André Malraux

French novelist, art theorist, and statesman (1901–1976)

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Lived 1901–1976, aged 75France

France WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
71 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1901–1976
Aged 75
Known for
The Minister
2011

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He wrote novels about revolution, then lived one — flying for the Spanish Republic, running guns, walking into the Resistance. Later he traded the barricades for a ministry and spent a decade remaking France's cultural landscape under de Gaulle.

Biography

About

André Malraux published La Condition Humaine in 1933, a novel set during the 1927 Shanghai uprising that won the Prix Goncourt. The Spanish Civil War pulled him from the page into the cockpit; L'Espoir came from that fight in 1937. He joined the French Resistance during the Second World War, survived, and emerged into politics. De Gaulle named him information minister in 1945, then brought him back as France's first cultural affairs minister from 1959 to 1969. After the war he left fiction behind and turned to art history, gathering his thinking in La Psychologie de l'Art, published in 1953 as…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from André Malraux

André Malraux

said1976

Our civilization … is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition.

— Picasso's Mask (1976)

André Malraux

said1975

On this earth of ours where everything is subject to the passing of time, one thing only is both subject to time and yet victorious over it: the work of art.

— André Malraux, TV program: Promenades imaginaires dans Florence, 1975.

André Malraux

said1967