THE MINISTER AND HIS GODS
S1R,—What Mr. Douglas Cooper says about Andre Malraux's philosophy of art needed saying, and as usual he has said it better than anyone else could have done. But is his conclusion entirely fair? Surely M. Malraux the Minister has done a good deal to make the French national collections a living and approachable reality. At least he has helped transform the Louvre, by the showing of some hundreds of pictures out of the reserves and by the opening of a chain of twenty-two rooms devoted to the nineteenth century. He has brought out a lot of half-forgotten and hitherto invisible masterpieces which it is a great pleasure to see, and although some of this was planned before his ap- pointment, it was he who secured the extra funds and saw the changes through.
True enough, people must stop using reproduc- tions as if they were an adequate substitute for the actual pictures. But I doubt if the French Minister
of Fine Arts is the man best placed to remedy- :his. It is a fault that is far commoner in countries like our own.—Yours faithfully.
JOHN WiLLETT
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