Andre Malraux: 'There is only one action over which in different stars and unchanging rivers have no sway: it is the action of a man who snatches something from death' - Culture - May 1960 - Critical Essay

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001

The following is the full text of an address delivered in Unesco's Headquarters on March. 8 by Andre Malraux, French Minister of State for Cultural Affairs. M. Malraux was presiding at the ceremony which marked the launching of the International Campaign for the Preservation of the Monuments of Nubia.

ON March 8 1960, for the first time, the nations, though many of them even now are engaged in overt or open conflict, have been summoned to save by a united effort the fruits of a civilization on which none has a pre-emptive claim.

Such an appeal, in the last century, would have seemed fanciful. Not that Egypt was unknown then. Her spiritual greatness was surmised, her majestic monuments were admired. But if the West knew Egypt better than it knew India or China, this was because it saw in her a province of the Bible. Through the Bible, Egypt, like Chaldaea, belonged to the dawn of our own history. Of the forty centuries Napoleon evoked as he stood before the Pyramids, the supreme moment was that in which they were beheld by Moses.

Temples have power to speak and statues acquire a soul

THEN, gradually, Egypt came into her own, though still within narrower limits than one would imagine. The pre-eminence of Graeco-Roman architecture and sculpture was never called in question; Baudelaire could speak of Egyptian "naivete." These tremendous temples, these rapt masterpieces which for three thousand years had seemed to commune with each other in the same unchanging dream, were above all prized as records, the only ones bequeathed to us by the ancient East. They fell within the domain of history rather than of art. In 1890 as in 1820, though the West was moved to study Egypt, it was not moved to safeguard her works.

With our own century, however, has come one of the greatest developments in man's spiritual history. These temples which had been looked on only as records have again become living witnesses; these statues have acquired a soul. Not, to be sure, the spirit which first informed them; but one which is their own, which we find nowhere else but in them, and which nobody before us has found there.

We talk of this art as a witness to a civilization, just as we say that Romanesque art bears witness to the Christianity of its time. Yet in fact we can only really comprehend a culture that still survives. Egyptologists have done noble work: but the faith of a priest of Amon, the basic attitude of an Egyptian to the world around him, are beyond our grasp. The humour of the ostraca, the homely figurines, the text where a soldier calls Rameses II by his nickname as familiarly as his veterans used Napoleon, the worldly wisdom of the legal texts--how are we to relate these to the Book of the Dead, to the funereal majesty of the great statues, to a civilization which for three thousand years seemed dedicated only to the celebration of the after-life?

Nefertiti haunts our painters Cleopatra inspires our poets

THE only ancient Egypt which can come alive for us is the one conveyed by its art--and this is an Egypt that never existed at all, any more than the kind of Christianity which would be inferred from Romanesque art if that were our only witness to it. Yet Egypt has survived in her art, not through famous names or lists of victories... Despite Kadesh, one of history's decisive battles, despite the cartouches carved and recarved at the behest of the bold pharaoh seeking to force his lineage upon the gods, Sesostris has less meaning for us than the unfortunate Akhnaton. The face of Queen Nefertiti haunts our painters as Cleopatra has inspired our poets; but whereas Cleopatra is a queen without a face, Nefertiti, for us, is a face without a kingdom.

Egypt, then, survives by virtue of certain forms. And today we know that these forms, like those of all religious cultures, are not to be interpreted in terms of the living people they profess to portray but in terms of the conventions which raise these people to the other world. At their highest expression, Egyptian conventions were designed to mediate between ephemeral men and the controlling stars. It is an art that consecrates night.

That is what we all must feel before the Sphinx at Gizeh, as I remember doing last time I saw it at twilight. I thought then, "How the second, furthermost pyramid enfolds the view, and how it makes this colossal death-mask seem like the guardian of some trap set to lure the heaving desert and the darkness. This is the hour when the oldest fashioned forms recapture the soft murmur with which the desert echoes the timeless devotions of the East; the hour when they restore to life these places where the gods were heard; when they banish the immensity of chaos and order the stars which seemingly emerge from night simply to gravitate round them."

In such a way, during three thousand years, Egyptian art translated the temporal into the eternal.

Let there be no misapprehension about this today: it is not as a witness to the past that it moves us, nor as what used to be called beauty. "Beauty" has become one of our age's most potent mysteries, the inexplicable quality which brings the Egyptian masterpieces into communion with the statues of our own cathedrals, or the Aztec temples, or the Indian and Chinese grottoes; with the paintings of Cezanne and Van Gogh, with the greatest dead and the greatest living artists; with, in short, the whole treasury of the first world civilization.