Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...André Malraux remains the archetypical questing man, still casting a fiercely brilliant eye on man's fate and mankind's shifting perceptions of art and politics. His latest book, La Tête d'Obsi-dienne, is a bestseller in France, even though it is heavily philosophical. In it, he reflects on art and civilization-Eastern, Western, African, pre-Columbian, prehistoric. TIME Correspondent Paul Ress visited the author in the Paris suburb of Verrières-le-Buisson, where he lives in a villa surrounded by sweeping lawns and old cedars. Ress's report...
Propped on tables and chests of drawers were unframed paintings by Braque, Chagall and Rouault, and photographs of Malraux's own beloved cats. Once a chain-smoker, he has given up cigarettes and alcohol and looks younger than he has in years. "Did you know," he asked, "that the Mona Lisa hung in the bathrooms of Francois I, Louis XIV and Napoleon?* Francois I, well, that was normal because he bought it from Leonardo. It was not so logical in the case of Louis XIV, because in his reign the great painter was Raphael. And in Napoleon...
...first-rate novelist himself, Malraux confided that he is no longer writing fiction. "Of the great novelists of my generation," he asks, "who is? Hemingway did not finish his last novel. Gide did not write a real novel in the last ten years of his life. Sartre abandoned the novel. So have...
History will decide whether Malraux is a novelist, art historian, political figure, or all three; at the very least he will be remembered as the man who scrubbed the monuments of Paris. "I had asked myself why Paris was so sad. The great architecture of Paris dates from the 17th and 18th-gay centuries. But the dirt had blacked out the shaded tones. When we washed them the colors reappeared. One day when I was Minister of Culture, General de Gaulle asked me how the cleaning was coming along. 'Famously,' I replied. 'Let me show...
From a bantering tone, Malraux turned skeptical on the subject of the hour-Europe. "It does not exist," he said, "and never has. It is the last of the great myths. Europe is a pink spot on the map. [In the Middle Ages it was] decided that there was a Europe because there was Christianity. Christianity was serious. Europe is a dream -for Europeans but also for others. I would like to know just how serious the American dream of Europe was. Did the leaders of America really ever believe in it?" The notion of a European Parliament was barely...