Malraux, André

Malraux, André (b Paris, 3 Nov. 1901; d Créteil, nr. Paris, 23 Nov. 1976). French writer and statesman. From 1959 until his retirement in 1969 he served as France's minister of culture (in this role he initiated a programme of cleaning the great buildings and monuments of Paris and commissioned ceiling decorations for the Paris Opéra from Marc Chagall, 1963–4). Before the Second World War he had written several novels, but his post-war books were devoted mainly to art, in a philosophical—at times metaphysical—vein. His writings reflect the broadening of aesthetic outlooks in the 20th century, when for the first time it was possible to have some familiarity with the art of the whole world throughout the entire course of human history. He thought that art should be appraised entirely by aesthetic standards, expressing this notion in his now famous concept of the ‘museum without walls’, in which all works of art—whatever their origin—are available to be appreciated for their formal qualities, independently of whatever they originally signified (the phrase comes from the title of one of his books, Le Musée imaginaire (1946), translated as Museum without Walls (1949)).