André Malraux: Quotes about art

André Malraux was French novelist, art theorist and politician. Explore interesting quotes on art.
André Malraux: 74 quotes6 likes

“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

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

“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.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: 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.

“The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety.”

André Malraux

André Malraux, Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951) Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Context: The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.

“Art is a revolt against fate.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say.”

André Malraux

L'espoir [Man's Hope] (1938)

“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.”

André Malraux

Part I, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“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.”

André Malraux

Part I, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“One can like that the meaning of the word "art" is to try to make men aware of the greatness that they ignore in them.”

André Malraux

André Malraux, Préface du Temps du mépris (1935), Malraux citations sur www. fondationandremalraux. org http://fondationandremalraux.org/index.php/citations/

“History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.”

André Malraux

Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)