SPRING BOOKS
Malraux's Law of Metamorphosis
By PHILIP HENDY
THAT now grandiose word Art still has for its first gloss in the dictionary the modest word Skill. The meaning of the word has been becoming more intellectual at least since the seventeenth century; but it is in the last hundred Years that it has been widely attaining a new significance. Once Art was the modest servant of Religion—as Ruskin in the last .entury wanted it always to remain. Now, to a public a nundred times greater than Ruskin's, it has become a value Parallel to Religion; to many even a value that has taken its Place : an Absolute.
" The notion of art as such must first come into being," writes Malraux* (p. 53), " if the past is to acquire an artistic value; thus for a Christian to see a classical statue as a statue, tad not as a heathen idol or a mere puppet, he would have ad to begin by seeing in a ' Virgin ' a statue, before seeing it as the Virgin." . The awakening is bound to be accompanied by doubts. „Though a Gothic crucifix," Malraux continues (p. 65), .,"i becomes a statue, as being a work of art, those special rela- tions between its lines and masses which make it a work of art are the creative expression of an emotion far exceeding a mere will to art." Having' learned to see as art such a variety of things, from all the centuries and all the corners ?f the earth, as no generation has been able to see before, have we only acquired a culpable superficiality? In finding the statue have we inevitably lost the god? , To make a work of art it takes two : the man who emits n from his mind in the form of an image and the man who receives the image into his mind. The image does not change; out each person will receive it differently according to his capacity, and, as time passes, according to the decade, the generation, the century. Thus the work of art is constantly undergoing a metamorphosis in the light of the culture of the °ay and of the new images which are a part of it. So the ctluestion of the value of our present-day ' esthetic ' apprecia- °n is bound up with the question of the value of our more ,, "r less ' abstract ' art. We hear much about the collapse of humanism, even more about the decay of religion. We hear little of what we have gained in compensation. .. The problems seem scarcely to exist for the professionals 7,stlieticians building card-houses out of art-forms already obsolescent, only to see them collapse as new forms are born; Lae art-historians with their self-blinding belief in a constant trogress in art—up to the point at which they themselves art into to become blind; the museum ' authorities ' carving up n` into portions according to the different materials and tech- 't, clues which were meant to complement each other, according 4.1.‘j the national boundaries over which—if the boundaries 'Alen existed—art has always triumphed, or, most unwhole- some Present. of all, into art of the dead past and art of the living present. of art from the context of its original setting and that the art of the museums is but a very limited, portable fragment of the art of the world as we know it now. In the first of the book's four Parts the museum walls go down at a puff. His Museum without Walls—the title of the first Part but a concept to which he often refers in the others—is an ideal collection of reproductions by which the physical limitations of time and space can be flouted and juxtapositions of works of art can be arranged and re-arranged regardless even of scale.
Thus liberated from the shackles of art-history, we are led from our museum cells into a 642-page labyrinth (trick-lit by more than 400 illustrations) of brilliant aphorisms, illuminating ideas and new evaluations of the art of all the world from the birth of image-making man. Needless to say, all the evalua- tions will not find acceptance with. everyone., For instance, our guide seems to me to dally too long in Part 3, called The Creative Process, over Caravaggio and, still more, Georges de Latour; but this may be because recent exhibitions have brought these painters to the front and the labyrinth is con- structed loosely, some of it seemingly from material ready to hand. Some of the judgements from which he draws deduc- tions are exceedingly dogmatic, as when he attributes Fra Angelico's fresco The Annunciation with. S. Peter Martyr' only to his school' (p. 365), the London version of ' The Virgin of the Rocks ' persistently (pp. 364 and 373-74) to Ambrogio de Predis ' or a large portion of Leonardo's St. Anne' (presumably, p. 418) to an assistant (these page refer- ences are given because no Ariadne has provided an index by which we may retrace our steps, and the eight-page synopsis gives little help). Our guide, however, is untrammelled by any predetermined theory of esthetics. He has understood far too well the inter- minable metamorphoses of art which it is his main delight to point out by the way. So at the entl of the labyrinth, Part 4, suitably called The Aftermath of the Absolute, he offers us rlo golden key to the future but only a greatly enlarged understanding of Art and the problems with which we are faced : " Though we sometimes have inklings (p. 609) of an underlying affinity in all art forms . . . . it does not prevail against their constant metamorphosis or our knowledge that the continuity of art is ensured by new discoveries. No traditional aesthetic has ' spread ' from Greece to Oceania; but it is true to say that a new idea of art has arisen in our times. . . . And it is because this idea is not based on any esthetic preconception that for the first time it covers the whole world.
"The rise to power of history, which began with the decline of Christendom and even of Christianity, is due neither to modem science nor to historical research into the lives of Christ and Buddha, but to the fact that history pigeon-holes each religion within a temporal context, thus depriving it of its virtue as an absolute. .
" In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value' p. 616), modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art." Malraux does not claim that the supreme values of our own day are expressed in our art: " The modern work of art (p. 624) cannot supply the ' present help in time of need ' that was once supplied by the gods of Delphi and the saints of Rheims— for the good reason that a culture that has lost its bearings has no holy figures; thus ours has to fall back on resuscitating those of other cultures." Nevertheless he believes (p. 616): " There is a fundamental value of modern art, and one that goes far deeper than a mere quest of the pleasure of the eye. Its annexation of the visible world was but a preliminary move, and it stands for 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.
The statement on the back of the title page " First published in England 1954 may be misleading. In 1949 Zweramer published two Parts : Museum without Walls and The Creative Act, now Part 3 and called The Creative Process. Part 4 was published in the United States. Part 2, The Metamorphoses of Apollo, is the only part not published before in English.
The translation (into American) is excellent. So are the binding and production of this unified volume.
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