Malraux, [George-]André André Georges Malraux, Colonel Berger, pseudonyms

Date born: 1901

Place born: Paris, France

Date died: 1976

Place died: Créteil (southeastern suburbs), Paris, France

Novelist and art historian; French Minister of Culture,1960-1969. Malraux was the son of Fernand-Georges Malraux (d. 1930) and Berthe Lamy (Malraux). His father, an investment banker, divorced his wife when Malraux was a child; he was raised by his mother and grandmother, Adrienne Lamy in the small town of Bonday. Malraux attended the École des Langues Orientales, studying Oriental languages (Sanskrit and Chinese) and Asian art. He left school without graduating, initially finding employment with the bookseller Rene-Louis Doyon, moving to the art department of the publisher Simon Kra in Paris to oversee Kra’s Editions du Sagittaire. In 1921 he was in charge of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler’s art Editions de luxe. Malraux's own contribution to the series, Lunes en papier, was illustrated by Fernand Léger. He also collaborated with Max Jacob on the art and literary review Action. In 1921, too, Malraux married the wealthy German writer Clara Goldschmidt (1897-1982). Bad investments with his wife's fortune in the stock market resulted in the couple's departure to Indochina, a former French colony still under French control, in 1923 for an archaeological expedition sponsored by the French Government. There Malraux attempted to recoup his fortune by smuggling a bas-relief from a temple out of the country, considered the property of the colonial government. He was caught and sentenced to prison. Clara organized a petition in France in 1924, which ultimately released him. After a brief returned to France, returned to Indochina the same year to write for the Saigon newspaper L'Indochine, the organ of the nationalist movement "Jeune-Annam" (Young Annam League). Malraux joined the Kuomintang in Indochina and Canton. He returned to France,, launching two short-lived fine-press series, la Sphère and Aux Aldes, between 1926-1927. Later in 1927 he became the art editor at Gallimard publishing. In 1930 he published his first book on art, Oeuvres gothico-bouddhiques du Pamir, on his experience with southeast Asian art. The same year, his father committed suicide. During the 1930s he participated on other excavations (Iran and Afghanistan) and directed the book series, "La Galerie de la Pleiade." In 1933 he published a fictionalized account of the defeat of a communists in Shanghai, La condition humaine, for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt. Ever the romantic-style archaeologist, he spent the prize money looking for the lost city of the Queen of Sheba in Southern Arabia. He addressed the Moscow Writers' Congress in 1934 and the following year the Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, Paris. His Marxist sympathies led him to membership in several anti-Fascist organizations, including the "Comite mondial antifasciste" and "La Ligue internationale contre l'anti-semitisme." He joined lives with another writer, Josette Clotis (d. 1944), with whom he had two sons. When civil war broke out in Spain, Malraux organized the foreign division of the Republican air-force in 1936. He toured the United States to raise funds for the Republicans in 1938. With France's entry into World War II, Malraux joined the French Army tank division where he was captured in 1940. He escaped and joined the French resistance. As the organizer of the French Resistance in southwest France, he lead the Alsace-Lorraine brigade in 1945, adopting the sobriquet "Colonel Berger." Malraux was arrested again by the Gestapo in 1944. Only popular outcry in Toulouse saved him. While he was engaged in the fighting in Alsace, Josette was killed in a freak railroad accident in 1945. His two half-brothers were also killed in the war. With the post-war de Gaulle, Malraux was appointed Minister of Information in 1945 (which he held only until 1946). He officially divorced Clara in 1946. In 1947 he issued the first volume of his most-important art book, La Psychologie de l'art with the volume, Le musée imaginaire. The second volume, La Creation artisque appeared in 1948. The same year he married the his half-brother's widow the pianist Marie-Madeleine Lioux. Volume three, La monnaie de l'absolu, was published in 1949. It appeared in English as part of the important Bollingen series in 1949. In 1951 Malraux expanded and reissued the Psychologie as the Les Voix du silence, including the new section, "Les Metamorphoses d'Apollon." A two-volume picture book, Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale was initially published in 1952. He embarked on a second philosophical narrative on art, La métamorphose des dieux in 1957. He was lecturing on art in Venice when de Gaulle appointed him a minister of information in 1958, rising to the appointment of Minister of Culture, a cabinet level position in 1960 (through 1969). As Minister of Culture, he oversaw the restoration of the Louvre Museum colonnade to its original state. He also built cultural centers (art museums, libraries) in provincial cities throughout France, known as Maisons de la Culture, a vision he shared and assisted with by Sorbonne art historian André Chastel (q.v.). In 1960 Malraux founded and directed Gallimard’s important survey series of art books, L’Univers des formes (some of which were translated into English as the Arts of Mankind series). In 1961, both his sons by his second marriage, Gautier and Vincent Malraux, were killed in an automobile accident. He separated from his third wife, Madeleine, in 1966. He conferred with Richard Nixon in Washington, DC, before Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972. A heavy smoker wracked by asthma as a result, he suffered his first (and hear fatal) heart attack the same year. Further volumes of La métamorphose appeared in 1974 and 1976. Malraux lived his final years near the small town of Varières, France, in the family chateaux of Louise de Vilmorin, his last companion. He contracted cancer for which he underwent surgery in 1976, finally succumbing to a second pulmonary embolism in 1976. He was buried in the local cemetery in Varières. In 1996 his ashes were moved to the Panthéon necropolis, Paris.

Malraux was an adventurer, both intellectual and physical. His art writing is built upon ideas rather than scholarship. Many of his ideas on the psychology of art can be traced to other French art historians of the time, such as Elie Faure (q.v.) and Henri Focillon (q.v.). Malraux counteracted the fashionable notion that Western civilization was in decline, by celebrating the continual personal creativity of the artist. "Art, for Malraux, was essentially the means whereby man affirmed his power to transcend destiny . . ." (Times obituary). His lasting legacy, however, was the concept of "le musée imaginaire" (usually translated into English as "the museum without walls"), which espoused visualizing art without the traditional confines (and constructs) of the museum grouping, i.e., by country and periodization. The advent of the internet in the 1990s brought again Malraux's notion of "museum without walls" to the art museum community when they began to define themselves in a web presence, delivering images to a public who never set foot in their museum. The excellent German translation of Les Voix acquired the alliterative title, Stimmen der Stille. A 1933 article on William Faulkner is credited with bringing the obscure southern American writer to the eventual attention of the Nobel Prize committee. He was never above unethical behavior. He lied to the Who's Who in France that he attended the Lycée Condorcet and graduated from the École des Langues Orientales. He never disputed his theft of the national treasure of Cambodia for his personal gain and his war experiences, though heroic, were exaggerated in subsequent years. His womanizing cost him three marriages.

Home Country: France

Sources: [literature on Malraux is legion; works that address his art-historical activity include:] Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 97 mentioned; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 6, 73; Righter, William. The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux. New York: Chilmark Press, 1964; Rosenburg, Harold. "Malraux and His Critics." Art News Annual 31 (1966): 133-7, 147-52; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 364-370; Malraux, Clara Goldschmidt. Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967; Madsen, Axel. Silk Roads: the Asian Adventures of Clara & André Malraux. New York: Pharos Books, 1989; Langlois, Walter. André Malraux: the Indochina Adventure. New York: Praeger,1966; Langlois, Walter. Malraux et l’art. Paris: Minard, 1978; Cate, Curtis. André Malraux: a Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1995; Harris, Geoffrey T. André Malraux: a Reassessment. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996; Hargrove, Charles. "André Malraux Buried in Little Country Cemetery." Times (London) November 25, 1976, p. 8; [obituaries:] "M. Andre Malraux: Novelist, Statesman and Critic." Times (London) November 24, 1976, p. 19; "Andre Malraux, 75, Dies in Paris: Writer, War Hero, de Gaulle Aide." New York Times November 24, 1976, pp. 1, 69.

Bibliography: Oeuvres gothico-bouddhiques du Pamir. Paris: Gallimard, 1930; La condition humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1933, English, Man's Fate. New York: Modern Library, 1934; La Psychologie de l'art [series] vol. I: Le musée imaginaire. Geneva: Skira, 1947, vol. II: La creation artisque. Geneva: Skira, 1948, vol. III: La monnaie de l'absolu. Geneva: Skira 1949, revised and enlarged as Les voix du silence. Paris: NRF, 1951, English, The Psychology of Art. vol. I: Museum without Walls. Pantheon, 1949, vol. II: The Creative Act. Pantheon, 1950, vol. III: The Twilight of the Absolute. Pantheon, 1951, [expanded text translated as] The Voices of Silence. New York: Doubleday, 1953; La métamorphose des dieux. vol. I: Le Surnaturel. Paris: Gallimard, 1957, Volume II: L'Ireel. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, vol. III: L'Intemporel. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, English, (volume 1 only), The Metamorphosis of the Gods. New York: Doubleday, 1960; Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1952-1954; edited, L’Univers des formes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960 ff.