Malraux, Literature and Art

‘Great artists are not transcribers of the world, they are its rivals.’
Malraux, The Voices of Silence

'On this earth of ours where everything is subject to the passing of time, one thing only is both subject to time and yet victorious over it: the work of art.'

André Malraux, TV program: Promenades imaginaires dans Florence, 1975.

Essays on

André Malraux
the theory of art and literature

by Derek Allan
Australian National University

André Malraux in a television program about art (1975)

NEW: Is aesthetics based on a mistake? Argues that aesthetics remains straightjacketed in a conception of art and its purposes inherited from the eighteenth century and that it now hinders, rather than assists, our understanding of art.

Malraux and the theory of art

André Malraux's Theory of Art - Challenges to Traditional Aesthetics (avec version française - e ora anche in italiano)

"Reckless Inaccuracies Abounding": André Malraux and the Birth of a Myth. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 67, Issue 2: pp 147-158. Counters the persistent myth, fostered by E.H. Gombrich and others, that Malraux's use of art history is unreliable. Also discusses certain issues at the intersection of art history and aesthetics. Abstract

André Malraux and the Challenge to Aesthetics Journal of European Studies. March 2003, 33: pp 23-40. Concerns two of Malraux's major works on the visual arts, The Voices of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. The essay argues that these works present the discipline of aesthetics as traditionally conceived with a fundamental challenge. They invite us to think about art in a radically different way.

Interview about Malraux
Rick Visser from the weblog Artrift asked me a series of questions about Malraux and art. The weblog is now closed so I have placed a copy on this website. The interview was conducted in 2003, well before my book on Malraux was published. If asked the same questions today, I might perhaps shift the emphasis here and there. (I would place more stress on the question of art and time, for example.) But there is nothing I would retract. (I have left formatting, illustrations etc as they were in Rick Visser's original version.)

André Malraux, the Art Museum, and the digital Musée Imaginaire. A brief paper on this topic.

Art and Time

The general relationship between art and time - the temporal nature of art - is a crucial aspect of the nature of art, but it is almost completely neglected in contemporary aesthetics (whether 'analytic' or 'continental'). These articles, which are influenced in different ways by Malraux's thinking, address key aspects of the question:

Time: The Forgotten Dimension of Art. Discusses key questions to be asked about the temporal nature of art, and explains why they need to be asked.

An intellectual revolution: André Malraux and the temporal nature of art. Journal of European Studies. 2009, 39: 198-224. Explains Malraux's revolutionary understanding of the relationship between art and time - the notion of metamorphosis. Also discusses certain responses to this aspect of Malraux's thought - e.g. by Maurice Blanchot - and an (unsuccessful) attempt in 'analytic' aesthetics to come to grips with the issue of art and time. Abstract

Art and History: Taking the Past Seriously Examines certain arguments in contemporary aesthetics which marginalize historical and anthropological evidence concerning art.

Myths about Malraux's Theory of Art.

"Of all my books, those I’ve written about art are certainly the ones that have been most seriously misunderstood."
André Malraux, 1973.

My publications and conference papers

My ANU researcher's page

My academia.edu page

Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux's Theory of Art.

Derek Allan

For the first time, a comprehensive, step by step exposition of Malraux’s theory of art as presented in The Voices of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Suitable for both newcomers to Malraux and more advanced students, the study also examines critical responses by figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Bourdieu, and E. H. Gombrich, and compares Malraux’s thinking with aspects of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics.

E. H. Gombrich once dismissed Malraux's account of art as “sophisticated double-talk”. This study reveals that, on the contrary, Malraux offers us a thoroughly coherent and highly enlightening system of thought, with revolutionary implications for the way we think about art.

Includes a substantial section on the much misunderstood topic of the musée imaginaire ("Museum without Walls").

30 illustrations, 23 in colour.

Link to publisher: Rodopi
Link to Amazon

Extracts from a recent review of Art and the Human Adventure*:

'Cogently argued, elegantly written and painstakingly researched...'

'... a brillant example of what could be described as critique engagée'.

'The author's main objective is to retrieve Malraux's philosophy from generations of critics and academics who ... are often content to substitute invective for reasoned debate'.

'... should spark a radical reassessment of Malraux’s stature as a theorist of art'.

an 'outstanding book'.