Andre Malraux
Andre Malraux
André Malraux DSOwas a French novelist, art theorist and Minister of Cultural Affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humainewon the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as Minister of Informationand subsequently as France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs during de Gaulle's presidency...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 November 1901
CountryFrance
struggle men artist
The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.
struggle roots creation
Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form.
art struggle dark
Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.
beyond cause man restored richness sacrifice total
The total sacrifice to a cause beyond his comprehension restored a richness to man
art communication mass
You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.
artist qualms-about confusion
If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.
men west forget
Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life.
religion youth ends
Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.
solitude endure
No one can endure his own solitude.
order civilization superstitions
Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
important three figures
Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.
artist rivals world
The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.
art feelings wish
Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.
art ideas heritage
A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.