Andr Malraux and the modern,

transcultural concept of art

Derek Allan

Few visitors to art museums today are likely to be even mildly sur-
prised to find exhibitions that include Pre-Columbian figurines, statues
from Egyptian tombs, Khmer sculpture, ceremonial masks from the
islands of the Pacific, or Australian Aboriginal bark paintings. Objects
such as these are now a normal, accepted part of art museum exhibi-
tions and of the wider world of art represented, for example, by repro-
ductions in books about art. Yet this, as we know, was by no means
always the case, and we need only glance briefly at the history of art
museums to see what a relatively recent development it has been.
The nineteenth century art museum, or the museum of fine arts as
it was then more commonly called, unambiguously reflected the view
that the only art worthy of the name was Western artin particular
Western art since the Renaissance, with the addition of selected works
from Greece and Rome. This had been a long-established view, at least
four centuries old. The painting or sculpture of non-European cultures,
or of pre-Renaissance Europe, might occasionally have had a kind of
curiosity value, but it was definitely not art, and certainly had no place
in the muses de beaux arts where the Raphaels and the Caravaggios,
the Titians and the Poussins,, held their exclusive and uncontested
place. Louis XIVs reaction to Medieval artAway with those mon-
strosities! 1was by no means idiosyncratic. It was representative of the
view, firmly established even by the seventeenth century, that there was
artwhich had probably reached its peak of perfection in Raphael,
Michelangelo, and certain works of Antiquityand then there were
strange, often misshapen, objects from times gone by and distant parts
of the globe that were at best botched attempts to be art or merely
grotesque fetishes or idols.
80 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

All this changed rapidly in the closing years of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the early decades of the twentieth. Not that the Raphaels, the
Caravaggios, the Titians and the Poussins were banished. But suddenly,
after long centuries, the boundaries of the domain of art began to shift
and blur. The so-called primitives of European art such as Cimabue
and Giotto began to grow in esteem. Selected artefacts from non-
European cultures, which, if preserved at all, had been confined strictly
to archaeological or anthropological collections, began to migrate by
ones and twos into art museums. The process was gradualgradual
enough anyway that it seldom made news as contemporaneous devel-
opments in twentieth century art, such as abstract art or ready-mades,
made news. But its effects were no less revolutionary. The new world of
art included not just earlier periods of European cultureMedieval,
Romanesque, and Byzantinebut also a steadily widening range of
non-European cultures, from Ancient Egypt to Pre-Columbian
America, from Africa to India, China and the islands of the Pacific. By
the mid-twentieth century, art for the West encompassed objects from
the four corners of the earth and from cultures stretching back to the
dawn of prehistory. The fetishes, idols, and monstrosities had moved
in beside the Raphaels and the Caravaggios to become works of art,
and in many cases masterpieces. A different world of arta transcul-
tural world of arthad come into being.
What is the significance of this event? Why did it happen? And why
did it happen then? Did it somehow imply a major change in Western
responses to painting and sculpture? Does art today mean something
different from what it meant during the previous centuries? How, in
short, are we to make sense of this event, which seems to stand like a
watershed between art as it once was and art as we know it today?
The answers I want to offer to these questions are the answers given
by Andr Malraux in three major works on the theory of art published
in the decades following World War IIThe Psychology of Art, The Voices
of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Malraux has a lot to say
about the event I have just described and offers some very interesting
answers to the questions I have just posed. For Malraux, the event was
nothing short of an aesthetic revolution which resulted in the first
universal world of artthe world of art we inhabit today. Malrauxs
account of this event in the books I have just mentioned is much more
DEREK ALLAN 81

detailed than the abbreviated version I will give here. I would, never-
theless, like to outline the key points he makes because his concerns are
closely linked to the themes of our conference and might, I hope,
provide an interesting background to our deliberations.

Most of what I have to say will be closely related to the concrete world
of art itself. I would, however, like to begin on a more abstract note and
briefly explain one of the fundamental ideas underlying Malrauxs
account which will be a recurring theme in my remarks.
Lurking within most of the familiar theories of art, its slumber rarely
disturbed by the harsh light of analysis, is a notion of something called
reality or the world. If, for example, art is theorised as a form of repre-
sentation, then it is ultimately reality or the world that is said to be
represented. If art is, as some aestheticians maintain, a source of knowl-
edge, then it is reality or the world that it is said to give us knowledge
about. And even if, as some deconstructionists have argued, art is some-
how trapped in its own web of language, it is apparently still reality or
the world that language prevents it from grasping. It regrettable, in my
view, that the apparently innocuous, uncomplicated notion of reality or
the world invoked in such cases is so frequently allowed to slumber on
unanalysed and undefined, and unfortunately I will not have time in this
paper to ask any of the questions that seem to me to be begged by it. I
mention it however because for Malraux the idea of reality or the world
in the context of art is not left undefined, but, on the contrary, takes on a
quite specific meaning which plays a crucial role in his thinking.
For Malraux, the reality to which art is addressed is a metaphysical
reality. That is a notoriously vague word, so what do I mean by it here?
The reality to which art is addressed, Malraux argues, is the funda-
mental emotion man feels in the face of life, beginning with his own. 2
That emotion is the bewildering sense, which we all have all no doubt
experienced at certain moments, of the arbitrariness and contingency of
all things. It is the sudden awareness that all the myriad forms of the
world seem to have no reason for being the way they are, or indeed for
being at allthat all this is not the permanent, definitive scheme of
things but merely a realm of fleeting appearance, a boundless chaos in
which everything, including man and all his endeavours, seems to be
82 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

without the least significance. Across the millennia, Malraux argues,

humanity has defended itself against this sense of chaos and insigni-
ficance by a series of absolutesbelief systems such as the major reli-
gions of the past that have swept aside the veil of appearance to reveal
the underlying nature of thingsthe Truth, the reasons why things are,
and are the way they are. Appearance then becomes a realm of snare and
delusionfor Christianity it is the here-below, for Buddhism imper-
manenceand can thus be vanquished because it is simply the obstacle
that man, given sufficient fortitude, can overcome as he makes his way
along the path of Truth.
Absolutes, however, Malraux argues, have not been mans sole
means of defence against the sense of chaos and insignificance in ques-
tion. From as early as Palaeolithic times, there has also existed the
creative act that we today call art. Unlike an absolute, Malraux con-
tends, art makes no claim to reveal the underlying nature of thingsthe
Truth beneath the veil of appearance. Art conquers by another means.
Art, Malraux argues, creates a rival world, not necessarily a supernal
world, or a glorified one, he explains, but one different in kind from
reality.3 Different in what way? Different because unified: it is a world
constructed solely of elements that, unlike those of mere, given reality,
are the way they are, and are present, for a reason. Art, Malraux writes,
creates another world, a world scaled down to mans measure.4 It
wrests forms from the real world to which man is subject, and makes
them enter a world in which he is the ruler. 5
In the case of visual art, for example, reality, the visible world, or
nature, is not, as is so often suggested, the artists reference point or
guide. Realitythe realm of mere appearanceis at most, Malraux
argues, a dictionaryan assemblage of separate elements, individually
capable of being invested with meaning, but combined in a manner that
renders them incoherent.6 Thus, all artistic styles, he writes.

are significations; they impose a meaning on visual experience

always we see them replacing the uncharted scheme of
things by the coherence they force on all they represent.
However complex, however lawless an art may claim to be
even the art of a Van Gogh or a Rimbaudit stands for unity
as against the chaos of appearances.7
DEREK ALLAN 83

Fundamentally, therefore, art for Malraux, like the reality it

addresses, has a metaphysical significance. Art creates a rival world that
affirms mans presence in the face of the vast indifference of the
uncharted scheme of things. At its deepest level, art does not exist
simply for psychological or ideological purposes, such as providing an
avenue for self-expression, communicating feelings, representing the
world, affording aesthetic pleasure, providing a form of cognition, or
interpreting social or political experience (to mention some familiar
explanations). Art is a response to mans incipient sense of insigni-
ficance in the face of a scheme of things in which his presence seems to
count for nothing. Whether visual art, literature or music, art is,
Malraux writes, one of the ways in which man denies his nothing-
ness.8

These, as I have said, are rather abstract ideas but I now hope to make
them more concrete through an examination of certain specific events
in the history of art. My key concern, as I have indicated, is the
aesthetic revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century which
brought about the vast expansion in our world of art to which I have
alluded. To do justice to Malrauxs analysis, however, I need to begin
further backas far back as Byzantium and the Renaissance in fact. At
first glance this might seem rather excessive. Byzantium and the
Renaissance are surely ancient history where our present topic is con-
cerned? I hope to show otherwise. I hope in fact to show that the
history I will briefly trace is of vital importance in understanding the
significance of the aesthetic revolution in question and the world of art
we now inhabit.
One more preliminary word. In his books on art, such as The Voices
of Silence, Malraux accompanies his text with reproductions that illus-
trate and amplify the points he makes. From here onwards, I would like
to adopt the same approach, using slides, and in some cases choosing
the same examples Malraux himself chooses. I will say very little about
the individual images I showmany of which will be very familiar to
you anywaybut I hope that, as in Malrauxs case, they will serve as a
kind of counterpoint to what I say and give it added depth and reso-
nance.9
84 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

For its creators and its original audiences, Malraux argues, Byzantine art
was not art in any sense of the word that resembles its meaning today.
The very word audiences, which I have just used with great reluctance,
helps to highlight the difference. Byzantine images, such as the Virgin in
the basilica at Torcello, or the mosaics at Ravenna, were not created for
groups of admiring art lovers, but for assemblies of devout Christian
worshippers. The art museum, which is so much a part of our contem-
porary experience of art, was then quite unknown and almost certainly
unimaginable, and works such as these were not created to consort with
others of a different kind in an art museum, but, as Malraux reminds us,
for one specific contextthe candle-lit interiors of Byzantine churches,
where, for the assembled faithful, they evoked the mysterious presence
of a transcendent God.10 Originally, in other words, images such as these
were intimately linked to the faith which they, in turn, served to animate.
In keeping with the basic proposition I outlined a moment ago, they
certainly sought to evoke another worlda coherent world deliberately
different from the world of fleeting appearancesbut it was not a world
of art. It was another world of revealed Trutha supramundane world
of an eternal and loving God far removed from the transitory human
domain here below.

Although I run the risk of telling you what you already know, I should
perhaps interpose here that there have been numerous cultures in
which the term art, in anything approaching its modern Western signi-
fication, was quite unknown.11 As Malraux writes in The Voices of Silence,
A major part of our art heritage has been bequeathed to us by men for
whom the idea of art was not the same as our own, or by those for
whom it did not even exist. 12 For cultures like that of Byzantium in
which a sense of the sacred played a central role, this comment is of
particular relevance. Even for the European Middle Agesrelatively
close to us in time, after allpainting, sculpture and architecture were
not, Malraux contends, created to serve the cause of art but to reveal
the features of Gods divine world, and the Middle Ages, he writes,
were as unaware of what we mean by the word art as were Greece or
Egypt, who had no word for it.13 The absence in so many cultures of a
term equivalent in meaning to our word art is, I might add, something
that the discipline of aesthetics has only recently begun to treat with
DEREK ALLAN 85

some degree of seriousnessthough mostly, I would argue, to explain

away rather than to explain.14 One of the many advantages of Malrauxs
theory of art is that he treats this fact seriously and helps us understand
why it is so. In Byzantium, as in so many other cultures, he argues, the
other world that painting, sculpture and architecture strove to bring
into being was first and foremost an Other World of the sacred. The
notion of art as know itthe art of art collections and art museums
was not only alien but in all probability quite unimaginable.
At a certain stage in European history, however, a radical change
was to occur and, for the first time, something called artthough not
yet with the meaning we attach to the word todaywas to come into
being. For Malraux, this change began with Giotto.
The Christian faith of Byzantium, Malraux argues, was a dualism:
its God was beyond the reach of human understanding. God was love,
Malraux writes,

But not human love. Gods love is sacred love, and partakes
of the central mystery of the Godhead. The Revelation did
not bring elucidation of the mystery, but communion with it
Though God was love and though man had access to Him
through love, the ultimate mystery of his being remained
inviolate.15

Hence, Malraux argues, the transcendent nature of Byzantine art.

These artists, he writes,

never attempted to depict Jesus and Mary as individuals or

even to standardise Christs physical appearance Yet in one
respecttheir otherworldlinessall these figures of the
Saviour have a striking uniformity, and this is equally true of
the biblical scenes over which they preside. For these scenes
do not depict events that once took place on earth, but
episodes of the sacred.16

Giotto, Malraux argues, represents the first clear break with this
dualisma first step in mans reconciliation with God. The crucial
development was not, as is so often said, a sudden interest in
86 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

naturalism or illusionism, although this played a necessary part.

Giottos discovery, Malraux argues, was a new power in painting
unknown to Byzantium. No longer a hieratic vision of otherworldliness,
Giottos frescos depicted sacred scenes that are at the same time scenes
of the life of Jesus 17events that once did take place on earth. Thus,
Malraux writes,

[Giotto] discovered a power of painting previously unknown in

Christian art: the power of locating without sacrilege a sacred
scene in a world resembling that of everyday life For the
first time sacred scenes related no less to the world of man
than to the world of God.18

Giotto thus opened up a new world of what Malraux terms picto-

rial fiction or the imaginary.19 Though his painting was still very
much in the service of a strong Christian faith, Malraux writes, he
[brought] the divine on to a plane nearer that of man by replacing the
hieratic forms of Byzantine art with [a] sublime expression of the
Christian drama.20 A degree of naturalism or illusionism played a nec-
essary part because the drama took place in a world resembling that of
everyday life. The essential point, however, was not nature imitation
the mere mimicry of the world of appearances. Once again, as always,
the aim was the creation of another world, but this time one that related
no less to the world of man than to the world of God.
Developments from this point onwards reveal an enthusiastic explo-
ration of the possibilities Giotto had opened up. It was not that
religious feelings were submerged, Malraux writes,

but these were supplemented by the thrill of discovering an

imaginary realm revealed by a power of the artist that
differed from his power of representing scriptural scenes, in
that it no longer called forth veneration, but admiration.21

This development took a further step forward with Botticelli. In its

exploration of the newly discovered imaginary realm, Malraux argues,
art began to call more and more frequently on the mythology of Anti-
quity whose heroes and goddesses seemed to represent an enduring,
DEREK ALLAN 87

privileged world of the imaginary and to offer a repertoire of exalted

acts befitting such a world.22 For Botticelliin his non-religious works
at leastit was no longer a question, as it had been with Giotto, of
locating without sacrilege a sacred scene in a world resembling that of
everyday life but instead of creating an earthly realm that rivalled that
of the sacred. Thus, the admiration inspired by a painting such as
Spring, Malraux writes,

like that inspired by Antiquity (and which Antiquity legit-

imised), is addressed to a demiurge which, for the first time,
rivals the Christian demiurge, because for the first time it
gives exalted expression to a fiction drawn from the realms of
the profane.23

These developments, Malraux contends, conferred on artand the

very word artboth a new function and an unprecedented prestige.
The point is crucial to Malrauxs argument. The paintings and mosaics
of Byzantium, like the art of other major religions, had given form to a
sense of transcendence that preceded them and could be experienced
without them. They had drawn their strength, their authority, and their
very raison dtre from a faith in another world that pre-existed them.
By the time of Botticelli, Malraux argues, there has emerged the first
unambiguous depiction of a transcendent world that came into being
solely through the artists achievement. Christian faith is not as yet
under open attack (and Malraux argues that this did not occur until the
eighteenth century). Yet through its newly discovered powers, art has
now begun to construct an exalted other world independent of any
pre-existing absolutea world, as Malraux writes, outside of which
man did not fully merit the name man24 that came into being solely
through the power of art itself.
In short a revolutionary change has taken place, which has altered
the very function of painting and sculpture. Source of a nobler
worlda world peopled by men and women touched by a spark of the
divineart is no longer an object of veneration but of admirationan
admiration evoked by the transformative powers of art alone. Art such
as that of Botticelli, Malraux writes, was in effect the Declaration of the
Rights of the Imaginary that will become the guiding light of the
88 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

painting to follow.25 The creative task of the painter is henceforth

accomplished in a domain unknown till then by Christianity, because
its prime objective will be the admiration it must evoke.26
Thus began, in Europe, the reign of art, in the sense described,
which was to last some four centuries. The domain opened up by
Botticellis Declaration of the Rights of the Imaginary was thenceforth
explored and vastly enlarged, Malraux argues, by figures such as
Michelangelo, Raphael, Tintoretto, Poussin, Rubens and Delacroix.
Further advances were made in the techniques of illusionismand
Malraux credits Leonardo with certain decisive discoveries in this
regardbut in no case, he argues, was this the central aim. The goal
was not a slavish copying of appearances but as always the creation of
another, rival worldin this case a world of God and man reconciled,
a world outside of which man did not fully merit the name man, and
which art alone could conjure up. Thus, despite the pursuit of the
lifelike, Malraux writes,

Art (as indeed its name implied) was always recognised as

something different in kind from the world of appearances
[and] what was asked of art in the period following Leonardo
was not a literal imitation of reality but the depiction of an
idealised world. While resorting to every known device for
rendering texture and spatial recession, and attaching so
much importance to rounding off its figures, this art was in
no sense realistic; rather it aspired to be the sublime expres-
sion of a dreamworld of harmonious beauty.27

My summary of Malrauxs account has brought me to the threshold of

the development discussed at the beginning of this paperthe
aesthetic revolution towards the end of the nineteenth century that
saw the sudden expansion of the world of art to include objects from a
wide a range of non-Western cultures past and present. As we have
seen, Malraux argues that the developments we have just considered
conferred on the notion of art a significance and a prestige previously
unknown in Western civilisation.28 The aesthetic revolution I am about
to describe has taken nothing away from that prestige but has, Malraux
DEREK ALLAN 89

contends, fundamentally altered the significance of art and the function

it performs.

The seeds of this revolution were sown in the closing years of the seven-
teenth century. This was a decisive moment for Europe, Malraux argues,
a moment when something unprecedented was happening; something
that was to transform both art and culture.29 For at least three centuries,
Christianity had been gradually losing its hold on mens minds, and the
new century of the philosophes, with their all-out war on religion, saw its
final collapse. Now, for the first time, Malraux writes,

a religion was being threatened otherwise than by another

religion about to take its place. In its long evolution from the
numinous awe of its beginning to the concept of a loving
God, the religious sentiment had frequently assumed new
forms. The cult of Science and Reason that now ensued was
not just another metamorphosis of the religious sentiment,
but its negation. The new generation would hear nothing of
religion, even though they replaced it with the cult of a
Supreme Being.30

The victory was swift and decisive. An Encyclopaedist, Malraux writes

was farther removed from Racine in his Port-Royal retreat than Racine
was from St Bernard; for the mere notion of retreat had ceased to
mean anything to the Encyclopaedists.31 Despite the persistence of the
forms of pious observance, Western culture became as unresponsive to
the voice of Christianity as to the stellar myths and Druid trees.32
In the first instance, Malraux argues, the void left by the disap-
pearance of religious faith was filled by a new faith in humanity itself, a
faith which, allied to the idea of History, gave birth to what he terms the
ideal of the coming man with its powerful myths of liberty, democracy,
science and progress. Yet while some of these hopes linger on and still
form part of our thinking today, the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries saw their progressive disintegration. That hope which Victor
Hugo, Whitman, Renan and Berthelot placed in progress, science,
enlightenment, democracy, he writes, soon lost its self-assurance. For
when those great hopes first arose in Europe there was nothing to give
90 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

them the lie. But this is no longer the case. For, we know now, he
writes,

that peace in our time is as vulnerable as it ever was; that

democracy has latent in it the germs of capitalist and
totalitarian policies; that Progress and Science mean the atom
bomb; that the human predicament is not amenable to
logic. 33

The result today is an agnostic culturea culture lacking any funda-

mental value. The claim is not, one should stress, that belief in God has
necessarily become an impossibility, or that no-one in any previous
culture ever doubted the prevailing beliefs of their times. Agnosticism
is no new thing, Malraux writes, what is new is an agnostic culture.34
The unprecedented development, which is our present reality, is a
culture lacking any fundamental value, any absolute in the sense
defined earlierunlike Ancient Egypt, unlike Greece, unlike Byzantium
or the Middle Ages, unlike post-Renaissance Europe, unlike even the
nineteenth century despite the fragility of its faith in Manin short,
unlike so many other cultures that have preceded ours or that have
existed in other parts of the world. We can look back across the
millennia of human history, Malraux is saying, and see culture after
culture in which a shared sense of the numinous, or of the sacred, has
given man an assurance of his place in the scheme of thingsan
assurance that there is something other than the ephemeral realm of
appearances. Modern Western culture, by contrast, has only a series of
unanswered questions. Having taken to heart Nietzsches pronounce-
ment (issued somewhat late in the day) that God is dead, and having
recognised, willingly or not, that, in Malraux words, Man is dead after
God,35 we are the first agnostic culturethe first civilisation in human
history in which men and women are born, and live, and work, and
suffer, and die, without any sense of a fundamental reason for it all.
The consequences in the field of art, Malraux argues, have been
dramatic. Previously, as we have seen, the function, the raison dtre, of
painting and sculpture had always been inseparable from a funda-
mental value, and this remained so even when, from the Renaissance
onwards, that value depended on art itself for its existence. What might
DEREK ALLAN 91

the function of art be, however, in an agnostic culture? What kind of

other world could painting and sculpture aspire to in a context in
which the possibility of something beyond the world of mere appear-
ance seems to have irretrievably vanished?
For Malraux, the first visual artist to offer an unambiguous answer
to this question was Manet. Manets Olympia, which caused such a
scandal when first exhibited (and not simply for its subject matter),
announces a change in the function of art no less dramatic than that
brought about by Giotto. A long chapter in the history of Western art,
lasting several centuries, was suddenly brought to a close. Gone was
any attempt to conjure up an exalted fictional worldan other world
of nobility and beauty such as that found in Titians Venus dUrbino, or
even as late as Delacroix. For Manet, as for the many artists who were
soon to explore the new regions he opened up, such as Van Gogh,
Czanne, Picasso and Chagall, the other world of art would now be a
world in which, Malraux argues, art is simply its own value.36 Like
Giotto, Manet had not simply discovered a new style, but revealed a
new power of painting. No longer linked to any value outside itself,
painting would now rely exclusively on its own power to create an
autonomous, rival world. For the first time, painting simply became
painting, no longer subordinated to anything outside itself.
This idea is easily misunderstood and Malraux has much more to
say about it than I have time for here. The suggestion is not that visual
art simply became a virtuoso display of techniquean exercise in the
various possible uses of colour, line, harmony, and spatial relationships.
The purpose of art remains, as it had always been, the creation of a
coherent world apart, a rival world proof against the chaos of appear-
ances. The crucial difference now is that for the modern artistthose
who explore the new world opened up by Manetthat purpose has, for
the first time, become the artists exclusive aim. Cut off from any other
value, modern art falls back on what Malraux terms its hard core. In
doing so, he writes, it reveals

that immemorial impulse of creative art: the desire to build

up a world apart and self-contained, existing in its own right:
a desire which for the first time in the history of art, has
become the be-all and end-all of the artist.37
92 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

Thus while we continue to use the word arthallowed, after all, by

centuries of usage since the Renaissanceits meaning has altered
fundamentally. Moreover, and most importantly for our purposes at
this conference, the change is signalled not only by the nature of the art
created, but also by the range of works resuscitated. For in falling back
exclusively on that immemorial impulse of creative art: the desire to
build up a world apart and self-contained, modern art has simul-
taneously opened our eyes to that same impulse in a vast range of works
from other cultures whose admission to the ranks of art had never
previously been contemplated.
Now we can begin to see the deeper significance of the aesthetic
revolution I discussed at the beginning of my remarks, and reason why
it took place. We today, Malraux is arguing, inhabit a world of art that is
quite unprecedented and radically different from that which preceded
it. The combination of an agnostic culturea culture that owes alle-
giance to no fundamental valueand the discovery by Manet and sub-
sequent artists of an art that relies solely on its own power to create
another world, has made us progressively aware, for the first time, of
this same power in countless works of the past and of other cultures.
Every work of artevery object, that is, that we now call a work of
artwhether from our own culture or from another, has at its core,
Malraux is saying, this same urge to build up a world apart and self-
contained or, in the terms I used earlier, the urge to construct a
coherent world rivalling the chaos of appearances. The emergence in
the West over the past century of an art dependent exclusively on this
power has simultaneously made us aware of this same quality in the
works of the distant past and of other cultures.
This is why we have, for the first time, welcomed into the world of
artthe new world of artobjects from cultures as various as Pre-
Columbian America, Ancient Egypt, Africa, Indiaand of course
Byzantium as wellall of which, previously, were rigorously excluded.
And we can now see clearly why they were excluded. For those who
first worshipped before the Torcello Virgin, as for the contemporaries of
Leonardos Virgin of the Rocks, and even of Delacroixs Death of
Sardanapalus, it would have been unthinkable to compare those images
with objects from other cultures as works of art. It was not a question
of superior skill or talent. It was, as we can now see, that one would
DEREK ALLAN 93

have been dealing with objects of different kindsobjects that could

not sensibly be compared. For their contemporaries, as we have dis-
cussed, Byzantine images such as those at Ravenna were not works of
art, they were manifestations of a revealed Truth. As such, they were
image besides which all images of other times and placesincluding
the surviving, and often still visible, works of Classical Antiquitywere
nothing more than the worthless products of error and delusion. For
the contemporaries of Leonardo, Poussin or Delacroix their paintings
were, certainly, works of art, but in the specific sense we have
examined in which they stood for an exalted world of harmonious
beauty. All other painting (including, by this time, Giotto as well, and of
course Byzantine art) was at best a failed attempt to achieve the same
goal. As Malraux writes, making the same point but choosing different
examples,

In the twelfth century, there could have been no question of

contrasting or comparing a Wei statue with a Romanesque
statue; on the one hand there was an idol, on the other a
Saint. Similarly in the seventeenth century a Sung painting
would not have been contrasted with a work by Poussin. For
this would have meant comparing a queer outlandish land-
scape with a noble work of art. Yet if that Sung landscape
were not appraised primarily as a work of art, it simply did
not exist. Its significance was repudiated not by Poussins
artistic talent but by the conception of art for which that
talent catered and from which it was inseparable.38

The quite different attitude that seems second nature to us now,

which allows us see all these objects as works of art is thus unprece-
dented. As Malraux writes:

It must not be forgotten that we are the first to realise that

every art is closely bound up with a significance peculiar to
itself; until our times such forms as did not tally with a
preconceived significance of art were not linked up with other
significances, but relegated to the scrapheap.39
94 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

Does this mean that we are the first to see art as it really isin its
definitive form, free at last from all extraneous values that previously
obscured its true nature? That would be a misunderstanding. Malraux
is not presenting us with a teleology or treating art as we now know it as
a kind of apotheosis. Indeed, he writes in The Voices of Silence, Should a
new absolute emerge, a large part of [our] treasured heritage of art
would doubtless fade into oblivion. 40 He is certainly arguing that all
those objects that we today call art, from the horses of Lascaux to
Picasso, have sprung from the same creative impulsethe urge to
create another world acting in defence against the chaos of appear-
ances, the desire to build up a world apart and self-contained, existing
in its own right.Yet that impulse, as we have seen, has manifested itself
in different ways across the ages, and by no means always as art. For
Byzantiumwhich, like so many other cultures, had no notion of what
we today mean by artit was the means of bodying forth another
world of revealed Truth, as it was also for Buddhist India, for Pre-
Columbian civilisations, and for so many others, although in each case,
of course, those Truths were of a different kind. From the Renaissance
onwards, as we have discussed, that creative impulse sought to reveal
another world of God and man reconciled, a world that endowed the
term art with a special, privileged meaning because art alone could
conjure it into existence. In todays agnostic culturea culture in
which, for the time being at least, all avenues to the transcendent seem
closed offthat creative impulse has been left, as it were, to its own
devices. It has responded by discovering an art in which, as Malraux
writes, the desire to build up a world apart and self-contained has
become for the first time the be-all and end-all of the artist. In doing
so, it has created not only a new art of the present but also a new art of
the pasta past now peopled not simply by the works of Europe since
the Renaissance and selected works of Greece and Rome but also by
those from the temples and grottoes of South-East Asia, from the
islands of the Pacific, from as far back as the early civilisations of
Mesopotamia and Egypt, and even from Palaeolithic times. Not that
we, today, see any of these works as they were originally seen. Indeed, if
we did, Malraux points out, we would immediately remove many of
them from our art museums.41 But the presence within them of that
same immemorial impulse to which modern art has so successfully
DEREK ALLAN 95

drawn our attention has enabled them to foregather in a world of art of

a kind hitherto unknown. No longer relegated to the scrapheap, no
longer heathen idols, queer outlandish landscapes, botched attempts to
be art, or monstrosities, they have become works of art, not in the
sense that phrase possessed from the Renaissance down to the end of
the nineteenth century, but in the new sense it has acquired today. Just
as the world of art initiated by Giotto revived the works of Greece and
Rome that Byzantium had so decisively spurned, so our new world of
art, dating from the closing years of the nineteenth century, has brought
about another Renaissancebut on a much larger scale. The result is,
in Malrauxs words, the first universal world of arta world in which,
as he writes, a Mexican god becomes a statue, not a mere fetish, and
Chardins still lifes join the Chartres Kings and the gods at Elephanta
on equal footing.42
By one of those strange accidents of history, due to the rapid spread
of Western culture around the globe, there remain certain exceptional
cases in which objects that might form part of this new world of art
originate in non-Western cultures still in existence. In such cases,
Western eyes might perhaps wish to view the objects in question as
works of art in the sense just described even though they still retain
their original sacred significance in the cultures from which they come.
Such circumstances, as we know, occasionally lead to rather fraught
debates about the real or authentic significance of the objects, and
about whether treating them as artand placing them in an art
museum, for exampleconstitutes a denial of their true nature. If we
accept Malrauxs analysis, these debates rest on a misunderstanding.
Neither significancethe original sacred significance or the signifi-
cance now as artrules out the other, any more than regarding the
statues at Luxor or the cave paintings at Lascaux as works of art denies
their now vanished significance as sacred or magical objects. Where
Luxor and Lascaux are concerned, the original cultures have long since
disappeared, and with them, irretrievably, the original significance of
the objects concerned. In the case of non-Western cultures still extant,
we obviously have an obligation to respect the religious beliefs involved
and the status this confers on the objects in questiona status that
might well, if the communities in question so decide, rule out their
inclusion in an art museum. But if Malrauxs analysis is correct, the
96 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

search for the real meaning of the objects in some definitive sense is a
red herring. The Western observer today, if he or she is permitted, may
well discover in many such objects the immemorial voice of which
Malraux speaks, just as he or she may discover it in the cave paintings
at Lascaux, the sculpture at Luxor or at Chartres, the paintings of
Titian, or the works of Picasso. For the culture in which the objects in
question still play a part in a living religion, their significance may be
quite different and, for the reasons we have discussed, that significance
may be quite incompatible with the idea that it is a work of art. Both
voices are authentic; neither is definitive.
In any event, we should not allow the heat and dust of occasional
debates such as these to obscure the larger issue to which I have sought
to draw attention. In the lifetime of everyone at this conference, and of
our parents, the world of art has included objects from non-Western
cultures, such as many of those we will discuss. Yet only a little further
back in time, when some of our grandparents were young, the notion of
a universal world of arta transcultural world of art to use the
terminology of this conferencewould have been very novel, if not
quite unknown, and many of the objects we will discuss would not have
been allowed across the threshold of an art museum. We, in other
words, are living in the aftermath of an aesthetic revolution. We live in a
world in which the scope of the term art, and indeedif we accept
Malrauxs analysisthe very meaning of the term, have undergone a
radical change. The story he has to tell, as we have seen, ascribes to
Manet and the artists who followed him a significance no less than that
of Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo and the artists who followed them. Not
surprisingly, therefore he has no hesitation in calling this aesthetic
revolution our modern Renaissance,43 although, as he points out, this
is a Renaissance on a much larger scale. The prevailing mood of modern
aesthetics, which generally prefers to stand aloof from the history of
art, has, I believe, led us to overlook the importance of this event and of
the radically altered nature of the world of art we now inhabit. I think it
is timehigh timethat situation was rectified. It is one of the many
strengths of Andr Malrauxs theory of art that he helps us do that.
 N OT E S

11 Andr Malraux, The Psychology of Art, Museum without Walls, trans. Stuart
Gilbert (New York: Pantheon, 1949), 23. English translations from The
Psychology of Art, The Voices of Silence, and the first volume of The
Metamorphosis of the Gods are mostly based on Gilbert although I have
made minor changes in some cases. Translations from La Tte dObsidienne
and from the second two volumes of The Metamorphosis of the Gods (LIrel
and LIntemporel ) are my own.
12 Andr Malraux, La Tte dObsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 221.
13 Andr Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 320.
14 Andr Malraux, De la reprsentation en Orient et en Occident, Verve, 1,
Summer, 1938, 69.
15 Ibid.
16 The Voices of Silence, 350.
17 Ibid, 324.
18 The Psychology of Art, Museum without Walls, 137.
19 The slides accompanying the paper included many of the works mentioned
in the text and a number of others.
10 Andr Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, trans. Stuart Gilbert
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), 128-136; The Voices of Silence, 212-
213.
11 Where European culture itself is concerned, an excellent account of this
matter has been provided by Paul Kristeller in his essay The modern system
of the arts: a study in the history of aesthetics, in Peter Kivy (ed.), Essays on
the history of aesthetics (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press,
1992). Where other cultures are concerned, there are many references in the
anthropological and archaeological literature. The anthropologist, Raymond
Firth, comments, for example, that the concept art as such is alien to the
practice and presumably the thought of many of the peoples studied by
anthropologists. [Raymond Firth, Art and anthropology, in Jeremy Coote
and Anthony Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, art and aesthetics (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1992), 26.] See also, for example: Gay Robins, The Art of Ancient
Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 12: . . . as far as we know, the
ancient Egyptians had no word that corresponds exactly to our abstract use
of the word art. They had words for individual types of monuments that
we today regard as examples of Egyptian artstatues stela, tomb
but there is no reason to believe that these words necessarily included an
aesthetic dimension in their meaning.
12 The Voices of Silence, 127.
13 Ibid, 53.
14 See for example: Denis Dutton, But they dont have our concept of art, in
Nol Carroll (ed.), Theories of art today (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2000), 217-238; and Nol Carroll, Art and Human Nature, in
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring 2004, 95-107.
98 L I T E R AT U R E A N D A E S T H E T I C S

15 The Metamorphosis of the Gods, 134.

16 Ibid.
17 Ibid, 336.
18 Ibid, 337. Malrauxs italics.
19 Ibid, 338-340.
20 Ibid, 338, 340.
21 Ibid, 350.
22 Andr Malraux, La Mtamorphose des Dieux, LIntemporel (Paris: Gallimard:
1976), 5.
23 Andr Malraux, La Mtamorphose des Dieux, LIrel, (Paris: Gallimard: 1974),
115.
24 La Mtamorphose des Dieux, LIntemporel, 5.
25 La Mtamorphose des Dieux, LIrel, 115.
26 Ibid, 111.
27 The Psychology of Art, Museum without Walls, 87.
28 And these developments were followed in the eighteenth century, as we
know, by the emergence of a special branch of philosophyaesthetics
specifically devoted to the study of art and, significantly, beauty.
29 The Voices of Silence, 480.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid, 468.
32 Ibid, 481.
33 Ibid, 540.
34 Ibid, 496.
35 Malraux had made this diagnosis as early as his 1926 work La Tentation de
lOccident. See Andr Malraux, La Tentation de lOccident (Paris: Grasset,
1951), 174-175.
36 The Voices of Silence, 605, 610.
37 Ibid, 616.
38 Ibid, 609.
39 Ibid, 617. Malrauxs emphasis.
40 Ibid, 460.
41 Ibid, 65.
42 The Metamorphosis of the Gods, 21.
43 The Psychology of Art, Museum without Walls, 142.