Visiting imaginary museums with André Malraux

 

André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence, 1951) is a synthetic, imaginative art omnihistory, an application (successful) to be Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, and at the same time an implicit apology for his brief career as a looter of Cambodian art.  Terrible, terrible.  Please see his 1930 novel La Voie royale (The Royal Way) for the fascinating details.

Actually Malraux, a true con man, likely thought he did nothing wrong and was not apologizing in any way.  I am just trying to give him credit.

The first fifth of the book, “Le Musée Imaginaire” / “The Imaginary museum,” for some reason retitled “Museum Without Walls” by Stuart Gilbert in his 1953 translation, is in particular a terrific piece of imaginative art criticism.  Inspired by the great improvements in the reproduction of artworks and the flood of high quality art books, Malraux constructs, and argues we are all free to construct, a museum in our heads, or our libraries, containing all art from all time, in a way that was never possible before.

Not that Giotto or Fra Angelico did not do all right with their much smaller museum.  Malraux has interesting things to say about that.  Perhaps knowing everything about everything is not good for art.

But in the meantime Malraux juxtaposes works freely across time and space, with productive results:

This 13th century French angel and 4th century Gandharan Buddha are on pp. 158-9 of the French text, pp. 160-1 of the English.  About forty percent of Les voix du silence is illustrations, so if you enjoy this kind of thing there is a lot more to see.

I was doing a little “imaginary museum” exercise back in this piece about visiting actual Paris museums.  Malraux was obviously as inspired by the variety of the collections in the ever-growing range of Paris museums.  Think how exciting the Paris museum world must have been just after the war, with civilization coming back to life, and the collections coming out of hiding.

The rest of the book is not so original, I do not think, although I would be interested in what a historian of art history thinks of it.  The third of the book titled “La Création Artistique” / “The Creative Process” is a wide-ranging study of high-level creativity that is knowledgeable and open-minded.  His idea of creativity is more formalist than most people's, although not mine. I just have doubts about how original it is.  That “imaginary museum” stuff, that is Malraux’s.

Let’s have some prose and see Malraux’s extremely French mix of insight, lyricism, clarity, and hot air.  I read this book in French, but since the online edition had, ironically, terrible reproductions, I also used an English edition for the illustrations.  So I will use Gilbert’s translation, not mine.

Malraux is writing about the difficulty of fitting objects like Melanesian masks into our art appreciation frame.  “[A]fter seeing a hundred New Ireland figures, we prefer to isolate two or three and toy with the illusion that they are the work of some great mythical sculptor (of no time, yet a little of ours).”

Those colors of the New Hebrides, intense or muted, are employed by dressmakers and theatrical designers; indeed when a great number of these figures are brought together in a museum, we have a sudden feeling of being invited to se a haute couture of Death.  These glittering ghosts really belong to poetry, which is why the Surrealists make so much of them.  But Surrealism, far from proposing to further culture, repudiates it in favor of the dream.  Our artistic culture, however, does not repudiate the dream, but seeks to annex it to itself.  Our Middle Ages, too, suggest to us what the festival deriving from the prehistoric ages may have been; but once his Carnival was over, medieval man fell to building cathedrals, and his rulers had not “ancestors” but forebears.  (575 English)

Gilbert’s decisions, when I took a look, often puzzled me.  He has a tendency to over-expand.  But he has a heck of a task.  That last clause in French is:

… mais son Carnaval terminé, il construisait des cathedrals, et ses chefs n’avaient pas d’ancêtres, ils avaient des aïeux. (573)

… but his Carnival having ended, he was building cathedrals, and his rulers did not have ancestors, they had ancestors.  (me, trying to be literal)

You see the expansion, a simple “il” turning into “medieval man,” and “fell to” fussily solving a verb issue.  But I have no idea what subtlety separates “ancêtres” from “aïeux” – I think they are synonyms – so I have no idea what Malraux is trying to say.  My translation is obviously wrong.  Gilbert at least takes a shot at it, even adding some extra quotation marks, although I do not think he knows either.  He had to do this on page after page.

If this all sounds interesting but maybe too full of hot air, the big sections are available separately.  Just read the “Museum Without Walls” section, which is also available as its own book, and see how that goes.

In the old days I would have written about this rich, enjoyable, exasperating book for a week.