André Malraux (pronounced: [ɑ̃dʁe malʁo]) DSO (3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French novelist, art theorist and Minister for Cultural Affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate) (1933) won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as Minister of Information (1945–1946) and subsequently as France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs during de Gaulle's presidency (1959–1969).

Early years[link]

Malraux was born in Paris in 1901, the son of Fernand-Georges Malraux and Berthe Lamy (Malraux). His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced. There are suggestions that Malraux's paternal grandfather committed suicide in 1909.^[1]

Malraux was raised by his mother, maternal aunt Marie and maternal grandmother, Adrienne Lamy-Romagna, who had a grocery store in the small town of Bondy.^[1][2] His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930 after the international crash of the stock market and onset of the Great Depression.^[3] From his childhood, associates noticed that Andre had marked nervousness and motor and vocal tics. The recent biographer Olivier Todd, who published a book on Malraux in 2005, suggests that he had Tourette's syndrome, although that has not been confirmed.^[4] Either way, most critics have not seen this as a significant factor in Malraux's life or literary works.

The young Malraux left formal education early, but he followed his curiosity through the booksellers and museums in Paris, and explored its rich libraries as well.

Marriage and family[link]

In 1922, Malraux married Clara Goldschmidt. Malraux and his first wife separated in 1938 but didn't divorce before 1947. His daughter from this marriage, Florence (b.1933), married the filmmaker Alain Resnais.^[5]

After the breakdown of his marriage with Clara, Malraux lived with journalist and novelist Josette Clotis, starting in 1933. Malraux and Josette had two sons: Pierre-Gauthier (1940–1961) and Vincent (1943–1961). During 1944, while Malraux was fighting in Alsace, Josette died, aged 34, when she slipped while boarding a train. His two sons died together in 1961 in an automobile accident.

In 1948, Malraux married a second time, to Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother, Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966.

Subsequently, Malraux lived with Louise de Vilmorin in the Vilmorin family château at Verrières-le-Buisson, Essonne, a suburb southwest of Paris. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieu. Her most famous novel was Madame de..., published in 1951, which was adapted into the celebrated film The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), directed by Max Ophüls and starring Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio de Sica. Vilmorin's other works included Juliette, La lettre dans un taxi, Les belles amours, Saintes-Unefois, and Intimités. Her letters to Jean Cocteau were published after the death of both correspondents. After Louise's death, Malraux spent his final years with her relative, Sophie de Vilmorin.

Career[link]

Early years[link]

As a young man, Malraux began writing for the magazine Action. He worked as an editor for the publisher Simon Kra, who produced "limited edition" books, which were popularly considered an investment against inflation. Some of these books included Marquis de Sade's Les Amis de crime, and Le Bordel de Venise.^[6]

Indochina[link]

At the age of 21, Malraux left for Cambodia with Clara.^[7] There he undertook an exploratory expedition into the Cambodian jungle. On his return he was arrested by French colonial authorities for removing bas-reliefs from Banteay Srei, a Khmer temple. Malraux later used the episode in his second novel La Voie Royale.

His experiences and observations while in Indochina led to Malraux's becoming highly critical of the French colonial authorities. In 1925, he helped to organize the Young Annam League and founded a newspaper L'Indochine.^[8]

On his return to France, he published The Temptation of the West (1926). It was in the form of an exchange of letters between a Westerner and an Asian, comparing aspects of the two cultures. This was followed by his first novel The Conquerors (1928), then by The Royal Way (1930) which was influenced by his Cambodian experience.^[9] In 1933 he published Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine). The novel about the 1927 failed Communist rebellion in Shanghai was written with obvious sympathy for the Communists; Malraux was awarded the 1933 Prix Goncourt for this work.^[10]

Spanish Civil War[link]

During the 1930s, Malraux was active in the anti-fascist Popular Front in France. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces in Spain, serving in and helping to organize the small Spanish Republican Air Force.^[11] (Curtis Cate, one of his biographers, claims that Malraux was slightly wounded twice during efforts to stop the Falangists' takeover of Madrid, but the historian Hugh Thomas claims otherwise.)

The French government sent aircraft to Republican forces in Spain, but they were obsolete by the standards of 1936. They were mainly Potez 540 bombers and Dewoitine D.372 fighters. The slow Potez 540 rarely survived three months of air missions, moving some 80 knots against enemy fighters flying at more than 250 knots. Few of the fighters proved to be airworthy, and they were delivered intentionally without guns or gunsights. (The Ministry of Defense of France had feared that modern types of planes would easily be captured by the Germans fighting for Francisco Franco, and the lesser models were a way of maintaining official "neutrality".)^[12] The planes were surpassed by more modern types introduced by the end of 1936 on both sides.

The Republic circulated photos of Malraux standing next to some Potez 540 bombers suggesting that France was on their side, at a time when France and the United Kingdom had declared official neutrality. Malraux himself was not a pilot, and never claimed to be one, but he was given the title of the Squadron Leader of 'Espana'. His commitment to the Republicans was personal, like that of many other foreign volunteers; there was never any suggestion that he was there at the behest of the French Government. Aware of the Republicans' inferior armaments, of which outdated aircraft were just one example, he toured the United States to raise funds for the cause. In 1938 he published L'Espoir (Man's Hope), a novel influenced by his Spanish war experiences.^[13]

Malraux was occasionally criticized by opponents for his involvement or motivations in the war. He was sometimes described as an 'adventurer'.^[14] Antony Beevor, for example, writes, "Malraux stands out, not just because he was a mythomaniac in his claims of martial heroism – in Spain and later in the French Resistance – but because he cynically exploited the opportunity for intellectual heroism in the legend of the Spanish Republic."^[15]

However, other biographical sources, including fellow combatants, express very different views, praising Malraux's leadership and sense of camaraderie. Here as elsewhere, Malraux's participation in major historical events inevitably brought him determined adversaries as well as strong supporters, and the resulting polarization of opinion has colored, and rendered questionable, much that has been written about his life.^[16] For instance, Comintern records, on which Beevor relies for the comment above, are a very questionable source since Malraux had been critical of some Stalinist policies. Beevor's reference to "claims of martial heroism" is also dubious since although Malraux's books sometimes describe military action, he never presents his own role as especially heroic.

World War II[link]

At the beginning of the Second World War, Malraux joined the French Army. He was captured in 1940 during the Battle of France but escaped and later joined the French Resistance.^[17] In 1944, he was captured by the Gestapo.^[18] He later commanded the tank unit Brigade Alsace-Lorraine in defence of Strasbourg and in the attack on Stuttgart.^[19]

After the war, Malraux was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de guerre. The British awarded him the Distinguished Service Order, for his work with British liaison officers in Corrèze, Dordogne and Lot. After Dordogne was liberated, Malraux led a battalion of former resistance fighters to Alsace-Lorraine, where they fought alongside the First Army.^[20]

During the war, he worked on his last novel, The Struggle with the Angel, the title drawn from the story of the Biblical Jacob. The manuscript was destroyed by the Gestapo after his capture in 1944. A surviving first section, titled The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war.

After the war[link]

U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Marie-Madeleine Lioux, André Malraux, U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at an unveiling of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Mrs. Kennedy described Malraux as "the most fascinating man I've ever talked to".^[21]

After the war, General Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux as his Minister for Information (1945–1946). Malraux began work on the first of his books on art, The Psychology of Art, published in three volumes (1947–1949). The work was subsequently revised and republished in one volume as The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du Silence). Other important works on the theory of art were to follow. These included the three-volume Metamorphosis of the Gods and Precarious Man and Literature, which was published posthumously in 1977.

Malraux was appointed Minister of State in De Gaulle's 1958–1959 government, and France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs. He served De Gaulle during his entire presidency (1959–1969).^[4] Among many other initiatives, he launched a then-innovative (and subsequently widely-imitated) program to clean the blackened facades of notable French buildings, revealing the natural stone underneath.^[22] He also created maisons de la culture in a number of provincial cities and worked to preserve France's national heritage.

In 1960 Malraux worked as editor on the series Arts of Mankind, an ambitious survey of world art that generated more than thirty large, illustrated volumes. During the 1960s, Malraux published the first volume of a trilogy on art entitled The Metamorphosis of the Gods; the second two volumes (not yet translated into English) were published shortly before he died.

Malraux was also an outspoken supporter of the Bangladesh liberation movement during the 1971 Pakistani Civil War.

He also began publishing a series of semi-autobiographical works, the first of which was Antimémoires (1967). One of these, Lazarus, is a reflection on death after he suffered a serious illness. La Tete d'obsidienne (1974) (translated as Picasso's Mask) concerns Picasso, and visual art more generally.

Malraux died in Créteil, near Paris, on 23 November 1976. He was buried in the Verrières-le-Buisson (Essonne) cemetery. In honor of his contributions to French culture, his ashes were moved to the Panthéon in Paris during 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his passing.

Legacy and honours[link]

• 1933, Prix Goncourt
• Médaille de la Résistance
• Croix de guerre
• Distinguished Service Order (United Kingdom)

Malraux's works on the theory of art, such as The Voices of Silence, contain a revolutionary approach to art that challenges the Enlightenment tradition which views art simply as a source of "aesthetic pleasure". French writer André Brincourt commented that Malraux's books on art have been "skimmed a lot but very little read",^[23] and it is true that critical commentary^[whose?] has often given superficial and distorted accounts of their arguments.

There is now a large and steadily growing body of critical commentary on Malraux's literary œuvre, including his very extensive writings on art. Several of his works, including the last two volumes of The Metamorphosis of the Gods (L'Irréel and L'Intemporel) are not yet available in English translation.

• 1968, an international Malraux Society was founded in the United States. It produces the journal Revue André Malraux Review, Michel Lantelme, editor, at University of Oklahoma.^[24]
• The Amitiés internationales André Malraux is based in Paris and promotes his works.
• A French-language website, Site littéraire André Malraux,^[25] provides valuable research and information dedicated to André Malraux and topics such as literature, art, religion, history and culture.

Quotations[link]

"Man is dead, after God". Malraux, The Temptation of the West. (1926)

‘The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.’ Malraux, L'Intemporel (3rd volume of The Metamorphosis of the Gods.)

'In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it'. Malraux in a television program about art, 1975.

"Art is an object lesson for the gods." The Voices of Silence

"The art museum is one of the places that give us the highest idea of man." The Voices of Silence

"Humanism does not consist in saying: ‘No animal could have done what I have done,’ but in declaring: ‘We have refused what the beast within us willed to do, and we seek to reclaim man wherever we find that which crushes him.’" The Voices of Silence

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Les Noyers de l'Altenburg

Bibliography[link]

• Lunes en Papier, 1923 (Paper Moons, 2005)
• La Tentation de l'Occident, 1926 (The Temptation of the West, 1926)
• Royaume-Farfelu, 1928 (The Kingdom of Farfelu, 2005)
• Malraux, André (1928). Les Conquérants (The Conquerors). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-50290-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=4g1n2P_-MEYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=malraux&cd=7#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  (reprint University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-50290-8)
• La Voie royale, 1930 (The Royal Way or The Way of the Kings, 1930)
• La Condition humaine, 1933 (Man's Fate, 1934)
• Le Temps du mépris, 1935 (Days of Wrath, 1935)
• L'Espoir, 1937 (Man's Hope, 1938)
• Malraux, André (1948). Les Noyers de l'Altenburg (The Walnut Trees of Altenburg). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-50289-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=0nzrHlrufnQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=malraux&cd=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  (reprint University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-50289-2)
• La Psychologie de l'Art, 1947–1949 (The Psychology of Art)
• Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952–54) (The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (in three volumes))
• Les Voix du silence, 1951 (The Voices of Silence, 1953)
• La Métamorphose des dieux (English translation: The Metamorphosis of the Gods, by Stuart Gilbert):
  • Vol 1. Le Surnaturel, 1957
  • Vol 2. L'Irréel, 1974
  • Vol 3. L'Intemporel, 1976
• Antimémoires, 1967 (Anti-Memoirs, 1968 – autobiography)
• Les Chênes qu'on abat, 1971 (Felled Oaks or The Fallen Oaks)
• Lazare, 1974 (Lazarus, 1977)
• L'Homme précaire et la littérature, 1977
• Saturne: Le destin, l'art et Goya, (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) (Translation of an earlier edition published in 1957: Malraux, André. Saturn: An Essay on Goya. Translated by C.W. Chilton. London: Phaidon Press, 1957.)

For a more complete bibliography, see Site littéraire André Malraux.

References[link]

This article incorporates information from the revision as of 2010-02-5 of the equivalent article on the French Wikipedia.

Further reading[link]

• Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux's Theory of Art (Amsterdam, Rodopi: 2009) Derek Allan
• André Malraux (1960) by Geoffrey H. Hartman
• André Malraux: The Indochina adventure (1960) by Walter Langlois (New York Praeger).
• Malraux, André (1976) (in French). Le Miroir des Limbes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-010864-3. 
• Malraux (1971) by Pierre Galante (SBN 40212441-3)
• André Malraux: A Biography (1997) by Curtis Cate Fromm Publishing (ISBN 208066795)
• Malraux ou la Lutte avec l'ange. Art, histoire et religion (2001) by Raphaël Aubert (ISBN 2-8309-1026-5)
• Malraux : A Life (2005) by Olivier Todd (ISBN 0375407022) Review by Christopher Hitchens
• Dits et écrits d'André Malraux : Bibliographie commentée (2003) by Jacques Chanussot and Claude Travi (ISBN 2-905965-88-6)
• André Malraux (2003) by Roberta Newnham (ISBN 9781841508542)
• David Bevan (1986). André Malraux: towards the expression of transcendence. McGill-Queen's Press – MQUP. ISBN 978-0-7735-0552-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=T9xjZytIaf4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Andr%C3%A9+Malraux,#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Jean François Lyotard (1999). Signed, Malraux. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3106-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=TrfYXE9KgEsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=malraux&cd=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Geoffrey T. Harris (1996). André Malraux: a reassessment. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-12925-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=4L0qd8EYpIMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=malraux&cd=14#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Antony Beevor (2006). The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-303765-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=VsGtxYCcE2MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Battle+for+Spain:+The+Spanish+Civil+War+1936-1939&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Andre Malraux: Tragic Humanist (1963) by Charles D. Blend, Ohio State University Press (Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 62-19865)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: André Malraux

• Amitiés Internationales André Malraux The official site of the French André Malraux Society: Malraux and culture.
• André Malraux The site of research and information dedicated to André Malraux: literature, art, religion, history and culture.
• "André (Georges) Malraux (1901–1976)", Authors' Calendar, Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. 2008
• Université McGill: le roman selon les romanciers (French) Inventory and analysis of André Malraux non-novelistic writings
• Malraux's early, surrealist writings
• 'Malraux, Literature and Art' – Essays by Derek Allan
• A multimedia adaptation of Voices of silence