In Paris
The floor is covered with photos and he is stretched out in their midst like a child playing with picture cards, a rather heavy build and a white pullover that makes him look bigger than he is. On a table are bottles of liqueur, whisky, cognac, a vase of flowers, tulips, a monograph of Zanne, one of Bosh, a wooden doll made by the Hopi Indians of North America. On the floor Egyptian and Greek art, medieval gothic and Kmer temples, Piero Della Francesca and Balthus intermix and inter-mingle. On the desk in the study are cut and stitch manuscripts, handwriting mixed with typing, a quotation cut from a book and glued into what one day will be another. It is the time of the Voix du silente, art as “anti-destiny”, the artist as creator of his/her own transcendence.
By comparing it, we can understand its metamorphosis: “Europe discovered black art when it looked at the African sculptures between Cézanne and Picasso and not fetishes between coconuts and crocodiles. It discovered great Chinese sculpture through Roman statues and not through chinoiserie”.
Among the passions of a lifetime, for Malraux art was the passion of a lifetime marked by the idea of death: “the only living suicide case”, as Paul Morand put it. Naturally, he did it his way, which was therefore neither erudite nor specialist, but the feverish way of someone trying to make sense of the nonsense of existing, liberation from the human condition, the struggle to get beyond time, triumphant on the finiteness which was his but which was not wanted, yearning for an eternity beyond reach.
“The biggest mystery is not being thrown accidentally among the profusion of matter and that of the stars. It is the fact that from this prison we receive from ourselves fairly powerful images to deny our nothingness. And again: “It is nice that, though we know we have to die, human beings tear from the ironies of the nebulae the song of the constellations and launch this into the wager of the centuries impressing on them unknown words”. A priest of human greatness, Malraux seeks the path to the transcendent denied him by the lack of a faith.
And if God, as Nietzsche taught him, is no longer possible, this does not mean to say that sparks of divinity should not be sought in the world that surrounds us. “The task of the 20th century is to reintegrate the gods”. Art, therefore, does not exist unto itself, and the artist is not a simple creator. He is the hero of mankind’s war against an imposed destiny, against the history that dates it and the nature that limits it and the time that cancels it. A romantic vision for a man that was the last of the romantics. It is no chance occurrence that the Musée de la vie romantique of Paris dedicated to him a superb exhibition entitled “Andrè Malraux et la modernité”. In its room they are all there.
Balthus, who Malraux called to direct Villa Medici in Rome, Braque, whose funeral oration he pronounced in front of the Louvre colonnade, Chagall, to whom he entrusted the task of painting the frescos of the dome of the Paris Opéra, Masson, charged with painting the frescos in the Theatre of France, Maiol, whose sculptures filled the Tuileries, Giacometti, whose retrospective at the Orangérie was his last act as Minister.
Then there is Max Jacob, who introduced him, when he was just eighteen, among the artistic talents of the capital, Léger, who illustrated his first book, Lunes en papier, Dérain, a collection of whose works was owned by Malraux and which he sold to pay the lawyers at the time of his arrest in Cambodia, Dubuffet, whose first buyer he was,, Fautrier, of whom he was one of the first predators, Roualt, to whom he was attached by a tragic sense of life, the beautiful treatise La tête d’obsidienne.
And then of course, there are the Asian works of art, Cambodia, China, Japan, Tibet, Afghanistan; the stages of a fascinating journey begun in his youth and never again abandoned. The daring theft of the Kmer statues dates back to 1924, while 1930 marked the opening in the NRF gallery of an exhibition of “Gothic-Buddhist works” from Pamir emphasising the sense of mystery of a familiar yet far-off aesthetic, Gothic without the Romanesque. And finally, the native arts of Africa, Oceania, Mexico and North America. Everything contributes to an idea of a real museum, what Malraux was to call an “imaginary museum”, meaning the knowledge acquired by photographic reproductions, from books, from documentaries, the possibility of making comparisons, tracing parallels, underlining debts, loans, influences.
The result is significant not only in terms of the quality of the works on show (Balthus’ most beautiful nude, the “Nu adossé” dated 1939, as erotic as ever, a sweetly funereal seascape by Braque, as well as the maquette for the windows of the Maeght Foundation chapel, a cat sculpted by Giacometti, the preparatory studies for the frescos of Chagall and Masson, the Buddha of Gandhara, the Chinese bronze vases dated 1000 BC…), but because of the effect on the onlooker of seeing these side by side and the idea of what lies behind the ability to keep together and join up so many different periods, styles, subjects and sensitivities, all so far from one another in time, space and custom. Behind it all is an omnivorous, precocious and predestined youth .”A genial artist is first of all an adolescent attracted by a painting kept behind the eyes and which is enough to distract him from the world”: A denier, despiser of his own things, because he had been unable to invent and create them at his own whim, the very rare occasions on which Malraux reverts to autobiographics on himself as a boy is to speak of art, exhibitions, galleries and the impressions of a student in war time: the atelier of Dégas, a merchant in Place de la Madeleine specialised in impressionist paintings, a Louvre that had just reopened in which to admire the works of Rubens and Rembrandt, the Guimet of oriental art that will leaves its mark on him forever.
He is helped by a prodigious visual memory that enables him, even after many years, to remember even the smallest details, even the position of the paintings in a room. And an inexhaustible avidity as a reader, thanks to which he builds up a disorderly culture, typical of someone who is self taught, but impressive in terms of references, quotations and links. In it are all the right books for a mythology of art, for a reflection on the destiny of civilisations: there is Spengler’s Decline of the West, the Bhagavad-Gita, the writings of Baudelaire.
At twenty, he is already travelling: Bruges, the Italy of Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, Venice, Sicily, Prague, Vienna, The Berlin of the Island of museums, Athens where the statues of the artists-heroes triumph over destiny, Madrid, Carthage, all the museums of Europe. At twenty-three he is in Cambodia, and has gone with the approval of the academic authorities; at twenty-eight, he is in Afghanistan, Persia, India, Japan. In these pilgrimages, Malraux sees and remembers, he collects catalogues and works, be builds up his own museum-library useful to him when he puts his intuitions and view of art down on paper. Alongside the journeys, he is an habitué of Paris artistic circles. The friendship of Max Jacob, Gris, Vlaminck, Braque provides him with an overall, modern and classic view available to no other writer. Interrupted by ideological commitment and the slaughter of the Second World War, his love of art returned with renewed energy in the post-war years, when Malraux was no longer just a writer, intellectual, propagandist, speaker and Gaullist, but also a politician and minister.
For his friends-artists of the past, he is now a State patron of the arts, the protector who controls paintings and monuments: from Braque he asks for a mosaic for the tower of the new Jussieu university, from Giacometti a “large head as if for the bow of a ship”, to be located in the Cité, from Picasso the statue of the “Faucheur”, The Reaper, to be placed at the end of the island of Saint Louis. “What I want is madness, what I get is nothing” he sighs every time these projects fail to get off the ground. But meanwhile, he creates the Houses of culture, cleans up Paris, inaugurates new foundations, opens leading exhibitions, embellishes theatres, gardens, squares.
An exceptional life travels the roads and the rooms of the Musée du romantisme, and with it an absolute and constant passion. The religion of human greatness has in him its most inspired and faithful officiator, romantically devoted to its cult, capable of absolute lyricisms, driving and bizarre fantasies. Thanks to Malraux, art celebrates the freedom of human beings from the dictatorship of chance, the capriciousness of destiny: “In the evening in which Rembrandt still draws, all the illustrious Shadows and those of the cave painters, follow with their gaze the hesitating hand that prepares their survival or their new sleep”.
translated by Interpres SAS