Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stood to reason that Novelist André Malraux, onetime fighter pilot with the Loyalists in Spain's civil war, and internationally famed art critic, would eventually zero in on Francisco Goya. An illness deafened Goya in his 40s and turned him from pleasant art to black indictments of man's inhumanity and fate's immutability. Believing that Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 spelled liberation, Goya at first collaborated. Inevitable disillusion further deepened his pessimism. Malraux, too, had a severe comeuppance in middle age when his Communist leanings proved to have been a flirtation with...
...sight as well, and even for his sanity. Slowly he ceased painting charming pictures and embarked on the hard-to-take masterpieces that made him an immortal. His purpose, he wrote, was simply "to occupy my imagination, which was troubled by consideration of my ills." Goya's art, Malraux maintains, consists of "taming madness so as to make a language...
...Goya, as to Malraux, the eternal resembled eternal night. "His patches of dark color often seem to represent darkness, but their function is more like that of the golden backgrounds of the Middle Ages; they take the scene out of reality and, as with the Byzantine scene, place it at once in a universe that does not belong to man. This black is devil's gold; it marks out the fantastic as strictly as the golden background had marked out the sacred...
Goya's destiny, says Malraux, "was an imperious one, and the Court which was filled with his name glitters for us lit by the rays of his black sun. But he was uncertain how far he was entitled to his phantoms, and still more uncertain how far his phantoms were entitled to enter the domain of art. He waited twenty years before giving them, in paint, their tyrannous accent...
...Tour's style, De Young Director Walter Heil says: "It is almost an abstract realism." Wrote French Critic Andreé Malraux: "No other painter, not even Rembrandt, can so well suggest that vast, elemental stillness; La Tour alone is the interpreter of the serene that dwells in the heart of darkness...