Andr Malraux and Art by Derek Allan;

Author:Derek Allan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang Copyright AG

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 ←95 | 96→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

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