BOOKS

The Minister and His Gods

By DOUGLAS COOPER

MONO intellectuals who have played a role in nkshaping the thought and destiny of twentieth-century Man, Monsieur Andre Mal- raux has been one of the most active as he is also one of the most puzzling. Where does he really stand? By turns revolutionary and reac- ti°flarY, demagogue and man of action, politician and dreamer, rhapsodist and fearless intellectual, ht has repeatedly changed direction and turned lus mind into other channels of thought. After establishing himself, between 1925 and 1945, as a remarkable novelist, Malraux has since the war chosen to wrestle with the formal and psychological aspects of artistic creation. He seems to see it as his duty to make people aware 01 the universal view of man's artistic heritage which has opened up since barriers of visual Prejudice have been overturned, since art history has become a science, and since modern methods 01 reproduction and museological arrangement have placed the world in our grasp with no necessity ity for travel. The volume by Malraux which now appears in English under the title The Metamorphosis of the Gods* belongs to his series of post-war works, for which a suitable generic description might be 'Speculations in the realm of Art.' Here the author deals with a vast theme, namely, the relationship between art and relIgious belief. Why did it happen, says Mon- sieur Malraux in effect, that the role of art under- v4,:eut a profound metamorphosis in the second

ealf of the fifteenth century? For thousands of not considered art was subservient to religion, was

"t considered to have a significant independent existence and yet enabled men to communicate with- their fellows and express themselves sublimely. But suddenly after 1450 Christian artists in Flanders and Italy asserted that 'the w. orld of painting' was a meaningful reality of Its own, began to make portraits of living people, and 'dared for the first time to pit the images rif their dreams against those of the world of God.' From that time on it seems art became Progressively 'unreal' and lost its spiritual signi- ,ncance. For as a result the New Testament story entered into the realm of Time,' where it joined file Painting of human happenings, thus becom- ing Involved with everyday reality and transient effects in such a way as to kill 'that eternity which, it seems, belongs to art alone.' 01118 before Sartre had given currency to the his of Thomme engage,' Malraux had shown by 1,s actions and in his novels that he was aware °lit! the significant human conflicts of our age and we eager to play a part in them. Thus in 1926-27 _".e find him as a young Oriental archaeologist .a_bandoning the past to work with the Kuomin- tang Communists in the revolutionary Com- mittee of Twelve which organised the Canton isma. Next Malraux attached himself to Trotsky for , grooming as an inflexible Marxist. Between 1936 36.and 1939 he fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and commanded an air force "._911adron. At the start of the Second World War

*Seeker and Warburg, £7 10s.

he joined the French Army as a private, but at the end emerged as a colonel in the FF1. the forces of resistance. Since then, Malraux has been one of de Gaulle's chief advisers and has occupied various Ministerial posts in his regimes.

As executive or creative intellect, on land and in the air, with the Right as well as with the Left, personal experience has enabled Malraux to gain a remarkable insight into the workings of the human mentality. And it is this insight which constantly spurs him on to freer intellectual speculation and to the writing of books. His latest contribution is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite history in the light of the eclecticism of modern taste and at the same time to redeem 'the first agnostic culture that the world has known.' By way of paradox, however, at the moment when this imaginative volume—a defence of civilised values and the pr,oduct of a highly cultured mind—is published, the Govern- ment of which Monsieur Malraux (now Minister for Cultural Affairs) is a member is persecuting any French intellectual who believes that liberty and respect for humanity require that an aggres- sive colonial war should be stopped. It is not, therefore, without a certain irony that on the back of the dust-jacket of The Metamorphosis of the Gods appears a portrait medallion of the author designed by Andre Masson, one of the 121 signatories of the fatal declaration on the Frenchman's right to refuse to serve in the war in Algeria. But Malraux's career has always been founded on paradox, just as paradoxes are strewn through the pages of his books.

Who would have suspected that in the post- war world this novelist-condottiere would be concerning himself with day-to-day politics while assuming responsibility for the programmes and display in France's national theatres and museums and at the same time applying his mind to art interpretation and aesthetics? Yet such has been Monsieur Malraux's feat during the last fifteen years, that is to say since he first

published the trilogy now re-titled The Voices of Silence, of which The Metamorphosis of the Gods can be regarded as an offshoot. Charac-

teristically, since entering this new intellectual field Malraux has set about upsetting established authorities. He refuses to be handicapped by limitations of knowledge and gleefully mocks at those who were victims of visual or taste conventions. Intellectually as well as physically, Monsieur Malraux is by temperament an adven- turer and his latest book is a splendid demonstra- tion of how to set at nought such awkward con- siderations as Space, Time and Destiny. For him the field of art writing is yet another tilting-

ground, and in The Metamorphosis of the Gods he unseats Pliny and Vasari as well as a recurring

horde of unnamed 'nineteenth-century art his- torians,' the great Renan, and Emile Male. And all this in the name of a Great Idea, a thesis which must be defended and proved right against all obstacles or challengers.

Obscurity and tumultuousness prove potent weapons, though this should not be taken to mean that Monsieur Malraux is not also capable of clever and ingenious reasoning. His book is, however, a sort of learned monologue which serves to distract the eye and the memory from the manoeuvres which he is obliged to perform in order to accomplish his trick. The legerdemain and familiarity with which Malraux juggles with the names of popes, emperors, saints, generals, temples, cathedrals and. incidentally, works of art may be impressive, but it is confusing. He tries to convince with the aid of cunning juxta- positions of photographs, but many have been taken from specially chosen—and hence danger- ously deceptive—angles. Yet where in all of this are the Gods of India, China and Japan? So far as India is concerned, Malraux sees in its contemporary scene—with pilgrimages, bazaars, sacrifices and 'the measured baying of the horn [which] calls down the Vedic night to shroud alike the sleep of the sacred cows and the shrill modernity of chromium'—the one surviving spectacle which for ourselves, caught up in 'the century of the decline of Europe,' should still suggest what things 'sacred' once meant to Man.

The call of the sacred horn and the cries of the sacrificial goat bring echoes of the message of Ellora—the affirmation that a Truth exists, beyond and above appearance—and this holds good for every religious art, no matter what the faith it stems from. . . . 'Appearance' is no more illusion than it is the stuff of dreams: for illusion is antithetical to a concrete world, as the dream is to our waking hours; whereas the antithesis of appearance is that which lies beyond all 'concrete' reality. And this other world is not merely a concept in which the idea of infinity fuses into some metaphysical Abso- lute. India teaches us at every turn that it can be a state of consciousness; that to the feeling of 'appearance' (not to the idea) corresponds the feeling of what causes it to be 'appearance.'

No mention here, nor elsewhere, of Vishnu, Siva or Buddha. Might it not have been fairer to the reader to indicate that these civilisations had to be omitted because they would have invalidated the author's argument? Unfortunately, one is driven to the conclusion that Malraux is more concerned with his own virtuosity than with trying to bring the reader into closer emotive contact with works of art. Has he perhaps for- gotten that in one of his earlier novels he wrote: 'Ce n'est pas la pdssion qui detruit l'o'uvre d'art, c'est la volonte de prouver'?

Be that as it may, in the end nothing is proved because Malraux is convinced that it is no longer necessary. He hypnotises himself by his elegant flow of language and allows repetitiousness to replace the dialectics of argument. He propounds even banal ideas in a cryptic oracular formula.

The view that the art expressing this new order merely reflected an increased skill in rendering appearance makes it unintelligible: the thirteenth-century sculpture that followed Romanesque is very different from a gallery of waxworks.

In an interview published in Labyrinthe in 1945 Malraux said: 'Since the period be- tween the two wars, the art of the whole world has converged on us. We have become heirs of the world as we are of "our fathers."' He attempted to illustrate his meaning in Le Mae lmaginaire, the first volume of the trilogy La Psychologic de l'Art. There, taking diverse works of art out of their original context, he proposed personal interpretations of their meaning, but without claiming that these meanings necessarily corresponded with the intentions of the makers. Today he does this no longer. Now Malraux asserts that from his privileged twentieth-et ntury

standpoint he can understand better than those of an earlier generation what any artist had in mind, and that their works will enable him to re-create the civilisation which produced them. No longer need the shadow of 'that ineluctable "Nevermore"' fall across 'the history of civilisa- tions,' affirms the author, because it 'is chal- lenged by the magnificent enigma of these un- dying presences. No trace survives of the power which called forth Egypt out of the prehistoric night; but the power which brought forth Zoser from it speaks with a voice as compelling as that of the masterbuilders of Chartres and that of Rembrandt.' In The Metamorphosis of the Gods Monsieur Malraux has banished doubt and speaks ex cathedra. Our duty as readers is not to question but to learn, and 'we would understand Greek art better if disregarding its statues of athletes, we saw its symbol in this heroic being [the .Nike of Samothrace] who sublimates the carnage as grandly as the genius of JEschylus transcends the butchery of the Atrithe.' That the two were separated by some 300 years seems of no account, nor even that the Nike marks the beginning of the decline.

Malraux's theme is the differing ways in which, for thousands of years, Man used Art simply `to depict the Gods.' He begins with the Pharaohs of Egypt and ends with the Madonnas of Van Eyck, but when one searches for a definition of what distinguishes a member of 'the world of God' from a hero or a man the author has nothing better to offer than his ability to detect an abstract quality of 'Otherness' which signifies a dweller in some 'Other World which knows not Time.' To this 'Otherness' Malraux attributes all religious awe and the magnetic attraction which cult images can have for us,today. For, aligning himself first with 'Christianity and Judaism,' then as an afterthought with 'all religions,' he regards Time as an 'outcome of original sin.' Whatever is `subject to the rule of Time' he calls 'appear- ance' and goes on to maintain that for over 4,000 years the sole purpose of artistic-creation was to 'struggle against the sensation of appearance' and to create figures 'harmonising the forms of life with the supreme Truth which lies behind them.' By virtue of its 'Otherness,' the 'sacred' image alone could be 'free from appearance' and immune to Time, just as the temple or church provided a stable and well-ordered world apart from the everyday chaos and decay. There was therefore no question of artists trying to imitate mundane reality, nor thinking about evolution- ary or representational progress.

Malraux sees successive civilisations establish- ing a gap between art and appearance by obliging artists to think only of inventing forms cor- responding to the religious conceptions of the time. Thus Egyptian sculpture was conditioned by belief in the eternity of death, while in Nineveh and Memphis sculpture manifested a conception of 'the Sacred' which by its inherent concern with 'absolute Truth . . . ruled out artistry.' The Greeks, however, abandoned this supramundane conception because Homer trans- mitted totkin 'a vision of the divine, an inspira- tional the gony.' Their gods, near-mortal, legendary and idealised, when given form, could 'participate in the divine in virtue of the artist's genius, since for the Greeks, and the Greeks alone, genius was nothing other than an expres- sion of the divine.' But then came the Hellenistic period and the civilisation of Rome, where 'for the first time appearance ranked as the real' and the erstwhile 'makers of gods' turned into `makers of statues' who thought about 'embellish- ing' rather than 'transcending appearance.' With a picturesque but gusty phrase—Darkness was

falling on the western world but the eyes of the sacred were kindling once again within the shadows'—Monsieur Malraux snuffs out the Roman candle and passes through the Dark Ages to the glories of Byzantium, whose churches ate described as 'outposts of an Other World.' Next come Carolingian and Romanesque art, the latter, being called 'the art of the Christian populace' and 'a great, if humble, art of shepherds.' Here Malraux finds a unique balance between the sacred and the human, but still argues that its main concern was to liberate God's world 'from the thraldom of appearance.' The main features of this section are a forbidding Pantocrator and Judge, devils, decaying corpses and the Dance of Death. With the Gothic period, however, WY makes a triumphant entry into sculpture,' while God the Father is replaced first by Christ, then by Jesus, and ultimately by a cult of the Virgin and Holy Mother. In Gothic art, says MalraU" 'the imaginary was a world of human values, and these values were regarded as the most appro- priate means of rendering praise to God.' , This was a vital turning-point, for 'the artist self-effacement was ending.' Thus the Psalter of St. Louis—'the greatest royal saint'—becomes the first example 'of a Christian art signifYing, nothing,' while in its ivories the Gothic llama produced 'the first secular art form of any real consequence.' The next step was into a 'world of fiction' whose values were 'primarily aesthetic not spiritual.' And so the author arrives at Giotto who could 'without sacrilege' locate 'a sacred scene in a world resembling that of everyday life.' Nevertheless, we are told emphatically that Giotto was not a 'realist,' that he did not 'invent the sky' but made 'his "actors" play their parts in the setting of a ceremonial theatre amid Properties"' set off against a dark blue 'back- cloth.' Soon, however, the world of God was to blend with that of Man, but even then Van EYck's 'realism' and portraiture are excused on the grounds that 'the creative power itself, the very act of painting,' separates the image from the living model. With Botticelli no such justifi- cation is possible. He painted Venus 'because she did not exist,' and in thus opening up the world of The Unreal 'a Christian artist dared . . . to Pit the images of his dreams against those of the World of God.' This may pass as a fair summary of Malraux's involved (and often rhetorically expressed) think- ing. Anyone with some knowledge and an obser- vant pair of eyes will soon detect the flaws and confusions. It is surely false to try and equate sPirituality with an aversion to realism, just as it is false to pretend that mediaeval—or for that matter African Negro—art fills us with awe and admiration only because it cannot be confused with the real world of appearance. Cult images were never intended to resemble eye-witness evocations. Would Monsieur Malraux seriously deny the quality of 'Otherness' to Michelangelo's uielti (Florence Cathedral) or his Last Judgment (Vatican) and claim that they inspire us with a lesser amount of awe and admiration than, say, the West portal of Chartres or Le Beau Dieu at Amiens'? Does he seriously believe that the history of art and stylistic change is nothing but a question of 'annexation,' that is to say, one style taking over and changing another? Is there not something to be said for the point of view expressed by Emile Male: If we knew history better, we would find a single great intelligence as the source of every important innovation. When iconography is transformed, when art adopts new themes, it is because a thinker has collaborated with the artists. Even when it comes to modern times Malraux proves an unreliable guide: 'It is now common knowledge that a new age dawned and its paint- ing came to birth somewhere around 1860.' Can he be serious? 1780, yes; 1860, no. A case could be made for regarding the years 1880 to 1900 as a preparatory period of 'the new age' in science, art, literature, music and architecture which has been created by the men of the twentieth century. But no 'new age' dawned with Manet and the Impressionists, nor indeed with the Fauves, and for painting the annus mirabilis was 1906-07. This book is difficult to read, and its difficul- ties are enhanced by the translator, Mr. Stuart Gilbert, whose handling of the English language is stultifying and deplorable. Nevertheless, one is struck by Malraux's extraordinary familiarity with works of art of all kinds, periods and nationalities. He carries in his head a musec imaginaire which any of us might envy. But instead of a pen and a set of photographs he has in hand nowadays a far more powerful instru- ment for change, namely the French National Museums. Could not Monsieur Malraux turn miracle-worker and make of their collections a living and approachable reality? The prime need today is for people to use their eyes and once again look at works of art in the original instead n or the m of seeing them through the distortions of a re- production fog of semi-literate and often ill-informed critical appraisals. If this could be achieved, our age might recover a sense of artistic taste and judgment, and then the mythology surrounding so much psucdo-art would be exploded. Is not this an undertaking which should particularly appeal to the crusading spirit of France's modern-minded and adventur- ous Minister for Cultural Affairs?