Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first half-century of Andre Malraux's life has been a full one. A frail little Parisian with bulging eyes and fluttering hands, he has divided his energies between art, Marxism, revolution, literature, archeology, exploration and war, is now chief political adviser to General Charles de Gaulle. Among Malraux's writings are two first-rate novels (Man's Fate, Man's Hope) and an equally fine study of art history. Splendidly illustrated translations of the first two volumes of his Psychology of Art were published in the U.S. in 1949. Last week came Volume...
...Critic Malraux is not always clear about what he means by "the absolute," but generally it comes down to a matter of religion; he believes Christianity is in a twilight stage. For him, a "little pseudo-Gothic church on Broadway, tucked away amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age. On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb...
Taken together, Malraux's three volumes constitute a rambling, rapt, repetitive essay touching on almost every known period and style of art from Celtic coins to Wei Buddhas. Slushy and bone-clean by turns, it abounds in brilliant insights, bends them to the service of a single theme: the all-inclusiveness of the 20th Century's art heritage and the importance of using it well...
Great art of the past, Malraux points out, is largely religious, almost always the product of homogeneous, self-assured cultures. It follows that since contemporary civilization is irreligious, divided and painfully unsure of itself, contemporary artists can achieve greatness only by such brand-new means as making art itself a sort of religion, using the art of happier times as source material, and finding self-assurance in the spirit of historical investigation...
...write novels in the international manner, as Andre Malraux and Arthur Koestler do, a novelist needs to have been around. Geographically, at least, George Tabori has the qualifications. He was born in Hungary, became a British subject after many travels, now lives in France. His best book was a political novel about Italy (Companions of the Left Hand) ; another was a psycho-thriller, set in Egypt (Original Sin), which was chiefly notable for the longest dust storm in modern 1't-erature. This time, Tabori has written a perspiring little novel about Arabia, and garnished it with murder, intrigue...