Tag Archives: Dr. Steven Zucker

malraux: membership for all

What stamped Andre Malraux’s work as extraordinary was his intensity. When he wrote about a statue, one has a vision of Malraux standing before it with a burning determination that this piece of stone must yield its secrets to him. … Continue reading

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malraux: buchenwald of the plastic arts?

Achievement and failure. Andre Malraux arrayed all art beneath a soaring arch of philosophical vision…but the philosopher is left seekingsalvation in the aesthetic “World Beyond,” … Thus Malraux. At this point he abruptly concludes  La Metamorphose des Dieux. His account … Continue reading

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malraux: venus as rival of the virgin

The end of feudalism, the waning of intense religious fervor,  and the beginning of the bourgeois values and cycles of consumerism changed everything. Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods. Its not hard to follow the slippery slope from … Continue reading

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malraux: after the defeat of eternity

Andre Malraux wrote his Metamorphosis of the Gods over a half century ago, essentially showing how the spiritual in art was slowly transformd into the truncating and commodifying of eternity, idolatry, and the cult of celebrity and the man-centered universe … Continue reading

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malraux: invasions of eternity by time

For whom the bell tolls. In the case of Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods, it was the Renaissance and Flemish art that took Giotto’s new world of pictorial fiction that placed the sacred scene within the world … Continue reading

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gods in art: giant saviors

It was a daring venture of the intellect. Andre Malraux’s The Metamorphosis of the Gods was a philosophical study that sought the key to humankind’s fate through a study of the world’s art… …The change begins when artists introduce men … Continue reading

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metamorphosis: they begin to mingle

Andre Malraux was an agnostic who worshiped art, and whose private cathedral was that vast and dizzying intellectual structure he called the “imaginary Museum.” Jean Onimus once said of Malraux, “Malraux cannot resign himself to the Death of God. He … Continue reading

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Bernini : once more with oomph and feeling

Bernini. Counter Reformation overstatement…A pitiless unromantic view of death was another Counter Reformation theme. Bernini went to the macabre iconography of the Middle Ages and borrowed the death’s head for his tombs. The skeletons holding an hourglass in the tomb … Continue reading

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Bernini and transverberation: a striking through

Bernini kept undisputed control over artistic life in Rome for more than half a century. Behold the roots of heaven. They may be made of stone… …He even managed to put sensuousness at the service of the church. Discerning tourists … Continue reading

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war against the arts

Frank Lloyd Wright grew to disdain painting and sculpture generally and to see architecture as the only art. A lifetime of this mindset gave rise to a predictable and inevitable final result: The Guggenheim museum, a museum that defeats the … Continue reading

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