Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...manifesto, published two months ago, affirmed the right of Frenchmen to refuse to cooperate in the prosecution of the six-year-old war in Algeria. Among the signers of the manifesto were Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francois Sagan, and Florence Malraux, daughter of author Andre Malraux, who is Minister of Culture under de Gaulie...
Apples & Pictures. Malraux is both irritating and sentimental when he tries to give art for art's sake a religious mystique. Art to him is an "anti-destiny," man's only means of asserting himself in a meaningless universe. He equates sacred and profane works of art by arguing that both aim at "defeating the tyranny of Time": though Vermeer "had no intention of imparting to his Maidservant that morsel of eternity which the Egyptian sculptor imparted to his Zoser, he may well have wished his picture of this girl to enter into a world akin to that...
...this metamorphosis, the gods presumably share Olympus with The World's 100 Great Paintings. To satisfy this lofty status, Malraux exalts the secular painter's function to a kind of priestly vocation. Sacred art deified its subject; profane art deifies the calling of the artist. "Cezanne," Malraux argues, "did not wish to represent apples, he wished to paint pictures...
...Malraux thus is open to attack from two sides. The art-for-art's-sake partisans are impatient with such metaphysical preoccupations, and argue that a well-painted apple is its own excuse for being. The religiously orthodox argue that the apple, no matter how well painted, has nothing to do with the case; art cannot solve what Malraux himself describes as "the problem set [man] by the spark of eternity latent in his being...
...most readers, however, the important fact will be that few critics can find as much as Malraux in the picture of an apple-or of gods and men. It is doubtful that he can help his readers find a substitute for God; it is certain that he can help them...