The Voices of Silence

A great spokesman for the French intelligence, an inexhaustible provider of formulations, Malraux is not a master of exposition. The consecutive and lucid unrolling of smoothly spun-out ideas is something you will not find in Psychologie de I’Art. Though Malraux tries to disentangle his argument and to make his main points in some logical order, all the painters and all the periods seem to show more be trying to crowd into his pages at once, proposing unexpected comparisons and curious observations. His paragraphs and even his sentences become sometimes so dogged and allusive that one finds them rather hard to follow...

This survey is so exciting, shows such an immense grasp of its subject in its great contours and its concrete detail, that one is swept by it through snags and opacities. You have not only extended studies of the most important schools of art but also picture-by-picture accounts of the careers of certain important painters. show less

When I read Malraux I know that his observation in matters concerning the visual arts must necessarily be defective. It would be natural to him to suppose that a painter was (like himself) fired by politics, when this painter was, in reality, 'mad about drawing', as was Hokusai, or mad about certain combinations of black and white, as was one of Malraux's favourites, Franz Hals...

Malraux show more analyses very well the art-scene of our time. He groups primitivism (African, Sumerian, etc.), infantilism, the art of the lunatic, as well as that of the Child. He sees the diabolic principle inhering in the grouping. I could not, myself, have dissected with more understanding the major impetus responsible for much of the painting, sculpture, and design in our time. God is dead, Sartre asserts; and so does Malraux. But the latter perceives the Devil brought in by some of the contemporary artists and he applauds the coming back into currency of the diabolic. show less