Word: malraux
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Among the many books on art, two were achievements of the first rank. One was the U.S. appearance of the first four volumes of the British Pelican History of Art, a 48-volume project. The other was Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence, a brilliant if tantalizingly subjective musing on art through the ages. In a year when books on flying saucers and interplanetary travel became commonplace, Jonathan Norton Leonard brought the subject back to earth in his informed and sensible Flight into Space. For humor it was a sad, unsmiling period. Thurber Country, a book of characteristic...
...METAMORPHOSES or APOLLO traces scores of stylistic influences, such as that of classical Greek sculptures on Indian Buddhas. To Malraux, style is all-important: "Painting centers much less on seeing the 'real world' than on making of it another world; all things visible, serve style, and style serves man and his gods...
...CREATIVE PROCESS elaborates Malraux's notion that art, not nature, is the true inspiration of art: "Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet poems and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a man who is thrilled by figures and landscapes. He is essentially one who loves pictures...
...study of art has been only one of many vocations for Malraux himself. In his 20s he explored the archeological ruins of Indo-China and from 1925 to 1927 took part in the Chinese Revolution. In his 30s he wrote two famed novels, Man's Fate and Man's Hope; later he flew for the Loyalists in Spain. In World War II he was a leader of the Maquis, since then has acted as adviser to General de Gaulle. Today, at 52, Malraux is working on a new novel...
...breadth of his experience has given Malraux a passionate humanism that contrasts vividly with the dry gripings of most critics. "A man becomes truly Man," he maintains, "only when in quest of what is most exalted in him. . . There is beauty in the thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the disdainful splendor of the nebulae the music of the spheres and broadcast it across the years to come, bestowing on them messages as yet unknown...