In 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its greatest champions. Drawing on a range of contemporary publications, he adopted images and responded to ideas. Indeed, Malraux’s book on the floor is a variation of photographer André Vigneau’s spectacular Encyclopédie photographique de l’art, published in five volumes from 1935 on—years before Malraux would enter this field. Both authors were engaged in juxtaposing artworks via photographs and publishing these photographs by the hundreds, but Malraux was the better sloganeer. Starting from a close examination of the photograph of Malraux in his salon, art historian Walter Grasskamp takes the reader back to the dawn of this genre of illustrated art book. He shows how it catalyzed the practice of comparing works of art on a global scale. He retraces the metaphor to earlier reproduction practices and highlights its ubiquity in contemporary art, ending with an homage to the other pioneer of the “museum without walls,” the unjustly forgotten Vigneau.

The Conquerors describes the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists in the Cantonese revolution of the 1920s. It is both an exciting war story and a gallery of intellectual portraits: a ruthless Bolshevik revolutionary, a disillusioned master of propaganda, a powerful Chinese pacifist, and a young anarchist. Each of these "conquerors" will be crushed by the revolution they try to control. In a new Foreword, Herbert R. Lottman discusses the political background of the book, and the extent to which Malraux invented the history he wrote about. "[The Conquerors] is a valuable introduction to Malraux himself, who would, like his fictional counterpart, become an analgam of talents as novelist, essayist, Leftist and Gaullist, Resistance hero and art critic. He was among the most 'universal' of French men of letters."—Choice "The novel can be enjoyed as a remarkable work of modernism. With images derived from the silent cinema and prose from the telegraph, it moves at a tremendous pace. Canton all comes to violent life, seen as though from a speeding car."—Kirkus "No other writer of the 20th century had the same capacity to translate his personal adventure into a meeting with history and a dialogue of civilization."—Carlos Fuentes, New York Times Book Review

At the age of seventeen he shocked his parents by abandoning his high-school studies, going on in just three years to become a prosperous rare-book publisher, a keen literary critic, and an author of fantastic fiction. He then turned himself into a self-taught archaeologist and staged a bold statue-lifting raid on an abandoned Cambodian temple - an exploit which catapulted him to notoriety when he was only twenty-three.

Derek Allan has published widely on aspects of Malraux's works and the theory of art and literature. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and a Masters degree in French Language and Literature. and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the School of Humanities at the Australian National University. --Book Jacket.

Few men have lived the twentieth century as André Malraux. From Angkor Wat to China in the 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to the French Resistance against the Germans, from being an intellectual viewing the world from the outside to being the cabinet minister -- working for de Gaulle and others to rule it -- such is Malraux's life as it has been known to the world. But is this really Malraux's life? What is appearance and what reality? Jean Lacouture turns now to trace the life of this most ambiguous and complex person. Based on vast research and a great many interviews, some with Malraux himself, Lacouture has written a biography that is both a marvel of scholarly investigation and an exceptionally subtle description of those shadow areas that exist between a man's life and his work, his memory and his imagination. -- From publisher's description.

Moving beyond merely biographical or textual interpretation, Claude Tannery traces the philosophy of life and art developed by André Malraux. With both sensitivity and expert interpretation he defines the issues—personal and artistic as well as political—that underlie Malraux's writings—including early as well as late works, novels, speeches, and essays. The result is a new and subtle portrait of Malraux.

"One of the key texts of Malraux's work . . . [its] pages must be counted among the most haunting in all of twentieth century literature."—Victor Brombert "The description of the gas attack on the Russian front in 1915 will never be forgotten by anyone who has read it. . . . [Malraux] writes with the precision, the certitude and the authority of an obsessed person who knows that he has found the essence of what he has been looking for."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, from the Foreword Malraux's greatest novel, Man's Fate, gave a grim, lurid picture of human suffering. [The Walnut Trees of Altenburg], written by a life-long observer of violent upheaval and within the shadows of World War II, gives a calm, thoughtful vision of humanistic endeavor that can transcend the absurdity of existence. Mature readers will find this a rewarding visit to one of the most accomplished writers of our time."—Choice

Annotation: This is a comprehensive and psychological history of art from a variety of cultures by one of the eminent thinkers of the twentieth century.