Telling Voice

The most talked-of art critic alive today is France's frail, adventurous Andre Malraux. When his three-volume Psychology of Art was published in the U.S. in 1949-51, it was welcomed with raves--and a good deal of honest bewilderment. Wrote Critic Edmund Wilson: "It is hard to judge very brilliant books, which may dazzle, deafen and stun when they explode under our noses, but [this is] perhaps one of the really great books of our time." Malraux himself was not so pleased with the book; it suffered from poor organization and a turbulent, over-intricate style. He rewrote it as a one-volume work, The Voices of Silence, published in the U.S. this week (Doubleday; $25).

The new book has some of the same faults as the old, but its 661 profusely illustrated pages glitter with sharp insight. Malraux has arranged them in four rambling essays, which cover the entire course of the world's art. The main theme of each essay is hinted by its title:

MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS explores Malraux's thesis that art reproductions present mankind for the first time with a real view of the whole world's art. In reproductions, he writes, "miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek vase paintings, 'details' and even statuary . . . have lost their properties as objects; but . . . gained something: the utmost significance as to style that they can possibly acquire."

THE METAMORPHOSES or APOLLO traces scores of stylistic influences, such as that of classical Greek sculptures on Indian Buddhas. To Malraux, style is all-important: "Painting centers much less on seeing the 'real world' than on making of it another world; all things visible, serve style, and style serves man and his gods."

THE CREATIVE PROCESS elaborates Malraux's notion that art, not nature, is the true inspiration of art: "Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet poems and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a man who is thrilled by figures and landscapes. He is essentially one who loves pictures."

AFTERMATH OF THE ABSOLUTE starts with the premise that art has ceased to be mainly connected with religion: "The cult of Science and Reason [is] not just another metamorphosis of religious sentiment, but its negation." Modern painters, he adds, make art itself a sort of substitute for religion. "Modern art . . . does not sponsor any makeshift absolute, but. at least in the artist's eyes, has stepped into its--the absolute's--place."

The study of art has been only one of many vocations for Malraux himself. In his 20s he explored the archeological ruins of Indo-China and from 1925 to 1927 took part in the Chinese Revolution. In his 30s he wrote two famed novels, Man's Fate and Man's Hope; later he flew for the Loyalists in Spain. In World War II he was a leader of the Maquis, since then has acted as adviser to General de Gaulle. Today, at 52, Malraux is working on a new novel.

The breadth of his experience has given Malraux a passionate humanism that contrasts vividly with the dry gripings of most critics. "A man becomes truly Man," he maintains, "only when in quest of what is most exalted in him. . . There is beauty in the thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the disdainful splendor of the nebulae the music of the spheres and broadcast it across the years to come, bestowing on them messages as yet unknown."

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