MAN'S SPIRIT
Pitzele, Merlyn S.
Man's Spirit THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART. by Andre Malraux, in two volumes: Vol I, Museum Without Walls, 156 pp.; Vol. II, The Creative Act, 224 pp. Illustrated in color and black and white. Translated...
...A little too trickily, perhaps, Malraux calls his first volume, Museum Without Walls, meaning thereby that photography can make art everywhere available and not confine one's art experience to the Louvre or have the taste of the Louvre's curator force a false impression of art's development: on one...
...Now style is a word for which usage has earned a deserved disrepute...
...Practitioner of realpolitik as intellectual adviser to Gen...
...This work has one serious weakness, and this reviewer must own that it was the American critic, Clement Greenberg, who cited it first...
...But true style is a tide, a magic lunar force, describable but not explainable like the angle at which the bones were set in some pre-human spine long fossilized...
...Except that Malraux, himself a political activist, would maintain that politics is the real synthesis of human aspirations, it would be unfair to draw a political moral from this monumental work...
...But he does not venture into modern art...
...And it is this sort of style, in art, examined by Malraux which shows the single-spiritness of creative man whether he lived his life in Florence, Khartoum, Rome, or Rheims, or on the Steppes...
...The contrast of such treatment with his sure-handedness with Chinese painting and with African primitives is disappointing...
...possessed by the same thoughts and feelings, through modes of art indigenous to his place and time, found common expression for his creative urge...
...Many of its photographs of the world's art treasures, from the Siberian ice-cap to French Equatorial Africa, appear here for the first time...
...It is art history, comparative culture, and intellectual adventure of the highest sort...
...a gingerly handled paragraph or so on Picasso and Matisse, and that is all...
...He could, descriptively, have called this book Man's Spirit...
...de Gaulle, Malraux has here returned to the subject which has concerned him in his novels, Man's Fate and Man's Hope...
...He is sure enough of himself to be unorthodox in taste in judgment and in interpretation...
...A passing reference to Braque, to Mondrian, Modigliani...
...Many of its magnified reproductions of more familiar works exhibit details vouchsafed to no one who has not lain on a scaffold and studied the Sistine ceiling at six-inch range or shinnied up an Alexandrine column to inspect the chiseled brow of an Egyptian god...
...Reviewed by Merlyn S. Pitzele MORE eloquent proof that there is One World, and only One World, has never been tendered than in this stunning book by that extraordinary European, Andre Malraux...
...Where Malraux deals with the established great, with the enshrined, with masterpieces, he is magnificent...
...This does not mean that universal man found a common reliance on the brush, the chisel, and the carving knife...
...But tools and materials aside, the expressions undertaken by man-the-artist of reverence, abnegation, entreaty, fear, elevation, and defiance led, as if directed by omnipresent instinct, to similar styles...
...What a modern camera can do, especially when loaded with color film, is breathtaking...
...The controversy over modern painting and sculpture seems to have left him uncertain of his judgment...
...Pantheon Books...
...And the concept it identifies has come to be regarded as precious, better left in the province of the over-intellectualized or the commercial...
...They are a contribution of major import' ance which can be prized by the professional in this field and be under-stood and appreciated by the rankest amateur...
...Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert...
...For what he is writing about—describing, illustrating, analyzing—is the universal urge to express thought and feeling in what has come to be understood as the forms of art...
...The tools of art are not limitless, although they are more various than is often thought, as is also true of its raw material...
...Flaw though this is, it detracts not at all from the value of what he has produced in the way of fresh insights where he has ventured...
...Vistas never before glimpsed or even imagined are suddenly before us...
...One is struck forcibly by the fact that, though communication between cultures did not exist in the ancient and medieval periods, man everywhere...
...No volume that this reviewer has ever seen in any field approaches it in the effective use of illustration to illuminate text and text to render illustration meaningful...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
