1. The changing significance of the work of art in the museum
2. The museum, temple to the arts and sciences
7. The memory of the classical ideal
9. The ultimate significance of art
9. The ultimate significance of art
Form and matter in the work of art are not so interesting as is meaning and intention. We know that the artist transcends the craftsman, but some craftsmen are genuine artists, a religious object can become a masterpiece but not always an object of veneration. Malraux has this to say,
If a gothic crucifix becomes a statue because it is a work of art, the peculiar relation of its lines and volumes, that which makes it a work of art, is the artistic expression of a feeling which is not limited to art. It is not kin to a crucifix painted by a talented atheist, which only expresses his talent. It is an object, a sculpture, but it is also a crucifix. (6)
Here is the great mystery of artistic creation. A painting may be a portrait, but it also tells us something which sometimes not even the sitter could express. The great artist places a seed of immortality in his work. The crucifix mentioned by Malraux is doubly eternal, as an embodiment of beauty to all men and a testimonial of the divine sacrifice to the Christian. Such incredible permanence in the face of adversity, that rooted fidelity of the work has a transcendent value that will be perceived by everyone, believers and non-believers alike.
To the non-Christian the statue population of cathedrals is not so much an expression of Christ as it is of Christ's protection of Christians against the forces of destiny. (629)
Art, then, reflects the struggle of man in the face of an implacable destiny, overcoming chaos and death. And what is true of the Christian religion is true of all the others. The doors of the imaginary museum are open to a new ecumenism.
The lesson of the Buddhas of Nara or Shiva's dance of death are teachings offered by Buddhism or Hinduism. The imaginary museum suggests the vast possibility projected by the past, the revelation of lost fragments in mankind's obsessive plenitude, brought together in their common invincible presence. (673)
The imaginary museum for Malraux is much more than a repository or a conservatory of reproductions. It is nothing less than the place where man befriend man, the meeting place of the artist of today with the artist of the past and the artist of the future. This human plenitude cannot be contained by time and space because,
Each masterpiece purifies the world, and their common lesson is that they exist, and the victory of each artist over his servitude converges in an enormous display, that of art over human destiny. Art is anti-destiny. (637)
That phrase "art is anti-destiny" says it all. Malraux attributes to art a humanizing duty that knows no boundaries of space or time. The imaginary museum, as he imagines it, is the world of the possible more than the actual world, where the work of art could well be unrealized but never impossible. This idea, as we saw before, opens the doors to "virtual interaction" with the artworks of all ages, including unfinished and even unborn works which we can bring to life. Museums, real, imaginary and virtual, help us to establish a new relationship with the past. That is why they fulfill an irreplaceable role in civilization.
The voice of the artist draws its strength from his being born to a loneliness that calls out to the Universe to give it a human voice, and in the great art of the past there survives for us the invincible inner voice of vanished civilizations. (628)
Malraux thinks of the museum not as a place of peace but of struggle. It is a fight for the dignity of man because of his transcendent courage.
Our culture is not made up of reconciled pasts but of irreconcilable parts of the past. We know that it is not an inventory, that we are the inheritors of metamorphosis and the past is there to be conquered. (631)
Values confronted with destiny tear the limits of the human condition. There is implicit an enormous sacrifice, a daily victory over the "irreconcilable parts of the past." Dead values can be revived.
In the cemetery of dead values we discover that values live and die in relation with destiny. As the human types that express the highest values, supreme values are mankind's bulwarks. Each of us feels that the saint, the wiseman, the hero, are victorious over the human condition. (631)
Supreme values converge but do not mix, each keeps its infinite uniqueness and dignity. They are always linked to a promise, to an announced salvation.
Buddhist saints do not resemble nor can they be like Saint Peter or Saint Augustin, neither can Leonidas be like Bayard or Socrates like Ghandi. The succession of ephemeral values that surround a civilization: the Taoist conscience, the Hinduist submission to the Cosmos, the Greek questioning, the medieval community, reason, history, show us in an even clearer manner how values decline when they don't aim at salvation. (631)
Finally, Malraux goes beyond the museum as a temple to art, he proposes the masterpiece as the supreme expression of the purest value, as the human work that transcends and brings salvation in every age.
It is art in its entirety, made free by our own art, with which our civilization, the first to do this, defies destiny. (631)
The contemporary artist has placed his final objective in creativity and acknowledges this supreme value in all cultures. For this reason,
It is us and not posterity who reveal a centuries old treasure, since creation has become for our artists the supreme value. We are the ones who have drawn the living past from the dead past. (631)
Just as art can be said to be "anti-destiny,"
History in art has a limitation which is destiny itself since it fails to act absolutely on the artist who awakens the interest of successive generations of art lovers, but because each age implies a form of collective destiny which it imposes upon those who defy it. (633)
This is how a universal art culture is developing for the first time in history, with the same basis as the imaginary museum.
The first universal culture of art, which will no doubt transform modern art while following its guidelines, is not an invasion but one of the supreme conquests of the West. (638)
At the end of this millennium we are aware of ourselves as the inheritors of the greatness of all cultures.
If the quality of the world is the subject matter of all cultures, the quality of man is their objective. It is this quality that makes culture not an accumulation of knowledge but the repository of greatness. Our art culture knows that no limits can be placed on the most subtly refined sensibility, and has searched for the figures, the songs and poems that are the heritage of the most ancient nobility in the world, because it now knows that it is its only heir. (638)
It does not matter that the artist's existence is a matter of indifference to the universe of things, the work of art is a gift to man.
No doubt for a believer this long dialogue on metamorphoses and resurrections is joined to a divine voice, because man does not become a man unless he pursues his highest aspirations. But there is also beauty in the animal that knowing it must die wrings irony from darkness and sings to the stars, casting haphazardly into the centuries words unknown to us. (639)
Many times a meditation in front of a work of art may lead to a deep spiritual change. There are many testimonies of metanoia. One of the most recent and touching is told by Henri J. M. Nouwen in his The Return of the Prodigal Son. Meditations on viewing a Rembrandt.(9) The story begins in an imaginary museum and ends at the Hermitage. "An apparently meaningless encounter with a reproduction representing a detail of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son sent me off on a long spiritual adventure that led me to understand my vocation better and gain new strength to live it. The actors in this adventure are a picture of the seventeenth century and its author (Rembrandt), a parable of the first century and its author (Saint Lucas, 15, 11-32) and a man of the twentieth century in search of meaning in his life." Nouwen, a Dutch priest and Harvard professor tells us of his first contact with a color poster of the masterpiece. "I saw a man dressed in an enormous red cloak tenderly touching the shoulders of an unkempt boy kneeling in front of him. I could not look away. I was attracted by the intimacy of the man, the warm red of the man's cloak, the golden yellow of the boy's tunic, and the mysterious light surrounding the scene. But above all it was the hands, the hands of an old man and the manner in which they touched the boy's shoulders which transported me to a place where I had never been before." An emphasized detail of a reproduction met by chance let loose a chain of events that took our author to St. Petersburg where he would contemplate for hours the original of this work of genius, one of his compatriot Rembrandt's last. Nouwen confesses, "I drew close to Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, as if it were my own: a picture that contained not only the essential story that God wanted me to tell others, but also the one I myself wanted to tell to men and women of God. This picture became a mysterious window through which I stepped into God's kingdom."
Figure 4
What matters Rembrandt lost among the nebulae? demands Malraux. For it is the stars that deny man and it is man to whom Rembrandt speaks. It is late afternoon and Rembrandt draws, watched while he sketches by the shadows of the illustrious dead and cavemen draftsmen, their eyes on his doubting hand which is preparing their renewed survival or perhaps their new dreaming. And in the evening, the quivering hand is accompanied by millennia, and it trembles with one of the secret forms, one of the highest, the one representing the strength and honor of being a man. (640)
Thus does Malraux conclude his book and on leaving his Imaginary Museum he generously throws open for us the doors of the virtual museum (10) of the twenty-first century so that we can share with our brothers the honor of belonging to the human family.
