Art as rediscovery: the relationship between art and heritage in the life and work of André Malraux (1920s–1930s)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Arts and heritage are the two categories essential to the fabric of cultural policies and of public discourses on culture. This paper explores the duality of art and heritage in the work and life of André Malraux in the 1920s and 1930s as a window into one of many distinctive conceptions of culture in France. Art, artists, and art amateurs, are, in Malraux’s conception, the only forces that can challenge the fugacity of time and bring art to a new relevance; heritage and preservation have no such powers. This paper demonstrates Malraux’s conceptions of heritage as standard foundations for areas of French cultural policy by building on his novels and his theoretical writings on heritage in the 1930s, and looking back at his actions in Indochina in 1923, in terms of his illicit acquisition of statues from Central Asia in the 1930s, and his adventures in Djibouti and Yemen in 1934. Malraux’s conception not only gives symbolic authority to arts over heritage, but also negates the plausibility of cultural interpretation outside the world of art. This article concludes by showing how the malrucian conception of culture can help us understand some discourses and contemporary cultural controversies in France.