolution that gave birth to our universal world of art. Art museums, Malraux writes, have “helped deliver the works they gather together from their function” and the word “helped” is there for a reason. The world of art, as we know it today, is all but inconceivable without the art museum, but the art museum is its close ally and natural form of expression, not its fundamental cause. The contrary opinion –​the proposition that Malraux argues that the art museum is the root cause of our modern universal world of art –​often goes hand in hand with a claim that, in Malraux’s eyes, art has now attained its definitive form. In the quotation given above, Blanchot, for instance, claims that, in Malraux’s eyes, the art museum is “a kind of force that, in our era, is simultaneously the end of history –​as it is expressed and achieved by art …” And elsewhere in the same article, speaking of Malraux’s account of modern art and the art museum, he suggests that Malraux believes that “a conclusion has been reached” and that It is clear that for Malraux, and doubtless for each of us, the present time is not –​insofar as the plastic arts are concerned –​an era like the others. It is the radiant world of “the first time.” For the first time art is revealed both in its essence and its totality –​both closely related. Art abandons everything it was not and extends to everything it has been.27

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  135 Comments like these can easily lead us astray. Art museums today contain large numbers of objects that we regard as works of art, and the musée imaginaire includes others located outside museums. But Malraux nowhere suggests that this state of affairs is necessarily definitive and he is quite explicit about this. “The Musée Imaginaire […] is not eternal,” he writes,28 and “if a new absolute should appear, doubtless a large part of our treasured artistic heritage would fade away like a shadow …”29 Or, more concretely: If it became generally accepted that the supreme purpose of art is (for instance) to serve politics, or to act on its audience in the manner of the advertisement, the art museum and our artistic heritage would be transformed in under a century.30

Malraux, in other words, accepts the full implications of his theory of art and recognizes that there are no grounds for asserting that the present situation is a final destination, a terminus ad quem –​“the end of history –​as it is expressed and achieved by art,” as Blanchot phrases it. In keeping with his fundamental position, Malraux acknowledges that the modern notion of a “work of art” (post-​Manet), the responses associated with it, and our modern universal world of art, are themselves subject to metamorphosis and, therefore, to the possibility of being consigned to obscurity (at least for a certain period). This is not a prediction in the sense of a claim about an historical inevitability. Unlike Hegel or Marx, for example, Malraux proposes no unified theory of history (which would, moreover, imply an absolute) and the future always remains the realm of the unknowable. He is, however, fully aware of the consequences of his thinking. If metamorphosis is “the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics,” the responses evoked by a given work today, whether it be a painting by Picasso, a Byzantine mosaic, a Hindu sculpture, or a Palaeolithic cave painting, are no less subject to the processes of metamorphosis than those that the work evoked (or failed to evoke) at any time since the moment of its creation. Thus, the (hypothetical) emergence of a new absolute might well usher in a cultural change sweeping enough to cause much of our treasured musée imaginaire to “fade away like a shadow” –​as Byzantine art did after the Renaissance, for instance –​to reappear at some future time perhaps, though again with a different, and quite unforeseeable, significance. An artistic creation in the fundamental sense of a rival coherent world can assume a variety

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of significances (in principle, an infinite variety) and the modern manifestation, where it is nothing more than that –​where it has fallen back on its “invincible element” –​is no more definitive than those it assumed in (for example) Italy during the Renaissance, in Byzantium, in Hindu India, or in prehistory, where painting and sculpture served very different purposes.31 The modern world of art represented in our museums today is certainly a world of “the first time,” as Blanchot says, since, as Malraux reminds us, our universal world of art is unprecedented. But while it is a first, Malraux is in no sense suggesting it is a last, and if Blanchot is claiming that, in Malraux’s eyes, art has now arrived at a final destination (which seems a likely interpretation of his references to “the end of history” and a “conclusion”) that claim would be quite incompatible with Malraux’s thinking. Neither the modern concept of art, nor the modern universal world of art it has made possible, is a definitive step and there is nothing in Malraux’s writings on art that suggests that Western culture is witnessing a kind of apotheosis of art –​an ultimate, concluding moment.32 We are touching here on one of the most revolutionary aspects of Malraux’s theory of the art and it merits further emphasis. Since its beginnings in the eighteenth century, the discipline of philosophical aesthetics (or the philosophy of art), has, explicitly or implicitly, treated art, however defined, as, in effect, an anthropological given –​a permanent aspect of human life, common to all cultures.33 It is true that a small number of modern thinkers acknowledge that the concept “art” was unknown in numerous earlier cultures, but the issue is rarely pursued in any depth, and is generally treated as a matter of relatively minor significance. Malraux is an exception in this regard. He certainly argues that the fundamental ambition to create rival, unified worlds, whether in music, painting, or poetry, has been a constant feature of human cultures throughout the ages. He is conscious, however, that this ambition has not always been viewed as “art”; that, in fact, viewed in the perspective of the millennia of human history (not to speak of prehistory), the era of “art” (in both its Renaissance and modern forms) has been quite brief; and that “the age-​old urge to create an autonomous world” has, time and again, been devoted to purposes that have nothing to do with “art” but with the gods, spirits, or ancestors. In short, Malraux integrates the impermanence of art –​the impermanence of the very notion of art and the differences in responses in different cultures –​into the very fabric of his

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  137 thinking. Art as we know it today, or as the West knew it before Manet, is no more permanent or universal than the emotions, now long forgotten, that the Egyptians experienced as they placed offerings before the statues of their God-​K ing, or even those, only vaguely understood today, of the Christian faithful who prayed before the Byzantine mosaics. None of this implies an attempt to devalue art as we now know it. On the contrary, Malraux regards those objects that we today group together in our musée imaginaire as infused with a unique power to defend man against his fundamental sense of bewilderment and insignificance –​a power to “deny his nothingness.” But the current manifestation of this ambition, he argues, is only one possibility among others, a possibility that is no more definitive than those that have preceded it, or which, perhaps, may follow. Art in the senses the West has known it was originally an invention of the Renaissance and then, following its transformation, a consequence of our modern agnostic civilization. But these developments, despite their importance, are only episodes, so to speak, in a long adventure that began somewhere in the depths of prehistory and has persisted across many millennia, “before” as Malraux writes, “the idea of art had ever crossed men’s’ minds.”34 And just as there were many cultures in which this idea, and the responses associated with it, did not exist, it is perfectly possible, Malraux recognizes, that, somewhere in the future, it will cease to exist and that our musée imaginaire, which stretches from contemporary art to Picasso to the Palaeolithic caves by way of Giotto, the Gandharan bodhisattvas and the bloodthirsty Pre-​Columbian gods, will fade away “like a shadow.” Viewed in this light, “art” as the West has known it, both in the post-​Renaissance form (which underpins Enlightenment aesthetics …), and in its post-​Manet incarnation, can no longer be regarded as a permanent feature on the human landscape. Another cultural change as deep as those that produced “art” (in both forms) may suffice to trigger a replacement via a major metamorphosis, perhaps, as Malraux says, “in less than a century.” And if we find that time-​scale difficult to accept, we need only remind ourselves that the transformation from the musée des beaux-​arts of the nineteenth century (the museum of Baudelaire’s “beacons” for example) to our modern universal world of art took no longer.

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Notes 1 T.W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 175. Towards the end of the essay, Adorno’s verdict on art museums becomes a little less severe. 2 Georges Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable, Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1956), 13. 3 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993), 99. Merleau-​Ponty’s emphasis. The English critic William Righter claims, similarly, that Malraux wants to isolate works of art in the “chill” of the museum where they risk becoming “abstract and bloodless.” William Righter, The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 86, 87. Adding an ideological twist, Pierre Bourdieu describes art museums as “these holy places of art where bourgeois society deposits the relics it has inherited from a past that is not its own.” Pierre Bourdieu, L’Amour de l’art (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969), 165. 4 Maurice Blanchot, “Time, Art, and the Museum,” in Malraux, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​Hall, 1964), 150. 5 Dominique Vaugeois speaks of what she terms the outdatedness (inactualité) of Malraux’s writings on art. Given the large numbers of visitors to art museums, one feels inclined to ask who is the most up to date –​philosophers of art who claim that museums are “necropolises” where works of art are “in the process of dying,” or an art theorist who recognizes their importance and offers a reason for it. Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps: L’Art à l’ épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-​Michel Place, 2016), 12. 6 The term “Western culture” here encompasses non-​Western cultures affected by Western thought and values. 7 See Chapter Six. 8 Ibid. 9 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 204. It is also why Malraux says that, for over a century, our relationship with art “has become increasingly intellectualized.” Ibid., 205. There is an element of comparison involved, not in the simple sense of comparisons between subject matter or formal properties, but in the sense that we instinctively confront one work’s style with another to experience each more fully. 10 André Brincourt, Malraux, le malentendu (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1986), 104. Brincourt’s emphasis. Brincourt is speaking here of the musée imaginaire but the point applies equally to the art museum itself.

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  139 11 Georges Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’ (Paris: Hazan: Louvre éd., 2013), 71. Didi-​Huberman’s emphasis. 12 André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale: La statuaire, Écrits sur l’Art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 972, 973. 13 The musée imaginaire is a concept that Malraux applies to visual art in particular, but the fundamental principles also apply to literature (and doubtless music). Cf. L’Homme précaire et la littérature, 255, 256: “Although literature confronts us with questions less insistent than the one through which the musée imaginaire has made us inheritors of the entire planet, it presents us with a closely related challenge.” 14 Malraux died before the internet came into its own. There is little doubt that he would have welcomed it as an important means of accessing photographic reproductions of visual art. 15 Donald Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” in The Anti-​Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 50. 16 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 887. 17 See Chapter Two. 18 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 206. 19 Ibid., 212. 20 Paul Meecham and Julie Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 206. 21 Pierre Bourdieu claims that “Malraux’s vision of the art museum, the ‘musée imaginaire’ as melting pot [Bourdieu uses the English phrase]  of all civilizations […] is a great imposture,” which rests on the idea of “the eternal work of art” and is “independent of history.” There are multiple errors here: the musée imaginaire is not a “melting pot,” it is a “confrontation of metamorphoses;” it is not made up of “civilizations” but of works of art; and Malraux, as we have seen, explicitly rejects the idea that art is eternal and independent of history. Moreover, even if Bourdieu’s interpretation were correct –​which it is not –​it is far from obvious why this would result in an “imposture.” Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, une révolution symbolique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2013), 115. 22 Hans Belting, “Le musée de l’art mondial,”La Nouvelle Revue Française 606, (2013), 74. 23 Some art historians complicate the issue further by introducing the term “global art” which they then seek, in various ways, to distinguish from “world art.” Whatever the value of this distinction, it contributes nothing to an understanding of Malraux’s concept which simply refers to the art of all periods and cultures. 24 For a relatively recent example, see Peter Lamarque, “Reflections on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Restoration and Conservation,” British Journal of Aesthetics

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56, no. 3 (2016). More recently there has also been some interest in the idea of “cultural appropriation,” an issue discussed in the previous chapter. 25 Blanchot, “Time, Art, and the Museum,” 148. 26 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 203, 204. 27 Blanchot, “Time, Art, and the Museum,” 150, 151. Other critics have at times expressed views similar to Blanchot’s. Jean-​Pierre Zarader comments that “the Musée Imaginaire ‘delivers’ the work from the religious or profane content it first possessed, and with which it identified. Thus displaced from its original context, the work finds its proper location. It is in this sense that the Musée Imaginaire is the place of art: here the work finds its essence ….” Jean-​Pierre Zarader, Le Vocabulaire de Malraux (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), 48. Zarader’s emphasis. 28 André Malraux, La Tête d’obsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 240. François de Saint-​Chéron suggests that this sentence means that Malraux regards his own writings on art as subject to the process of metamorphosis. No doubt he does, but the meaning of the statement quoted here is quite clear: it refers to the musée imaginaire, and the context in which it is said clearly indicates that he is speaking of works of art in general. François de Saint-​Cheron, L’Esthétique de Malraux (Paris: Sedes, 1996), 46. 29 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 696. 30 Ibid., 261. 31 Georges Didi-​Huberman argues that: the montage of the reproductions in Malraux’s books on art is intended to support his concept of “universal art”; that the montage seeks to illustrate “a stylistic or spiritual synthesis”; and that Malraux wishes to demonstrate the “unity of human culture” revealed by commonalities between different styles. Each of these propositions is mistaken. Malraux believed that the modern universal world of art was an obvious fact; it did not require his “montage” of reproductions as proof. He nowhere suggests that his books on art illustrate “a stylistic or spiritual synthesis.” And the proposition that he believed in the “unity of human culture” would imply an absolute –​a fixed ideal of “Man” beneath cultural differences –​an idea that is quite antithetical to his thinking. Georges Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’, 41, 50. Didi-​Huberman’s emphasis. 32 The critic Jean-​Claude Larrat appears to lend some support to this aspect of Blanchot’s interpretation of Malraux. He suggests that the optic of “the universal art museum,” together with modern art, can be viewed as “the apotheosis of art at last recognized for its own sake and not as the auxiliary of idols, myths and sublimations of all kinds, to which it has been for so long subordinated.” This perspective, Larrat writes, could be described as “progressive” and “Hegelian.”

The Art Museum and the Musée Imaginaire  |  141 The comment confuses what Malraux calls the “invincible element” of art with an end-​point. To fall back on an irreducible “core,” so to speak, is not, or not necessarily, to reach an apotheosis. Suggestions that there are elements of Hegelianism in Malraux’s theory of art (which several critics have made) or that it is in some respect “progressive” (in the sense of a commitment to the idea of progress in art) are misunderstandings and are clearly incompatible with the theory of metamorphosis. Jean-​Claude Larrat, “En relisant Maurice Blanchot: le musée, l’œuvre et la métamorphose,” in Les Écrits sur l’art d’André Malraux, ed. Jeanyves Guérin and Julien Dieudonné (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2006), 162. 33 Setting aside thinkers such as Hegel and Arthur Danto who seem to envisage a “death of art” of some kind. 34 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 764.

8

Art and History

The relationship between art and history has long been a source of discord in the philosophy of art. The currently influential Anglo-​A merican analytic school typically minimizes the role of historical forces in its explanations of the nature of art. According to Peter Lamarque, a prominent representative of this current of thought, analytic aesthetics prefers to ignore what he terms “historicist” considerations and “[seek] the truth about the subjects it addresses, and timeless truth as far as that is attainable.”1 Historical factors are occasionally taken into account in ad hoc ways, but any suggestion that there might be a systematic link between art and history is frowned upon. Philosophers in the continental school have a different view. More strongly influenced by traditions stemming from Hegel and Marx, continental thinkers typically look for connections between art and historical forces, and especially for evidence that these might be systematic in some way, sometimes claiming, as Sartre does in What is literature? that both artist and audience are inescapably engagés in history.2 Continental thinkers do not always agree about the precise nature of the relationships between art and history, just as analytic philosophers of art often differ about the nature of their “timeless truths;” but the contrast between the two approaches is nonetheless

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unmistakable and is doubtless one of the reasons why they tend to operate in separate academic universes. Where does Malraux stand on this issue? Critics have offered a variety of opinions. Some maintain that Malraux isolates works of art from their historical circumstances, one aesthetics textbook published in 2009, claiming that he offers us “a contextless approach to art,”3 the art historian Roland Recht asserting that “there is no place for the history of art” in Malraux’s writings, and Georges Didi-​Huberman declaring that Malraux’s thinking is characterized by an “aristocratic rejection of history.”4 Others, interestingly enough, take a diametrically opposite view, some suggesting, as noted in the Introduction, that Malraux’s books on art are in reality histories of art, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty even claiming that Malraux is a full-​blown historical determinist committed to the belief that the painter is at the mercy of “a Reason in history of which he is the instrument.”5 As it happens, Merleau-​ Ponty’s statement offers a useful point of entry to our present discussion, partly because it is frequently cited and seems to have exerted a considerable influence,6 and partly because the errors it contains help us understand Malraux’s true position. Merleau-​Ponty’s comments, which are contained in his essay mentioned earlier, is based on his interpretation of a section of The Psychology of Art7 in which he argues that “[Malraux] can explain the convergence of different works only by invoking some destiny that rules over them.” In support of this, he quotes a passage from the same work (whose context will be explained in a moment) in which Malraux writes: … as if an imaginary spirit of art pushed forward from miniature to painting and from fresco to stained-​glass window in a single conquest which it suddenly abandoned for another, parallel or suddenly opposed, as if a subterranean torrent of history unified all these scattered works by dragging them along with it […] a style known in its evolution and metamorphoses becomes less an idea than the illusion of a living fatality. Reproduction, and reproduction alone, has introduced into art these imaginary super-​artists of indistinct birth, possessed of a life, of conquests and concessions to the taste for wealth or seduction, of death and resurrection –​known as styles.8

Art and History | 145 This statement, writes Merleau-​Ponty, clearly shows that Malraux encounters, at least in metaphor, the idea of a History which unites the most disparate attempts, a Painting that works behind the painter’s back, and a Reason in history of which he is the instrument. These Hegelian monstrosities are the antithesis and complement of Malraux’s individualism.9

We have had occasion earlier in this study to notice Merleau-​Ponty’s tendency to isolate Malraux’s comments from their context and here, unfortunately, that problem rears its head again. The excerpt quoted occurs towards the end of a section of The Psychology of Art in which Malraux’s main aim is to explore the effects of photographic reproduction on our relationships with art. One obvious consequence is that large numbers of people now have access to good quality reproductions, but there are other effects, Malraux argues, of which we are sometimes less aware. As noted earlier, a key characteristic of our modern response to art, in Malraux’s view, is that we are the first to accept that “each art is inseparable from a particular significance now evident to us,” this significance being embodied in the work’s style.10 Now, one effect of photography, he argues, is that it often increases our awareness of these styles. Black-​and-​white photography can intensify the “family likeness” (that is, the stylistic resemblance) of different kinds of objects from the same period (such as a tapestry, stained glass, a miniature, a painting and a sculpture) which might otherwise seem to have little affinity with one another, and a similar effect can arise when works of different sizes (a miniature and a large sculpture, for example) lose their dimensions and become images on the pages of a book. In such cases, objects “lose something of what is specific to them,” Malraux writes, “but their common style is so much the gainer.”11 So, in general, whether reproduced in color or in black-​and-​white, objects of different kinds, “from miniatures, to frescos, to stained-​glass windows, to tapestries, to Scythian jewelry-​work, to paintings, to Greek vases, and even sculpture” become “plates” and in doing so, tend to lose their properties as objects but gain “the utmost significance as style they can possibly acquire.”12 Or, translated into the terms employed earlier, their peculiar significances as autonomous worlds become as pronounced as they could be. Now, if reproductions of works of the same culture are gathered together in an album –​for example, of Chinese or Babylonian art –​and especially if they are arranged in chronological order, the stylistic trajectory followed by

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the series of works is thrown into prominence, and since works of art are, Malraux argues, not mere historical objects (like a potsherd or an old spear) but living presences,13 these trajectories can give the impression of a living organism changing over time. That is, the series of images strikes us as more than just samples of a given style (as in an exhibition catalog, for example) and appears, as Malraux writes in a phrase that Merleau-​Ponty omits, to have “a life of its own,” as if “an imaginary spirit of art” were at work.14 There is, of course, no suggestion that there is such a spirit (an idea one might more easily associate with someone like Focillon), which is why Malraux qualifies it with the word “imaginary,” just as he speaks in the same passage of “these imaginary super-​artists.” His point is simply that such a juxtaposition of images –​ which is only made possible by reproduction –​can appear as a continuous stream of creativity (due allowance made, as he says, for intermittent periods of regression) as if one were encountering an imaginary spirit of art that had a life of its own. Once this context is restored, we quickly see that there is nothing in the passage Merleau-​Ponty quotes, or in the discussion of the effects of photographic reproduction preceding it, that would support a claim that Malraux is thinking in terms of “a Painting that works behind the painter’s back, and a Reason in history of which he is the instrument.” Malraux’s reference to “a subterranean torrent of history” (which, in any case, he deletes in the equivalent passage in Les Voix du silence15) is preceded by an “as if” and is, like his “imaginary spirit of art,” clearly intended as a metaphor (a point that Merleau-​Ponty acknowledges but then disregards). Ironically, Malraux’s proposition is, in fact, the very reverse of the one Merleau-​Ponty ascribes to him. His proposition is not that art is somehow determined by an external force, as if it were a response to outside stimuli, but precisely, as he says, that, as a living presence, it seems to have “a life of its own.” Basically, there are two interconnected themes in this admirable passage: the idea of an apparently living entity (not just “an idea,” as Malraux says) “known in its evolution and metamorphoses,” and the sense that this is a specific, finite event –​an event with a beginning, a varied and eventful life, a death and a resurrection. There is no suggestion of a teleology, no ultimate aim or historical Idea being realized, no underlying meaning conferring unity or rationality on the process and transforming it into a manifestation of “Reason in history” –​or of “some World Spirit,” as Merleau-​Ponty alleges a little later.16 On the contrary, such

Art and History | 147 a sequence of reproductions, Malraux writes, gives the impression (“l’ illusion”) of a fatality –​a fundamentally inexplicable sequence of events –​but “a living fatality” because, although unintelligible, it seems to have a life of its own. Unlike the customs and beliefs of the civilization that produced them, the images escape “the charnel house of dead values” and seem alive, as if animated by “an imaginary spirit of art,” or, as Malraux aptly puts it, by “these imaginary super-​artists […] known as styles.” There is no question of “Hegelian monstrosities” or any other form of historical determinism (a notion, incidentally, that Malraux explicitly rejects elsewhere in The Voices of Silence17). Merleau-​Ponty has simply misread the passage he quotes and, in doing so misled those critics who have taken his claims to be well-​founded. Jean-​Pierre Zarader writes that Merleau-​Ponty “caricatures Malraux’s position.”18 The verdict seems too mild. Merleau-​Ponty is quite simply wrong and his analysis is a serious distortion of what Malraux writes. Moreover, in describing Malraux as a determinist, Merleau-​Ponty also manages to obscure the function that Malraux in fact ascribes to historical forces. For while he is certainly not a determinist, Malraux does not exclude history from his thinking. His explanation of the temporal nature of art is not, after all, that art is exempt from historical change –​immortal. As we recall, he dismisses that proposition as “simply preposterous” and his books on art accurately reflect this view: Giotto’s discovery of a “power of painting previously unknown in Christian art” is a response to a transformation of Christian faith that involved a rapprochement between man and God; and the radical transformation triggered by Manet was a response to the emergence of an agnostic culture after the intellectual upheavals of the eighteenth century. For Malraux, however, art is not merely a “product” of history –​something that results simply from particular confluences of social and cultural forces. Art is an activity sui generis with its own inherent power of creating a rival, coherent world –​a human achievement as specific as the revelation of an absolute such as a religious faith, although of a different kind. Thus, while major cultural changes such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment can certainly alter the course of art, they do so episodically, so to speak, not in any systematic way. Which explains why Malraux writes in The Voices of Silence (in further statements that Merleau-​Ponty seems to have overlooked) that although the relationship between art and history seems complex, “perhaps it would be less so if we did not require it to be rigorous,”

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and later, “art is more affected by deep underlying currents than by tidal waves.”19 The relationship, in other words, is both variable and unpredictable. The sudden tidal waves of history, such as wars, famines, or pestilences, may only have marginal effects. More radical changes, such as those initiated by Giotto or Manet, may require major cultural developments working at a level as deep as art itself, such as the transformation of a religion or its final decay. Merleau-​Ponty’s characterization of Malraux as a latter-​day Hegelian bowing to the dictates of a “World Spirit” serves only to obscure this key aspect of his thinking. Art for Malraux is neither a creature of history nor impervious to it: metamorphosis is a form of temporal transcendence, but one in which history plays an ineradicable, if variable, part. Put another way, Malraux accepts neither of the explanations of the relationship between art and history described at the beginning of this chapter: he assigns more importance to history than analytic aesthetics, and more importance to art than continental thinkers. Unlike the first, he refuses to isolate art in an eternal world exempt from change; unlike the second, he refuses to reduce the artist to little more than history’s faithful servant. Somewhat ironically then, Malraux’s theory of art, which representatives of these two schools of thought have so steadfastly refused to engage with, offers a solution –​a relatively straightforward solution in the end –​to one of the major problems that has kept them apart for so long. As mentioned earlier, a number of critics –​art historians in particular –​have claimed that Malraux’s grasp on the facts of the history of art is unreliable. If true, the charge would be serious, especially given that history in general, and the history of art in particular, play an important part in his theory of art. Unfortunately, writers who make this accusation often fail to offer supporting evidence, so it is not always easy to provide rebuttals. There are occasional exceptions, however, and it is worthwhile examining a sample of these, not least because criticisms of this nature seem to have generated a widely accepted folklore among art historians and art theorists that Malraux is not a trustworthy source. We have already had occasion to mention the attacks by art historians such as E.H. Gombrich and Georges Duthuit which accuse Malraux of failings such as ignorance, carelessness, and fraud. These attacks are not recent but the negative attitude they exemplify has by no means disappeared, as illustrated by recent books by George Didi-​Huberman and Dominique

Art and History | 149 Vaugeois which we shall consider in a moment. Elsewhere, I have provided extended comment on the accusations by Gombrich and Duthuit, explaining why they are groundless, and it would not be appropriate to repeat those analyses in full here.20 Given the continuing influence of their claims, however, it seems important to highlight some of the more conspicuous flaws in their criticisms. Gombrich, regrettably, sometimes gives the impression that he has not understood Malraux’s arguments and many of his comments are much less an analysis of what Malraux says than a series of somewhat disconnected impressions based, it often seems, on a rather limited acquaintance with Malraux’s texts. One is amazed to find, for example, that his review of The Voices of Silence –​a review that certain writers today still treat as valuable21 –​ revolves in part around a brief conversation in The Royal Way, Malraux’s second novel, published in 1931, and written more than three years before the experience of the “return to the earth” which played such a vital role in the development of his thinking about art. The conversation, whose principal interest in the context of Malraux’s theory of art is that it reveals that his thinking about the relationship between art and time was still at a preliminary stage, includes the proposition, briefly sketched by one of the central characters, that all works of art eventually become myths and resuscitate when “our myths come into line with them.”22 Gombrich confidently claims that this idea expresses “the theme on which all Malraux’s subsequent writings are but variations,”23 and then proceeds to reject it (albeit on rather flimsy grounds), implying in so doing that he has dealt a body blow to Malraux’s theory of art. Unfortunately, however, as attentive readers of The Voices of Silence will know, the proposition that works of art become myths, and resuscitate when their myths and ours align, plays no part in that work. Malraux’s explanation of the temporal transcendence of art in The Voices of Silence and in all his books on art, depends, as we have seen, on the notion of metamorphosis which springs from his basic contention that art is a coherent rival world which, unlike an absolute, is never definitive;24 and to make matters worse for Gombrich, the term metamorphosis is not mentioned in the brief conversation in The Royal Way on which he places so much importance. Gombrich’s account of this crucial aspect of Malraux’s thought is, in short, seriously inadequate, and the remainder of his comments on The Voices of Silence is of a similar quality. Indeed, as this example illustrates, it is difficult

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to avoid the impression that he has simply not read Malraux’s book with care, which is surely the first duty of a reviewer, especially one who, in the same essay, claims that Malraux’s work is “nowhere imbued with that sense of responsibility that makes the scholar.”25 The tone of Gombrich’s remarks is generally rather condescending, as if he believes he is dealing with the work of an intellectual neophyte (with “adolescent” attitudes as he puts it26), but at one point his condescension misfires rather badly. Commenting on what he terms the “rhetorical” style of The Voices of Silence (which he had only read in English translation) Gombrich reproaches Malraux for a phrase that the English version translates as “Antigone’s immortal cry.” Gombrich reacts with scholarly disdain. This is not “a cry,” he protests, “but a reasoned statement in a momentous argument.”27 But unfortunately, Gombrich’s reproach reveals that he had omitted to check his quotation against the French original. Malraux does not use the word “cry” (cri) at all, his phrase being “l’immortelle évidence d’Antigone.”28 The error is perhaps relatively minor, although English readers, unaware that it is an error, doubtless saw the would-​be reprimand as further justification for Gombrich’s adverse criticisms. This carelessness, regrettably, is in keeping with Gombrich’s overall approach to Malraux’s work and, again, ill befits someone who apparently believes himself entitled to accuse Malraux of a lack of scholarly responsibility. Gombrich wrote several articles that make reference to Malraux’s books on art and his comments are often negative in tone, ill-​informed, and sometimes gratuitously discourteous. Given the reputation he had established in anglophone countries as an art historian, he would presumably have been in a good position to provide a useful introduction to Malraux’s books on art for English-​speaking audiences. But the opportunity was missed. Malraux’s thinking was seriously misrepresented and the unfortunate consequences, given that Gombrich’s books are still read, are still with us. Georges Duthuit’s lengthy attack on Malraux, published in 1956 and mockingly entitled Le Musée inimaginable, (The Unimaginable Museum) is equally unsatisfactory. There is no space here to consider more than a small portion of Duthuit’s rather sprawling work, but one representative sample is his commentary on Malraux’s account of Gandharan Buddhist art, an important element in the second section of The Voices of Silence and in the second volume of The Psychology of Art, both entitled “The Metamorphoses

Art and History | 151 of Apollo.” According to Duthuit’s reading, Malraux advances the thesis that the art of Gandhara emerged from a life-​or-​death struggle between a “Greco-​ Roman, humanist hegemony” and “the anti-​humanism of India and China.” Malraux, according to Duthuit, presents this event as if it were a confrontation between black and white, and a moment in the history of art of which one can say, “Here is a combat between night and day.”29 But Malraux is mistaken, Duthuit declares with an air of triumph,30 because he exaggerates the importance of the Hellenistic presence in Asia, and wrongly claims that it vanquished the Hindu/​Buddhist influence. Now, to begin with, there are factual errors in this criticism. Malraux nowhere suggests that the difference between Greek civilization and the civilizations of India and China is a contrast between humanism and an anti-​humanism. In fact, he speaks explicitly of the “humanism” of Chinese civilization,31 and describes Buddhism as “one of the noblest teachings the world has ever known.”32 (And where art specifically is concerned, he leaves us in no doubt about his admiration for large numbers of works from India, China, and South-​East Asia generally.) More fundamentally, Duthuit seems quite oblivious of the careful account of artistic creation that Malraux provides in The Psychology of Art and again in the second part of The Voices of Silence –​the very books he is discussing. As we saw in Chapter Three, Malraux never describes the creative process as a struggle for dominance between different styles. The artist seeks “deliverance” from all the styles that initially impress him, and genuine artistic creation is possible only when he destroys those styles in his own work and creates a style that is entirely new. Moreover, Malraux repeats the essence of this argument in his discussion of Gandharan art. In a passage in The Voices of Silence that deserves to be quoted at some length, he writes: The history of this adventure [the emergence of Buddhist art] is not that of the survival of Hellenistic forms, but rather of their death. When, in the oases, these forms encountered weak values, they merely fell to pieces; but when in India and China they came upon the powerful conceptions of the world sponsored by Indian and Chinese Buddhism, they underwent a metamorphosis. Rarely has history shown us more clearly that the “problem of influences,” which bulks so large in modern thinking about art, is always posed the wrong way around. Hellenistic forms were, in Gandhara, forms from which art broke free, and the same is true of the Greco-​Buddhist forms

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in India and China […] Though there is a continuity of a kind from the Koré of Euthydikos to Lung-​Mên, it is in no sense a continuity of influences, but of metamorphosis in the exact sense of the term: the life of Hellenistic art in Asia is not that of a model but of a chrysalis.33

The argument is clear, and one wonders how Duthuit, even if he had neglected to read the substantial sections of The Psychology of Art and The Voices of Silence concerned with the general nature of artistic creation could possibly have mistaken Malraux’s meaning. Far from suggesting that Hellenistic forms triumphed over existing Buddhist forms in a life or death struggle, Malraux argues that the emergence of the Buddhist art of Gandhara saw the death of these forms and the creation of something quite new that was neither Hellenistic nor the existing Buddhist style. Malraux’s general argument in relation to artistic creation is, as we saw, that art, as distinct from the pastiche, begins precisely where influences end, and in keeping with this view, he sees the emergence of Gandharan Buddhist art as a rupture, “a deliverance,” not a struggle for supremacy between different styles. Like many art historians (and philosophers of art), Duthuit seems to cling to the conventional view that the creative process involves a struggle between competing influences. Malraux’s position is plainly quite different, and in line with his general account of artistic creation, he argues in the present case that, to the extent that the Buddhist culture of Gandhara produced true works of genius –​true creations –​it did so by emancipating itself from both the Hellenistic and the existing Buddhist styles, which means that the question of a struggle for dominance does not arise. One is, of course, perfectly entitled to disagree with Malraux’s explanation but, to do so, one would at least need to show that one had understood it, and it is by no means clear that Duthuit has done so. Dominique Vaugeois suggests that Duthuit “exposes Malraux’s weaknesses.”34 As this example shows, it would be far more accurate to say that Duthuit exposes his own weaknesses. Brandishing accusations of “ignorance, negligence and fraud,” he, like Gombrich, seems to have, at best, a shaky understanding of the theory of art he is seeking to censure. The hostility of art historians towards Malraux has not been limited to France and Britain. A similar negativity emerged quite early in the United States, as exemplified in a review of The Voices of Silence by the American art historian Thomas Munro, published in the influential Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.35 Munro accuses Malraux of nothing less than “serious

Art and History | 153 historical errors” and “reckless inaccuracies abounding” and, as an example, cites Malraux’s discussion of Leonardo da Vinci which highlights the revolutionary nature of the background landscape in the Mona Lisa. Munro waxes indignant at Malraux’s claim. “No one,” he writes, “who had really seen the Hellenistic Odyssey paintings in the Vatican could assert [as Munro implies Malraux does] that Leonardo, by blurring outlines, invented a way of rendering space such as Europe had never known before.”36 Fortunately, Munro provides page references, so there is no difficulty in locating the passage in which this alleged blunder occurs. In a comment that needs to be quoted at some length, Malraux writes: In all previous painting –​Greek vases, Roman frescos, the art of Byzantium and the East, the art of Christian Primitives of various lands, of the Flemings, Florentines, Rhinelanders and Venetians […] whether they were painting in fresco, in miniature, or in oils, painters had always composed “by outlines” [“par le contour”]. It was by blurring outlines, and then by prolonging the boundaries of objects into distances that were no longer the abstract locations of previous perspective –​those of Uccello and Piero della Francesca seem to accentuate the independence of objects rather than attenuate them –​ distances made indistinct by tones of blue, that Leonardo, a few years before Hieronymus Bosch, invented, or systematized, a way of rendering space that Europe had never known before, and which was no longer simply a neutral environment for bodies but which, like time, enveloped figures and observers alike and flowed towards a vast immensity.37

One sees immediately that Munro has given a severely truncated version of what Malraux has to say. Malraux is not speaking simply of “blurring outlines.” He speaks of a style that “[prolongs] the boundaries of objects into distances that were no longer the abstract locations of previous perspective,” of “distances made indistinct by tones of blue,” and of space which “enveloped figures and observers alike and flowed towards a vast immensity.” The explanation is given further substance by two reproductions Malraux provides close to this text, which vividly illustrate the contrast he has in mind –​ a detail of background rocks in a painting by Filippo Lippi and a detail of the background landscape in the Mona Lisa –​images of which Munro makes no mention. In short, Munro has given a seriously distorted account of Malraux’s comments. Either he has not read the passage in question carefully enough, or he considers his brief reference to “blurring outlines” to be

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an adequate account of what Malraux says. For a writer –​an art historian once again –​who believes he is entitled to accuse Malraux of “serious historical errors” and “reckless inaccuracies,” neither alternative seems acceptable.38 Comments of this quality by art historians had become noticeably less frequent in more recent times and it seemed almost possible to hope that the uninformed folklore depicting Malraux as an untrustworthy source might be slowly fading. Regrettably, however, the clock has been put back by the two recent books on Malraux already mentioned –​Georges Didi-​Huberman’s study published in 2013 and Dominique Vaugeois’ more recent book which appeared in 2016. Didi-​Huberman, who, like a number of art historians, seems to harbor a barely disguised hostility towards Malraux, claims that, having decided to regard art as an absolute, Malraux concluded that knowledge about art “will be absolute knowledge” and that, believing he possessed this absolute knowledge, Malraux saw no need to trouble himself with the details of art history.39 Vaugeois, for her part, believes that Malraux does not treat the views of art historians with sufficient deference and respect. In her view, Gombrich and Duthuit have important things to say about Malraux: the first is “the person whose authority has carried the most weight against The Voices of Silence as a serious work,” while the second, as noted, is credited with having exposed Malraux’s “weaknesses.” More generally, Vaugeois reproaches Malraux for having ignored the “scholarly” (the French word used is “scientifique”) methods of art history, for taking insufficient notice of the opinions of “specialists,” and, as a result, failing to be “a useful reference in the field of knowledge,”40 opinions which Didi-​Huberman appears to share. These charges have doubtless breathed new life into the misleading folklore generated by previous art historians such as Gombrich, Duthuit, and Munro, and they call for a reply. First, the shortcomings in the attacks on Malraux we have just considered (and there are others that pose similar problems41) obviously raise questions about the reliability of certain art historians themselves. If one claims to be a “specialist” employing “scholarly” methods, one surely has an obligation, at a minimum, to give one’s readers an accurate account of the arguments one is criticizing, to examine those arguments with care, and to produce sound evidence for one’s own opinions. These features are conspicuously lacking in the cases considered above. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that the criticisms of Malraux’s texts advanced by Gombrich, Duthuit and

Art and History | 155 Munro provide excellent examples of what a “scholarly” method should not be like. Didi-​Huberman’s complaint about Malraux’s alleged lack of interest in art history is equally questionable. It is not at all clear what an “absolute knowledge” might be and Didi-​Huberman does not elaborate; it is clear, however, that quite contrary to his assertion, Malraux, as we have seen, does not believe that art is an absolute (assuming that this is relevant in some way to the notion of an “absolute knowledge”) and that he was in fact well read in art history. Moreover, it is important to stress again that Malraux is an art theorist not an art historian, and if one compares his work with other writers in his field –​the most appropriate comparisons being with the philosophy of art and aesthetics –​one quickly sees that he places far more emphasis on events in art history, and history more generally, than his counterparts in those disciplines. Analytic aesthetics, as noted, shows very little interest in the history of art and seems to fear that any substantial leanings in that direction will lead to the perils of “historicism;” and continental aesthetics, while generally showing a stronger interest in history than its analytic rival, tends to deal with historical subject matter in a selective and piecemeal way.42 Malraux, for the reasons examined in Chapter Four, integrates historical and art historical events into the very fabric of his theory of art and, despite the assertions by Didi-​Huberman, Roland Recht and others,43 his thinking is notable for the unusually large amount of historical detail it includes. Didi-​Huberman is, of course, entitled to disagree with Malraux’s selection of events and the interpretations he places on them (though in fact he rarely engages with Malraux at this level); but to claim that Malraux somehow ignores art history suggests a puzzling lack of familiarity with the works he is criticizing and of the field of intellectual endeavor to which they belong. A key feature of Malraux’s books on art, immediately obvious to anyone who picks them up (and, indeed, sometimes daunting for a beginner) is precisely the importance they place on individual works of art, on the history of art (as a whole, and not just European art), and historical events more generally. Didi-​Huberman’s criticism, in short, is not unlike those of the art historians considered above –​mistaken and misleading. There is a larger issue at stake here. To what extent can the history of art (and a fortiori a theory of art) be “scholarly” if that term presupposes “objective” facts –​that is, facts that are “publicly verifiable” as the conventional terminology has it. Doubtless, there are certain kinds of statements one can

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make about a work of art that might safely be described in this way –​such as who painted it, wrote it, or composed it, or who the sitter was if it is a portrait (assuming, in any given case, that such matters are known beyond reasonable doubt –​and often they are not). If one makes a mistake about such a point, one might certainly be deemed guilty of an “historical error” –​ which, of course, may or may not be serious, depending on the context. But consider as an example, Thomas Munro’s comments discussed above. Setting aside whether his perfunctory paraphrase of Malraux’s passage is adequate or not, and whether his view, or Malraux’s view, of Leonardo’s innovation is to be preferred, it is surely arguable that the point at issue is essentially one of interpretation or opinion, not of pure fact. In such cases, arguments advanced in favor of a particular view may be more or less persuasive, and one may even wish to dismiss certain interpretations as implausible; but to speak of “inaccuracies” and “historical errors,” and to make assertions of the kind that “no one who had really seen the Hellenistic Odyssey paintings in the Vatican could assert …,” implies that one is dealing with settled, objective matters of fact –​claims that are self-​evidently right or wrong –​and it is far from clear (especially when one actually compares the Odyssey frieze with the background of the Mona Lisa) that the kind of claim Munro is making belongs in that category. This is by no means an isolated case, and as we have seen in other examples mentioned in this study (Gombrich, Duthuit, Belting, Didi-​Huberman, Guégan …) one does not need to look far to find other art historians whose pronouncements can readily be called into question. The point is not that no one who writes about art is entitled to error. The point is simply that where the theory of art is concerned, the borderline between fact and interpretation, especially where non-​trivial issues are concerned, is often imprecise, and “facts” are often inextricably intermingled with ideas and with the propositions on which the theory is based. And the same is true of the history of art itself –​at least for a history of art that is more than a simple chronology of events (and even then, one would need to select the events one considers important …). The history of the history of art shows clearly how influential its theoretical assumptions have always been, which is why there have been so many different schools of thought and varieties of interpretation –​formalist, iconographic, psychoanalytic, semiotic, post-​Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, and so on. There is simply no such thing as a “standard” history of art, founded purely on objective, scholarly “fact,” with which all

Art and History | 157 “specialists” agree, and the implication in much of what Vaugeois and Didi-​ Huberman write that the contrary is the case is misleading –​indeed, one is tempted to say, naïve. (Hans Belting, more realistically, has written a book entitled The End of the History of Art? to which part of his answer is: “I am convinced that today only provisional or even fragmentary assertions are possible.”44) These observations are not intended to devalue the history of art as a discipline, and despite Didi-​Huberman’s suggestions, Malraux himself had no wish to do so either.45 The point is simply that one cannot reasonably treat the history of art as if it were a repository of established fact settled by a panel of specialists who inhabit a neutral, idea-​free world where theoretical assumptions and interpretative differences play no significant part.46 Most of the important questions about art (visual art, literature, or music) inevitably involve such factors, and this is especially the case where, as with Malraux, the subject is the theory (not the history) of art. This does not, of course, mean that the theorist can turn his or her back on whatever factual information may be known, and an important characteristic of Malraux’s theory of art is not only the amount of factual detail he includes but also the extent to which his arguments accord with the historical record. (One striking example is his theory of metamorphosis which corresponds well with the historical record, while the traditional theory of immortality –​which still has numerous adherents –​clearly does not.47) But the suggestion by Dominique Vaugeois that Malraux’s books on art are not “a useful reference in the field of knowledge” because they do not defer sufficiently to the views of “specialists” is a red herring. Claims of this kind serve only to reinforce the misleading folklore surrounding Malraux books on art; they do nothing to help readers understand them. As this study has revealed at several points, a number of art historians have shown considerable animosity towards Malraux48 (philosophers of art, as mentioned, have mostly just turned their backs on him) and some of this ill-​feeling seems to have resulted from a misunderstanding about his attitude towards the discipline of art history –​a misunderstanding partly fostered, ironically enough, by art historians themselves.49 E. H. Gombrich wrongly suggests not only that Malraux has a cavalier approach to historical facts but also that he has a kind of systematic indifference, if not antipathy, towards historical research;50 and Georges Didi-​Huberman, as we have seen, has a similar view. The misunderstandings on which such claims are based are

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sometimes easy to detect, as the following example shows. In an interesting section of The Voices of Silence, Malraux argues that art often makes a deeper impression on us than historical writing. Unless we are specialist historians whose professional studies give us an intense interest in aspects of the past, he writes, it is primarily through art that the past “comes alive” for us and remains in our memories. Art may not provide the “true history” –​and we may be aware of that –​but this history is, nonetheless, the one that, for most of us, strikes the deepest chord. Malraux explains: What, in the first instance, do Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages conjure up in our minds if not architecture, statues, and poetry (meaning more than “verses”)? […] So long as the artist pays no heed to them, conquerors are mere victorious soldiers; Caesar’s relatively small conquests mean more to us than all Genghis Khan’s triumphs. It is not the historian who confers immortality; it is the artist with his power over men’s dreams. And it is art that suggests a history which, though not the true one, is the one men take to their hearts: had they come back to life, the Roman worthies would never have swayed the Convention as Plutarch did.51

For Ernst Gombrich, this passage is proof positive that “[Malraux’s] outlook and purpose differ fundamentally from those of the historian or the scholar.” Malraux, he writes darkly, “would rather have faith in an illusion,” and thus “we find him extolling that notion which has proved so fateful and fatal to our time –​the Myth.”52 But once again Gombrich has read carelessly. Malraux’s aim here is in no sense to denigrate historical scholarship or suggest that one should “have faith in an illusion.” He is simply making a point about the power of art. The specialist historian, he agrees, may be in a different case by virtue of his or her professional interest. For the rest of us, however, the past we encounter through art tends to move us more profoundly, and etch itself more deeply on our memories, than any recitation of historical fact, however comprehensively or skilfully done. If Malraux had then gone on to say: “This being so, one can safely ignore the work of historians, including art historians,” he would certainly have been guilty of the charge that writers such as Gombrich and Didi-​Huberman lay at his door. There is, however, no such proposition, express or implied, anywhere in Malraux’s writings, and no warrant for thinking that he ever held such a view (which would, indeed, have been very strange given that he was a keen reader of history). Despite

Art and History | 159 the attacks to which some art historians have subjected him –​and some of them have been not only grossly inaccurate but unnecessarily discourteous –​ Malraux had no basic animosity towards art history as a discipline. It is true, as noted earlier, that he argues that “the history of art does not provide a sufficient account of the world of art” but, again, the suggestion is not that art history is worthless but that there is more at stake, and that, among other things, it does not explain the crucial power of art to transcend history and live on, while all else has succumbed to the passage of time. One cannot refrain from adding that it is an irony indeed that Malraux, of all art theorists, should be the one accused of a lack of interest in history. Leveled against philosophers of art in the contemporary analytic tradition, for example, the charge would be understandable, given the staunchly ahistorical approach of most writers of this persuasion and the scarcity of their references to historical developments earlier than the twentieth century. As one writer –​an art historian –​aptly notes in this connection, the disciplines of aesthetics and art history “which would appear to have so much to do with one another” in fact tend to live in different worlds and “pass each other like ships in the night.”53 Yet, one needs only a brief acquaintance with The Voices of Silence or The Metamorphosis of the Gods to see that here one is dealing with a writer of a quite different stamp –​one for whom both the history of art, and history more generally, play an important role. Moreover, in view of Gombrich’s suggestion that Malraux was somehow uninterested in scholarly research, it is worth noting that there is abundant evidence to the contrary. The overwhelming view of those who knew Malraux is that he had read very widely indeed, and there is ample evidence (if his works on art alone were not enough) that the history of art was high on his lists of interests.54 Given that Gombrich’s focus seems limited to libraries, one should perhaps add that Malraux was by no means content with what he could glean from the printed page or from reproductions. An indefatigable traveler, he saw first-​ hand large numbers of the works he discusses, his itinerary including such distant and varied locations as Elephanta in India, Borobudur in Indonesia, the Lung-​Mên caves in China, Palenque in Mexico and many more. None of this is intended to imply that Malraux’s interpretations of art or its history are always necessarily correct (due allowance made for the slipperiness of that term in this context), or that they are not open to challenge. To suggest, however, that a writer whose familiarity with history and the history of art, both

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of the West and of other cultures, seems to verge on the encyclopedic is someone who is uninterested in those subjects, is strange indeed. To repeat: one is certainly entitled to challenge Malraux’s interpretations of history; indeed, given the importance history assumes in his theory of art, serious weaknesses in this area could be much more significant than they might be in theories of art where the history of art, and history in general, is relegated to the margins. Challenges, however, need to be based on a careful reading of his texts, and one certainly seems entitled to expect something more pertinent, substantial, and reliable than the examples we have considered in this chapter. Finally, a little more should be said about Malraux’s prose style in his books on art which, as intimated earlier, seems to have displeased a number of critics, art historians in particular. Some describe Malraux’s style as too “rhetorical,” Roland Recht speaks of “Malraux’s incantatory prose,”55 Georges Didi-​Huberman prefers the epithet “oceanic,” and Dominique Vaugeois believes that Malraux’s “literary” style is inconsistent with a “scholarly” approach and that “the very literarity” of his style is “what most seriously reduces the likelihood that his writings on art will endure.”56 Are criticisms of this kind justified? It is, of course, plain to see that much of what Malraux writes is not couched in the rather dry, abstract idiom of many textbooks on aesthetics or the philosophy of art (or in the equally colorless idiom of many books on art history, although that is less relevant given that Malraux is not writing art history). Anglo-​A merican aesthetics usually tries to emulate the detached, clinical style of its parent discipline, analytic philosophy, and despite their different theoretical approach, most continental writers, with certain partial exceptions such as Jean-​Paul Sartre, also prefer a relatively dispassionate idiom. Both schools of thought give occasional nods in the direction of human feelings, such as the proposition that art is designed to evoke “aesthetic pleasure,” but even this is usually understood in distinctly intellectualized ways (frequently relying on Kant’s claim that aesthetic pleasure is based on the free play of the imagination and the understanding), and often described as “disinterested.” Now, Malraux’s explanation of art, as we have seen, is not of this kind. At the fundamental level, art, for Malraux, is a response to a fundamental human emotion, at the heart of which lie questions about the meaning of human existence, and this proposition naturally enough, is reflected in both the content of his books on art and, in different degrees, the style in which

Art and History | 161 they are written. We have examined one striking instance in the closing paragraphs of The Voices of Silence where Malraux highlights the extraordinary power of the process of metamorphosis using the image of a dead Rembrandt who is “still sketching” and we encounter a comment such as: “yet it is an inspiring thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the ironic silence of the nebulae the music of the spheres and cast it to the fortunes of the centuries to come, speaking languages yet unknown.”57 Another, briefer example, from The Metamorphosis of the Gods, is the proposition that the survival of art across time is “the presence in life of what should belong to death.”58 Passages such as these –​and there are many others –​would not sit comfortably, either in content or style, in the pages of most textbooks in modern philosophical aesthetics, especially of the “analytic” kind. There is an “emotional” element at work: in these instances, a consciousness of the perishability of all things, including man and all his endeavors but, at the same time, a recognition of the extraordinary power of art to defy this predicament, to defeat time and death, and to return to life. To give a sense of the significance of this human achievement, Malraux, quite understandably, calls on the evocative powers of language; and his explanation would surely be hamstrung, if not fatally weakened, if he refused to do so and confined himself to the neutral, and frequently rather lifeless, prose of traditional philosophical aesthetics (which, significantly, avoids topics such as the relationship between art and the passage of time). Examples such as these need, however, to be kept in perspective. The sweeping verdicts of writers such as Recht, Didi-​Huberman and Vaugeois, give the impression that Malraux’s style of writing is unvarying and that his alleged “rhetoric” is a constant feature throughout. Yet we only need reflect on certain other passages quoted previously in this study to see that this is far from the case. Consider Malraux’s claims in his discussion of artistic creation that “It is a revealing fact that, when explaining how his vocation came to him, every great artist traces it back to the emotion he experienced at his contact with some specific work of art;” or that “our quest for primitivism has reached the threshold of protohistory. But what painter, when he sees an Altamira bison, fails to recognize that this is a well-​developed style?”; or that “the basic neutral style in drawing would be the bare outline. But any such method if strictly followed would not lead to any form of art but would stand in the same relation to drawing as an art as the bureaucratic style stands to

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literature.”59 Likewise, consider his statement when discussing the fortunes of the concept of art that “We know that peace in our time is as vulnerable as it ever was; that democracy can usher in capitalism and totalitarian policies; that progress and science also mean the atom bomb; and that reason alone does not provide a full account of man;” or, as a final example, his invitation to consider “what would have happened if Tintoretto had been compelled to paint three pieces of fruit on a plate, just that, without any sort of background,” adding, “We feel at once that his presence as painter would have stamped itself more forcibly on this still-​life than on any Baroque fantasy or Battle of Zara.”60 Each of these statements is pertinent and thought-​provoking but they scarcely qualify as “rhetorical” and certainly not as “incantatory” or “oceanic.” The point of this objection is not to minimize the role that evocative prose plays in much of what Malraux writes about art; it is certainly an important factor and, where necessary and appropriate, he has no hesitation in employing it. But Malraux also writes in other registers. Where the issue requires a plainer, more expository style, he responds accordingly and there are large areas of his writing on art where he does so. The general point is simply this: Despite occasional allegations that he seeks to “mystify” his reader, Malraux, who believed passionately in the importance of art, always sought to present his arguments as clearly and as forcefully as possible and, quite reasonably, he adjusts his prose style to suit his purposes. Where necessary –​where there is a strong “emotional” element –​he moves away from straightforward exposition and adopts a more evocative style, but his goal is always the same –​to explain as lucidly as he can a theory of art, which, as he was doubtless aware, would strike many readers as very different from the conventional accounts to which they had been accustomed. Finally, criticisms of Malraux’s style sometimes seem to contain veiled suggestions that his alleged “rhetoric” is device designed to conceal the fact that his thinking is not coherent. Two points should be made in reply. First, if one accepts the analysis provided in the present study, it seems difficult to deny that each step in Malraux’s thinking follows in a clear and systematic way from the basic propositions from which he starts out; and this holds true whether or not we are speaking of aspects of his argument presented in his more evocative mode. Once one accepts his basic proposition that (in brief) art creates a rival world acting in defense against the chaos of fleeting appearances, everything we have considered in the preceding chapters

Art and History | 163 follows as a natural and completely comprehensible consequence. The charge that Malraux’s theory of art is not coherent is, in other words, quite groundless. Second, the assumption that “rhetoric” is always a screen to conceal incoherence can be a trap. Clarity of thought and the use of evocative language are by no means mutually exclusive –​any more than a taste for neutral, detached terminology is necessarily a guarantee of good sense and intelligibility. (Analytic aesthetics certainly prefers a neutral style, but whether that always results in good sense and intelligibility is debatable.) The forms of discourse in the philosophy of art that have prevailed since the Enlightenment have doubtless conditioned us to assume that any modern account of the nature and purpose of art must necessarily be cast in a similar mold. But the traditions to which this discourse belongs were inventions of eighteenth and nineteenth-​century Europe: they did not exist before then and, with the doubtful exception of Greece and Rome, they have existed nowhere else. Malraux introduces us to a radically new way of thinking about art, based on an aspect of human experience as deep-​seated as human consciousness itself, and he adapts his prose style to that end.

Notes 1 Peter Lamarque, “The Disintegration of Aesthetics,” in Scruton’s Aesthetics, ed. Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 274. Lamarque’s emphasis. 2 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Qu’est-​ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 88–​90. 3 Stephen Davies, Robert Stecker, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, and David Cooper, eds., A Companion to Aesthetics, second ed. (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2009), 129. The comment is contained in an entry on “aestheticism” (Author: David Whewell) which also claims that Malraux views all art as “pure aesthetic objects” and supports the notion of “art for art’s sake.” 4 Roland Recht –​Interview with Jean-​Louis Jeanelle, “Du mythe de l’universalité au musée éclaté,” Critique, LXX (2014), 805, 806. Recht adds that lack of “social and historical inscription” makes Malraux’s thinking “profoundly antidemocratic.” Georges Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’ (Paris: Hazan: Louvre éd., 2013), 132. Didi-​Huberman’s emphasis. 5 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 102.

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6 See, for example: Galen Johnson and Michael Smith, ed., The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 20; Oliver Mongin, “Since Lascaux,” ibid., p, 247; Jean Lacoste, La Philosophie de l’Art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 119–​23 ; Griselda Pollock, “Un-​Framing the Modern: Critical Space/​Public Possibility,” in Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, ed. G. Pollock and J. Zemans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 19. A less favorable critic describes Merleau-​ Ponty’s reading as “eccentric.” Gary Schapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University Press of Chicago 2003), 222. 7 Despite the title of his essay, which mentions “Voices of Silence,” Merleau-​ Ponty is in fact quoting from La Psychologie de l’art not Les Voix du silence, his essay having been written shortly before the latter work was published. See Galen Johnson and Michael Smith, ed., The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, 387, note 4. 8 Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire, 52. 9 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 102. This quotation restores the capitals on History and Painting removed in the English translation used here. See Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Le Langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in Signes (Paris, Gallimard, 1960), 81. The reference to Malraux’s “individualism” relates to Merleau-​Ponty’s claims discussed in Chapter Four. 10 See Chapters Six and Seven. 11 Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire, 24. 12 Ibid., 52. Malraux’s emphasis. “Plates” as in color plates etc. 13 See Chapter Five. 14 Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art, Le Musée imaginaire, 52. 15 In Les Voix du silence, Malraux makes some minor changes to the passage quoted by Merleau-​Ponty, but their effect is simply to further clarify the points being made here. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 238. 16 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 103. 17 Cf. for example: “The artist is no more ‘conditioned’ by a past to whose forms he looks back than by some spirit of the future.” Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 643. 18 Zarader, Malraux: Dictionnaire de l’ imaginaire, 190. 19 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 637, 646. Malraux’s uses the term “rigoureuse.” In the English translation, Stuart Gilbert translates this as “uniform and invariably decisive” which, though a liberal rendering, probably conveys Malraux’s meaning quite well.

Art and History | 165 20 See: Derek Allan, “ ‘Reckless Inaccuracies Abounding’: André Malraux and the Birth of a Myth,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 2 (2009); Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 173–​87. 21 The critic Geoffrey Harris describes Gombrich’s essay as a “now virtually canonical review of Les Voix du silence.” See Harris’s entry on Malraux in Chris Murray, ed. Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p, 211. 22 André Malraux, La Voie royale, Œuvres complètes (I), ed. Pierre Brunel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 398. 23 Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 80. In his widely read Art and Illusion, Gombrich repeats the claim that for Malraux “art survives only as what he calls ‘myth’.” See E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 54. 24 See Chapter Five. 25 Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 78. 26 Ibid. Malraux was 50 years of age when Les Voix du silence was published. 27 Ibid., 83. 28 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 893. The English translation of Les Voix du silence contains a number of errors and this is not the only mistake Gombrich is led to make by not checking the original. 29 Georges Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable, Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1956), 93. 30 There is no mistaking Duthuit’s hostility towards Malraux. One early reviewer of Le Musée inimaginable remarked: “Duthuit becomes at times so vehement that he lapses into sarcastic invective. Every page contains insinuations of bad faith, ignorance or naïveté.” George Boas, “Le Musée inimaginable,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16, no. 2 (1957), 281, 282. 31 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 370. 32 Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art: La Création Artistique, 38. 33 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 376. Duthuit appears to base his arguments principally on the text of The Psychology of Art where this paragraph does not appear. Puzzlingly, however, his book appeared in 1956, five years after The Voices of Silence, and one wonders why he did not update his comments and refer to the text of the later work, especially since, in his Foreword he refers to Malraux as “the author of The Voices of Silence.” In any case, Malraux’s basic explanation of the nature of artistic creation –​which the paragraph quoted here simply condenses and applies to a specific case –​is the same in both works, and in The Psychology of Art it is contained in the same volume as the discussion of

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Gandharan art that Duthuit is criticizing. It would be difficult to argue that Duthuit (who, after all, seems to pride himself on his conscientious scholarship) could simply have overlooked the argument. Perhaps he simply misunderstood it. 34 Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 77. 35 The is one of the rare articles this journal has devoted to Malraux. The American Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the British Journal of Aesthetics are the two principal academic journals for analytic aesthetics. Both have almost completely ignored Malraux. 36 Thomas Munro, “The Voices of Silence,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 4 (1957), 483. 37 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 267. 38 It should be added that the outlines in the Hellenistic Odyssey frieze to which Munro refers are not especially “blurred” and what blurring there is may be partly due to changes over time such as fading, repainting, and various treatments. One commentator writes that the results of this have “changed the character of the frieze completely, giving it a homogeneous, atmospheric effect and hiding the more restricted palette and abrupt color transitions of the original.” Bettina Bergmann, “ ‘Die Odysseegfresken von Esquilin’ by Ralf Biering,” American Journal of Archaeology 101, no. 4 (1997), 803. Munro makes no mention of factors such as these, which, after all, hardly seem surprising, given the age of the paintings in question. His other criticisms of Malraux are open to objections similar to those raised here. That is, he distorts Malraux’s comments by abbreviating them and taking them out of context. (I provide color reproductions of one of the Odyssey paintings, the Filippo Lippi in question, and the Mona Lisa background, in my book Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, 178, 179.) 39 Georges Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’ (Paris: Hazan: Louvre éd., 2013), 80. Didi-​Huberman’s emphasis. 40 Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 32, 76. Didi-​Huberman, L’album de l’art à l’ époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’, 80. 41 Stéphane Guégan, for example, claims that Malraux has a blacklist that “lumps together a certain mannerism, all Italian Baroque, the Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, the English portraitists, Boucher and Greuze, David, Romanticism, etc.” Stéphane Guégan, “La pensée sur l’art d’André Malraux: est-​elle toujours utile?,” Beaux Arts Magazine, no. 245 (2004), 89. Another interesting case, even stranger perhaps, is a claim by art historian Bertrand Davezac in an article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, that in The Voices of Silence “we learn to our surprise that, save for a few exceptions,

Art and History | 167 Italy was on the whole incapable of producing an art of high quality, while great figures like Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer and lesser Dutch interior painters, expressed values through which they reached the highest artistic achievements.” Bertrand Davezac, “Malraux’s Ideas on Art and Method in Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 22, no. 2 (1963), 179, 180. I have pointed out serious errors in both these claims in Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, 185– ​87, 284. 42 A good example is Walter Benjamin’s description of the development of art from earliest times to Renaissance and then to the present (Chapter Four, note 8). Compared with Malraux’s analysis of developments over the same time periods, this account is very sketchy indeed. 43 Pierre Bourdieu is another example. Bourdieu claims that Malraux views the work of art as “independent from history,” and that he “proceeds to an absolute deshistoricisation.” No supporting evidence is provided. Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, une révolution symbolique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2013), 115, 116. 44 Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xii. 45 Equally, the aim is not to suggest that Malraux never made a mistake over a question of fact –​the date a work was painted, who painted it etc. The history of art, like history generally, is constantly evolving, and like any writer who relies on the contemporary state of knowledge, Malraux was not proof against errors. All the evidence suggests, however, that he was conscientious in checking his facts. 46 Cf. the comment by the art historian Pascal Greiner on Malraux’s willingness to confront works of different cultures and periods. Such confrontations, Greiner complains, “have nothing to do with comparisons for scholarly purposes.” Pascal Griener, “Louée soit universalité,” Critique LXX, no. 805–​806 (2014), 491, 492. 47 See Chapter Five. 48 There are exceptions such as Georges Salles and André Chastel who worked with Malraux on the excellent “Universe of Forms” series. The latter also collaborated with Malraux, then Minister for Cultural Affairs, on the project for a general inventory of the monuments and cultural treasures of France. 49 Dominique Vaugeois describes Malraux as “mired in a worn-​out quarrel with the history of art.” The comment is misleading. The “quarrel” was one-​sided and consisted almost entirely of attacks by art historians –​generally ill-​founded. Malraux sometimes mentioned the problem privately to friends but rarely, if ever, responded publicly. Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 31.

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50 See, for example, E.H. Gombrich, “Malraux’s Philosophy of Art in Historical Perspective,” in Malraux: Life and Work, ed. Martine de Courcel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 181–​83. 51 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 875. 52 Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” 78, 79. The reference to “Myth” doubtless relates to Nazism and Fascism. 53 Keith Moxey, “Aesthetics is Dead: Long Live Aesthetics,” in Art History versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2006), 167. 54 The editors’ notes to the Pléiade editions of Malraux’s books on art mention that Malraux’s personal library included over two thousand books on visual art. The notes also describe Malraux’s painstaking efforts to ensure that his art historical documentation was as accurate as possible –​efforts that went well beyond library sources and included correspondence with relevant sources worldwide. Not surprisingly, the editors disagree with Gombrich’s remark. See Adrien Goetz, François Saint-​Cheron, and Christophe Parant, “Notice, notes, variantes,” in Écrits sur l’Art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1268–​78. Cf. also Henri Godard’s comment in his Introduction to the same volume: “Whatever Ernst Gombrich might think, Malraux had read widely, consulted widely and probed deeply.” Henri Godard, “Introduction” in Écrits sur l’art (II) (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), XXXIV. 55 Roland Recht, A quoi sert l’ histoire de l’art? (Paris: Les éditions textuel, 2006), 52. 56 Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps, 32. 57 See Chapter Five. 58 Ibid. 59 See Chapter Three. 60 See Chapter Four.

Conclusion An Intellectual Revolution

The Introduction to this study quoted Malraux’s comment to a friend in 1973: “Of all my books, those I’ve written about art are certainly the ones that have been most seriously misunderstood.” The analysis in the preceding chapters has identified a series of misunderstandings, many of them serious and related to key aspects of his thinking. Why has this occurred? One reason seems to be the tendency of certain critics to read Malraux without sufficient care, a problem to which André Brincourt drew attention as early as 1986 when, expressing his admiration for The Voices of Silence, he wrote that this “outstanding work has been skimmed a lot but very little read.”1 This situation has, as we have seen, resulted in confused accounts of Malraux’s ideas, and a pronounced tendency to ascribe to him views he did not hold, a problem aggravated by the curiously hostile attitude sometimes displayed by critics who express these opinions. As noted in the Introduction, however, carelessness does not seem to be the sole reason for the misinterpretations. Another, less obvious factor is an apparent reluctance to recognize that Malraux has developed a theory of art of a quite revolutionary kind that abandons traditional patterns of thought and adopts an entirely new approach. Seen in this light, the misunderstandings

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and the hostility are somewhat easier to explain. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to see that Malraux’s theory of art is radically new, many critics have attempted to force it into established molds –​to domesticate it, so to speak, and confine it to the regions of the known and the familiar. Then, discovering, predictably enough, that his thinking resists such attempts, the critics in question have resorted to negative and often hostile conclusions: Malraux is not a systematic thinker, he hides behind a “rhetorical” style, his knowledge of the history of art is faulty, his thinking is derivative, and so on. Problems of interpretation can thus be brushed aside: Malraux, such critics conclude, has nothing important to offer; at best, he is simply rehashing old ideas and doing it badly, in a text riddled with inaccuracies, and written in an unnecessarily florid style. Thus, we have seen Maurice Blanchot and Georges Didi-​Huberman, among others, misread Malraux’s key concept of metamorphosis by conflating it with the traditional idea of eternity, apparently not realizing that the two concepts are fundamentally different, and that Malraux is opening up new horizons of thought about the relationship between art and time. In like vein, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty views Malraux’s radically new explanation of the relationship between art and history through the prism of customary categories, classifying him as a devotee of Hegelian determinism –​while, ironically enough, other critics, apparently seeking to dress Malraux in the conventional robes of the detached aesthete, fly to the opposite extreme and claim that he turns his back on history, Georges Didi-​Huberman, for instance, accusing him of an “aristocratic rejection of history.” Malraux’s account of modern art meets a similar fate. Stéphane Guégan, falling back on familiar precedents, argues that Malraux relies on Maurice Denis’s well-​ known formula and even “pushes it further” than Denis, despite Malraux’s explicit statement in the very works Guégan is reviewing that the formula is inadequate. Georges Duthuit (whose unreliable book on Malraux, strangely enough, still seems to have its admirers) misrepresents Malraux’s account of the creative process –​a crucial element of his theory of art –​by ascribing to him the conventional view, which Duthuit himself apparently embraces, that artistic creation is essentially a struggle for supremacy between different styles, a view that Malraux emphatically rejects in the very work Duthuit is attacking. And seeking once again to confine Malraux to the realms of the conventional and familiar, Merleau-​Ponty argues that his thinking about

Conclusion | 171 modern art is a celebration of “individualism” and a version of the well-​worn claim that “the modern painter wants above all to be original,” despite clear evidence that this is not what Malraux has in mind. The list is easily extended. Hans Belting advances the rather shop-​worn idea that in highlighting the importance of today’s first universal world of art, Malraux is “appropriating” the works of other cultures to European purposes. Donald Crimp and others reduce the concept of the musée imaginaire to the pedestrian idea of photographic reproduction. Merleau-​Ponty and Blanchot among others commit the basic error of assuming that, in the context of art, Malraux simply equates the concept of reality with the run-​ of-​the-​mill, nebulous notion of “empirical life” (in Merleau-​Ponty’s phrase) or the “ordinary world” (as Blanchot would have it). Seeking to shore up the claim that nothing in Malraux is new, some critics claim that he is simply a “compiler” of the ideas of others, alleging, for example, that he appropriates his key idea of metamorphosis (which they frequently misunderstand) from Focillon, while Pierre Bourdieu declares (as usual, without supporting evidence) that Malraux’s books on art are nothing but “hasty borrowings from Schlosser or Worringer.” And in an attempt to dismiss Malraux entirely, there are even assertions that his thinking is, in any case, unintelligible, Gombrich claiming that it is nothing more than “sophisticated double talk,” and Bourdieu branding it “metaphysical bric-​à-​brac.” In all these cases –​and this is only a sample –​there seems to be more at work than just a failure to read Malraux with care; there are also signs of an underlying intellectual conservatism –​a determination to resist ideas that do not conform to conventional patterns of thought. Dominique Vaugeois writes that “Malraux’s essays conflict with the implicit rules and expectations that govern the practices of writing about art.”2 Vaugeois does not specify what these rules and expectations might be (one is tempted to wonder if they include careful attention to the arguments one is attacking and a recognition that criticisms should be supported by evidence) but the conservatism underlying the comment is not difficult to discern: Malraux’s cardinal sin, it appears, is that his books on art do not follow established patterns. He has had the audacity to strike out in new directions. The word that best describes Malraux’s theory of art is the one used in the title of this study: “revolutionary.” Accepting the implications of the realization that “man is dead, after God,” he abandons the traditional systems of

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belief on which Western aesthetics has depended since the Enlightenment and develops a theory of art founded not on any such set of certitudes, but solely on the fundamental human capacity to question existence which, he argues, lies at the heart of human consciousness. Art is then explained as a response to these questions –​not a definitive response of the kind provided by an absolute, but a series of provisional responses each “powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” With this as his foundation, Malraux develops a comprehensive theory of art whose principal elements include such crucial topics as: the nature of artistic creation; the psychology of our response to art (which has nothing to do with a “judgment”); the birth of the notion of “art” and its transformation after Manet; the birth and death of the idea of beauty as it relates to art; the sorely neglected question of the relationship between art and the passage of time; the emergence of our first universal world of art; the contemporary role of the art museum; the frequently misunderstood notion of the musée imaginaire; and the vexed question of the link between art and history. If one were compelled to name the most revolutionary aspect of Malraux’s thinking –​and the choice would be difficult because there is an embarrassment of riches –​one would be tempted to opt for his explanation of the relationship between art and the passing of time. In a sense, of course, this issue has only emerged as a conspicuous dilemma in the last hundred or so years, since the advent of our universal world of art. Prior to this, when “art” principally signified the art of the Renaissance and post-​Renaissance (Baudelaire’s “beacons,” for example) plus selected Greco-​Roman works, the familiar explanation that great art is immortal must presumably have seemed quite plausible. During that period, the only art that had been resuscitated –​ that had been recalled to life after having been ignored for a long period of time –​was that of Greece and Rome, and the belief in the immortality of art could be preserved easily enough by the assumed cultural decadence and artistic insensitivity of the intervening “Dark Ages.” But the emergence as art, from about 1900 onwards, of works from sources as various as Pre-​ Columbian Mexico, Mesopotamia, India, Byzantium, and Romanesque Europe (the last two previously belonging to those same “Dark Ages”) poses a problem of a quite different order. Clearly, it will not suffice to say that these works had only recently come to light: as we have seen, many had been discovered centuries before,3 but had been ignored, placed in collections of

Conclusion | 173 “curios,” or melted down for precious metals. Moreover, it is not quite so easy to accuse the centuries prior to 1900 of cultural decadence and artistic insensitivity when, after all, they produced figures such as Leonardo, Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, Racine and Goethe, not to mention a series of major Enlightenment and post-​Enlightenment philosophers, including some like Hume, Kant and Hegel who figure prominently in aesthetics itself. Thus, the dilemma suddenly becomes impossible to ignore: the notion that art is eternal now looking untenable, and the idea that it belongs within historical time not affording an alternative (since how, as Marx himself asked,4 does one explain its apparent power to transcend its historical moment?) what then is the relationship between art and time? If it is neither impervious to time, nor belonging wholly to it, what is its temporal nature? Modern aesthetics has essentially ignored this problem and it is hard not to be struck by the oddity of this state of affairs. If the term “art” in the twenty-​first century simply signified modern art –​say, the works of various contemporary artists plus a number of relatively recent figures such as Pollock, Bacon, Duchamp, Picasso, Chagall, and Miró, with perhaps the occasional backward glance to the Impressionists and Manet –​if this were so, theorists’ lack of interest in the temporal nature of art might perhaps seem less surprising. One might not find it particularly remarkable, after all, that a work by Picasso or Chagall painted several decades ago still seems vital and alive today, and one might even feel the same about a Manet or a Degas painted in the late nineteenth century. But as Malraux reminds us (if the evidence of our own eyes were not enough), “a civilization’s art is both what it creates and all the works it regards as living presences,”5 and for us today the range of works in the latter category extends far beyond modern and contemporary art to the paintings of Giotto, medieval stained glass, sculptures from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, prehistoric cave paintings, and much more besides. To ignore the questions this raises about the temporal nature of art, as modern aesthetics regularly does, is quite simply to ignore one of the most challenging aspects of our world of art today. Hence the importance of Malraux’s contribution: he both highlights the problem and provides a solution. His answer –​the concept of metamorphosis –​is, without doubt, a landmark in the history of Western thinking about art, a clear example of an intellectual revolution.

174 | Conclusion

As part of his wide-​ranging theory of art, Malraux also offers a radically new explanation of our relationship with the work of art. One critic claims that Malraux’s books on art “look very much like the confessions of an aesthete.”6 If the suggestion here is that Malraux understands our modern response to art in terms of traditional notions such as taste and aesthetic pleasure, it could hardly be farther from the truth. Not, of course, that Malraux suggests that art should be a source of displeasure, but art, in his eyes, has a much deeper purpose than affording a form of sophisticated delectation. “People confuse the nature of art with the pleasure it can bring,” he writes, “but, like love, it is passion not pleasure.”7 Art is a form of human creation whose source lies as deep as the fundamental questions to which it responds and, far from merely gratifying a refined sense of taste, our cultural heritage is “the collection of works […] that can help us live.”8 This is not to suggest that art somehow provides a solution to daily problems, or that it can map a path to a brighter political future, or even, as some philosophers of art seem to hope, that it can furnish a system of moral norms. Art “helps us live” because, whether we are fully aware of the fact or not, it provides a sense of the human capacity to resist the blind, apparently arbitrary forces to which human life is continually subject –​le destin in all its multifarious forms. While not a religion, Malraux writes, and although it “does not overcome man’s sense of being a mere accident in the universe,” it nevertheless “reminds man, when born to solitude [that is, without an absolute], of the profound relationship that once existed between humanity and the now-​ vanishing gods.”9 Art, in short, struggles against the same enemy as religion, but in a different way. It does not resolve the dilemma of man’s significance but neither does it consent to his servitude. None of this is an invitation to artist hero-​worship, and still less an unquestioning admiration for anything that happens to be found in an art museum. The proposition is, rather, that many great works of visual art, like many works of literature and music, bear witness to a capacity and a will in man to be more than the senseless forces that constantly threaten to reduce him to their level. “The musée imaginaire teaches us,” Malraux writes in the closing stages of The Voices of Silence, that those forces “are threatened whenever a world of man, whatever the nature of that world, emerges from the world tout court. Every masterpiece, implicitly or openly, tells of a victory over the blind forces of destiny.”10 Clearly, the notion of “aesthete” is entirely out of place here: the curtain has fallen on that

Conclusion | 175 conceptual world and something quite different has taken its place. Malraux, as mentioned, rarely comments on traditional aesthetics, but it is hard not to think that, viewed from his standpoint, the discipline of post-​Enlightenment aesthetics with its familiar categories of aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic properties, beauty, taste and so on, must have struck him as an anachronism –​an explanation of the nature and purpose of art that had long since lost its force and relevance. Malraux was born amidst cultural developments that are still very much our own today: the disappearance of religious belief, the disintegration of faith in progress and science as the key to a golden future, the bewildering diversity of world-​views revealed by anthropology, history and archaeology, the rapidity of technological change, the concomitant sense of what Malraux terms a “violent sense of the transient,”11 and, ultimately, the desolate awareness that human life as a whole seems to have no purpose –​a sense that man is nothing more than “the most-​favored denizen of a universe founded on absurdity.”12 Malraux regards art as one form of response to this predicament, which is why, early in The Voices of Silence, he describes the art museum as “one of the places that shows man at his noblest.”13 The wording here is important. For while his theory of art might well be described as a Copernican revolution in our thinking –​so radical are the changes it introduces –​his understanding of the nature and significance of art ultimately concerns more than art alone and, at its deepest level, is inseparable from questions about the significance of man. There is no suggestion that art is a substitute religion and we have seen that Malraux draws a sharp distinction between the function of art and the function of an absolute. There is unmistakably, however, an insistence on the profound human importance of art, especially today in a civilization bereft of any fundamental value. Art does not link humanity up with the underlying nature of things: unlike a religion or a secular faith, it does not draw aside the veil of appearances to reveal the longed-​for Truth. It does, nevertheless, provide a “series of provisional responses” and bears witness to “the power and the honor of being man.”

Notes 1 André Brincourt, Malraux, le malentendu (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1986), 120. Cf. the similar remark by another contemporary critic: “[Malraux’s

176 | Conclusion

writings on art] are more famous than familiar. Few people have taken the trouble to read them. They are most frequently admired or disdained from a distance –​admired, one might say, at a respectful distance, or disdained at the same distance.” Henri Godard, L’Expérience existentielle de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 11. 2 Dominique Vaugeois, Malraux à contretemps: L’Art à l’ épreuve de l’essai (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-​Michel Place, 2016), 12, 13. 3 And, as noted earlier, Byzantine and mediaeval art, unless destroyed or covered over, had always remained in plain view. 4 See Chapter Five. 5 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel, Écrits sur l’art (II), ed. Henri Godard (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 24. 6 Jean Pierrard, “Malraux: La voie royale du beau,” Le Point, no. 8 (November 2004). 7 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence, Écrits sur l’art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 539. 8 André Malraux, “Préfaces, articles, allocutions: ‘Sur l’héritage culturel’,” in Écrits sur l’Art (I), ed. Jean-​Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1192. 9 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 894. 10 Ibid., 887. 11 Guy Suarès, Malraux, celui qui vient: entretiens entre André Malraux, Guy Suarès, José Benjamin (Paris: Stock, 1974), 22. 12 Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 769. 13 Ibid., 205.

Appendix Titles of Malraux’s Works

This list gives the titles of Malraux’s books on art mentioned in the text. It also provides the English titles of those that have been translated (marked with an asterisk) and suggested titles for those not yet translated. The list is in order of publication in French. La Tentation de l’Occident D’Une jeunesse européenne Les Conquérants La Voie royale La Condition humaine Le Temps du mépris L’Espoir Les Noyers de l’Altenburg La Psychologie de l’art

1926

The Temptation of the West*

1927

A Generation of European Youth

1928 1930 1933 1935 1937 1943 1947–​50

The Conquerors* The Royal Way* Man’s Fate (or Man’s Estate)* Days of Contempt* Man’s Hope* The Walnut Trees of Altenburg* The Psychology of Art (in three volumes: The Imaginary Museum, The Creative Act, The Twilight of the Absolute)*

178 | Appendix

Les Voix du silence

1951

The Voices of Silence (first section also published separately in English as The Museum without Walls)* 1952–​54 The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (in three volumes) 1957 The Metamorphosis of the Gods*

Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale La Métamorphose des dieux, subsequently entitled La Métamorphose des dieux: Le Surnaturel (The Supernatural) to distinguish it from the second two volumes –​ see below. Antimémoires

1967

Le Triangle noir

1970

La Tête d’obsidienne

1974

L’Irréel

1974

L’Intemporel

1976

L’Homme précaire et la littérature

1977

Antimemoirs* (the first volume of the series entitled Le Miroir des limbes –​The Mirror of Limbo) The Black Triangle (Essays on Goya, Laclos and Saint-​Just) The Obsidian Head (translated as Picasso’s Mask)* The Realm of the Imaginary (second volume of The Metamorphosis of the Gods) The Undying (third volume of The Metamorphosis of the Gods) Precarious Man and Literature

References

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Index

A

Antiquity Greco-​Roman  50, 59, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 106, 109

Absolute  5–​8, 12–​15 and art  15, 21, 50, 51, 110, 111, 172, 175 and human consciousness  14 and Malraux  14, 15 and museum  129, 135 definition  13, 14, 79 disappearance of  56, 57, 59, 60

Adorno, Theodor  94, 125, 127 Adventure (of art)  46, 64, 137 Agnostic  agnostic culture  7, 15, 57, 59, 113, 129 art  21, 59, 147 Malraux  14, 15 anthropology  6, 47, 175

Anti-​arts (“official” painting)  57, 58

exemplary acts  50, 57, 82

Appropriation (of art)  113–​116 Archaeology  6, 47, 106–​108, 175 Art  activity sui generis  147 and history  15, 24, 76, 77, 81, 90, 91, 94, 135, 143–​162, 170 and nature  20, 21 and reduction  37 and transformation  36, 37, 64, 65, 90 antistyle  58 artistic styles  20, 21, 30–​39, 62, 63, 111, 112, 151, 152 as conquest  8, 21, 22 birth of concept  46–​55, 63, 64 change in function  55–​66 origin of  33, 34

186 | Index

Art museum and musée imaginaire  3, 125–​137, 171, 172, 174 Artist  and artisan  51, 53 and choice  39–​41 genius  38, 51, 53, 81, 91, 152 not “superman”  33, 98 sensitive to art  28–​30 social status  53, 64

Chartres (Cathedral)  74, 78–​81, 90, 96, 106, 107, 110, 116 China  145, 151, 152, 159 Consciousness (See Human consciousness) Creation in art  27–​43 and “life”, “reality” etc.  28, 28–​31, 36, 39 and Delacroix’s “dictionary”  31–​33, 36 and the sign  36 as deliverance  91, 151, 152 begins with imitation  8, 27, 28, 30, 31, 37, 38 ex nihilo  28, 38, 46 form of destruction  31, 34, 38, 151

B Barthes, Roland  27, 28, 38 Baudelaire  106, 107 Beauty  and the Renaissance  50–​55 and traditional aesthetics  7, 15, 65, 66, 75, 78, 93, 127, 172, 175 death of  58, 59

Belting, Hans  114–​116, 120n13, 131–​ 133, 156, 157, 171 Benjamin, Walter  66n8, 90, 94, 121n21 Blanchot, Maurice  2, 23, 33, 89, 90, 93, 126, 127, 133–​136, 170, 171 Botticelli  50–​52, 54, 111 Bourdieu, Pierre  2, 3, 84, 85, 95, 101n31–​32, 107, 139n21, 171 Buddhism  13, 32, 33, 107, 150–​152 Brincourt, André  169 Byzantium  48–​50, 54, 63, 81, 82, 107, 110, 114, 129, 135, 172

C Cabinets de curiosités  107 Cézanne  20, 30, 61, 62

D Danto, Arthur  120n17 Death of God  5, 15 Death of Man  6–​8, 175 “Deny our nothingness”  20, 172 Determinism (historical)  2, 86, 144, 147, 170 Didi-​Huberman, Georges  2, 3, 88–​90, 92, 93, 128, 140n31, 144, 148, 154–​161, 170 Djoser (pharaoh)  74, 90, 107 Duchamp, Marcel  173 Dufrenne, Mikel  86, 87, 88, 93 Duthuit, Georges  2, 3, 116, 125, 127, 148, 149, 150–​152, 154, 156, 170

E El Greco  30, 112 Enlightenment  2, 3, 6, 7, 15, 53–​57, 65, 76, 78, 93, 94, 97, 98, 163, 171–​175 and modern art  56, 57

Index | 187 Eternity (immortality, timelessness)  2, 75–​77 conflict with history of art  78–​80, 84, 157, 172, 173

F Faure, Élie  118 Focillon, Henri  85, 86, 171 Fundamental emotion  8–​15, 19, 21, 25, 39, 41, 79

G Gandhara  64, 150–​152 Gautier, Théophile  39, 76 Giotto  29, 33, 34, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 106, 147, 148 Gombrich, E.H.  1, 2, 3, 84, 85, 95, 117, 122n28, 148–​150, 154, 157–​159, 171 Grünewald  112 Guégan, Stéphane  60, 61, 68n40, 156, 170

H Hegel, G.W.F.  2, 6, 7, 27, 64, 76, 83, 94, 135, 143, 145, 148, 170, 173 History  13, 24, 46, 73, 74 and art  76, 77, 81, 90, 91, 94, 95, 135–​137, 143–​163 “discontinuous”  6, 7

History of art  78, 79, 91, 105, 106 and Malraux  2, 38, 45, 46, 55, 63–​65, 75, 80, 84, 103n50, 117–​119, 154, 155, 157–​160

Human consciousness  12–​15, 18n31 and art  15, 20, 34, 163, 172

Human nature (Man)  7, 12–​15, 53, 54, 175 Humanism (18th and 19th centuries)  5–​7, 56, 57 Hume, David  40, 41, 53, 54, 65, 75, 78, 79, 94 Hutcheson, Francis  53

I Imitation  8, 28, 30, 37–​39 Individualism  61, 145, 171 Intemporel (concept)  63, 92 Ionesco  18n27 Irréel (concept)  49, 52, 57, 63, 92, 110, 111, 112

J Jameson, Fredric  27, 28, 38 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism  166n35 Judgment in art (See: traditional aesthetics)

K Kant, Emmanuel  40, 53, 65, 78, 160, 173 Kristeller, Paul  47

L Lamarque, Peter  143 Laurent, Thierry  102n46

188 | Index

Leonardo da Vinci  152–​154 Literature  20, 35, 36, 47, 52, 157, 174 Lyotard, Jean-​François  2, 90, 91

M

metamorphosis of way of seeing  109–​112 only alternative since the Renaissance  94–​95 pertinence of the term  91, 103n49 revolutionary advance  172, 173

Modern art  58–​66 autonomy  58, 59, 62, 63, 109, 113, 116, 127, 136, 145 and “form”  60, 112, 113 and universal world of art  109, 115, 134 Maurice Denis  59–​61, 170 not a final stage  113, 134–​137 not just pleasure for the eye  59

Malraux, art theorist  “compiler” of ideas of others  93, 171 “literary” style  80, 81, 92, 160 “outdated” theory  93–​95, 138n5 and history of art (See: History of art) art “a flight from life”  22, 23 coherence of his theory  25, 84, 85, 162, 163, 170 reception in anglophone countries  5, 150 reliability of his information  148–​157

Manet  30, 58–​63, 65, 83, 109, 113, 129, 134, 147, 148, 172, 173 Marx, Karl  6, 7, 27, 64, 76, 77, 83, 84, 94, 135, 143, 173 Medieval  art (See also: Chartres Cathedral)  47, 48, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 106, 108, 114, 173 artisans (See: artist)

Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice  and determinism  2, 144–​148 and empirical life  32, 33, 125–​127 and individualism  61–​63

Metamorphosis  “the very life of the work of art”  80, 85, 135 and Focillon  85, 86, 171 and the Renaissance  81–​83 dialogue  80–​83, 95–​97, 110, 127, 128 in accord with history of art  80, 157

Munro, Thomas  152, 156 Music  20, 29, 30, 39, 47, 51, 157

N Naturalism (See: realism) Nietzsche  15

O Objets trouvés  43n35, 144 Odyssey frieze (Vatican)  153, 156, 166n38

P Photographic reproduction  6, 129–​ 132, 145–​147, 171 Poussin  51, 110, 111, 129 Prehistoric art  13, 33, 34, 45 Progress (in art)  44n39, 67n17, 140n32

Index | 189

R

T

Raphael  51, 55, 76, 77, 107, 111 Realism  20, 36, 37

Taine, Hippolyte  76, 85, 94, 122n25 Tietze, Hans  117 Time and art 

and Renaissance  49–​51, 82

Reality (the world, life)  20–​25, 126, 127, 171 as dictionary (See: Creation in art)

Recht, Roland  144, 155, 160, 161 Reduction (in art)  37 Rembrandt  30, 96, 97, 112, 132, 133 Representation  20, 34–​37, 60, 61 Rules (in art)  21, 22 “Return to the earth”  9–​13, 149 Ribon, Michel  86–​88, 93 Righi, Nicolas  100n22 Rimbaud  20 Robins, Gay  47 Romanticism  29, 30, 41, 57, 76, 94, 98

S Sartre, Jean-​Paul  90, 143, 160 Scheurleer, Pauline  119n6 Science  6, 7, 24, 56, 57, 68n33, 175 Shakespeare  51, 75 Sidney, Sir Philip  51, 52 Sign (and art)  36, 42n24, 43n29 Style  definition  20, 21 illusion of the neutral style  35, 36 “realistic” styles  36, 43n24, 52, 82 “style-​less” art  31, 34–​36

Subjectivism  60, 61, 63, 70n59 Surrealism  69n41, 118

eternity (See: eternity, immortality, timelessness) historical objects  74, 79, 81, 89, 146 importance of Malraux’s explanation  94, 95, 172, 173 metamorphosis (See: metamorphosis) not physical survival  98n4 “test of time”  103n53

Tintoretto  51, 62 Titian  51, 54, 57, 59, 107, 111, 112, 133 Traditional aesthetics  2, 15, 21, 40, 41 aesthetic pleasure  7, 15, 54, 55, 160, 174, 175 analytic aesthetics  3, 22, 27, 38, 45, 66, 76, 77, 93, 104n63, 117, 132, 143, 144, 148, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163 and beauty (See beauty) and human nature  7, 15, 54 continental aesthetics  27, 45, 47, 76, 93, 117, 132, 143, 144, 148, 155, 160 judgments of taste  7, 15, 21, 40, 54, 55, 93, 174, 175 late appearance  53

U Unity (coherence) of work of art  19–​ 23, 46, 54, 55, 59, 60, 65, 109, 112, 135, 136, 147 Universal world of art  105–​119 and modern art  109–​111 a fact not an “idea”  114 another renaissance  59, 106, 134

190 | Index

V

W

Van Gogh  20, 61, 79, 112

Watteau  54, 55, 57, 106, 107, 111

Vasari  53 Vaugeois, Dominique  22, 23, 86–​89, 93, 149, 152, 154, 157, 160, 161, 167n49, 171

Z Zarader, Jean-​Pierre  69n48, 147