“Reckless Inaccuracies Abounding”: André Malraux and the Birth of a Myth

Abstract

André Malraux was a well‐known name in the field of art theory in English‐speaking countries in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades immediately following the publication of the English translations of two of his major works in the field, Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence) and La Métamorphose des dieux (The Metamorphosis of the Gods). One academic commentator at the time wrote of the “extravagant praise from some quarters” for Malraux's “art philosophy” and its “wide popularity,” while another, reviewing these two works in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, described Malraux as an “art critic whose influence and renown in recent years is perhaps matched only by that of Sir Herbert Read.”1 Since that time, however, Malraux's fortunes in English‐speaking countries have shown a marked decline. While he remains a relatively familiar name as a novelist and as an innovative Minister for Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle, his books on the theory of art have receded into a penumbra where they remain largely the preserve of a small number of Malraux specialists, principally, though not exclusively, in France. Today, despite the initial surge of popularity, Malraux is a name seldom mentioned in the deliberations of aestheticians and philosophers of art, especially in English‐speaking countries, and his books on the theory of art are often left unread.2

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