André Malraux

The role of museums in our relationship with works of art is so great that we can hardly conceive of the fact that there are none and never were any where modern European civilization is or was unknown, and that they have existed in France for less than two centuries. The nineteenth century lived off of them, and we still do, forgetting that they imposed a whole new relationship between viewer and work of art. They helped deliver the works of art they housed from being functional, to transform them into paintings, even portraits. While the bust of Caesar or horseman Charles V may still be Caesar and Charles V, the duke of Olivares is no longer anyone but Velásquez. Of what is the identity of the man with the helmet or the man with the glove? Their names are Rembrandt and Titian. The portrait ceases to be first and foremost the portrait of someone. Until the nineteenth century, all works of art were the images of something that did or did not exist, before being--and in order to be--works of art. Only in the painter's eyes was painting painting; often, it was even poetry as well. And the museum deprived almost all the portraits [even if they were of a dream] of almost all their models at the same time that it stripped works of art of their function. It no longer knew palladium, saint, or Christ, or object of veneration, likeness, imagination, décor, possession: but rather images of things, different from the things themselves, which from this specific difference derived their raison d'être . . . The museum separates the work from the "profane" world and brings it closer to opposing or rival works. It is a confrontation of metamorphoses . . .

Art's voyage completes it in the nineteenth century. But rare was the person at that time who had seen all the great works of Europe. Gautier had seen Italy without seeing Rome, at thirty-nine; Edmond de Concourt, at thirty-three; Hugo, as a child: Baudelaire, Verlaine, never . . .

Today's student has a color reproduction of most of the masterly works, discovers many secondary paintings, archaic art, and the Indian, Chinese, and pre-Columbian sculpture of the major periods, knows some Byzantine art, Roman frescoes, and tribal and popular art. How many statues were reproduced in 1850? In our albums, sculpture--which black and white reproduced more faithfully than it did paintings--appears to be the preferred mode. We know the Louvre [and some of its annexes], which we remembered as best we could. For an imaginary museum has opened, which will drive to an extreme the incomplete confrontation imposed by the real museums: In response to their cry, the plastic arts have invented their printing press.

André Malraux, The Voices of Silence