Malraux, André

Malraux, André (1901–1976). French writer and statesman, born in Paris into a well-to-do family. He worked in the book trade before becoming a political activist (and archaeologist) in China in the 1920s and fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Out of his experiences he wrote a number of novels on revolutionary themes. In the Second World War he served in the tank corps, was taken prisoner by the Germans, escaped, and worked for the Resistance. He was a friend of Charles de Gaulle and after the war he became increasingly involved in politics, serving as France's Minister of Culture from 1959 until his retirement in 1969 (in this role he initiated a programme of cleaning the great buildings and monuments of Paris and commissioned ceiling decorations for the Paris Opera from Marc Chagall, 1963–4). His postwar writings were devoted mainly to art, in a philosophical—at times metaphysical—vein. The major work is La Psychologie de l'art, originally published in three volumes as follows: Le Musée imaginaire, 1946, translated as Museum without Walls, 1949; La Création artistique, 1948, translated as The Creative Act, 1949; La Monnaie de l'absolu, 1949, translated as The Twilight of the Absolute, 1951. A revised version of the work was published in four volumes in 1951 entitled Les Voix de silence, translated as The Voices of Silence, 1953 (the individual volumes are entitled Museum without Walls, The Metamorphoses of Apollo, The Creative Process, and The Aftermath of the Absolute; a one-volume edition appeared in 1954). His other major work on art was La Métamorphose des dieux, 1957, translated as The Metamorphosis of the Gods, 1960. Malraux's writings reflect the broadening of aesthetic outlooks in the 20th century, when for the first time it has been 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.