page_title: André Malraux
section_title: After the war
hierarchical_section_title: André Malraux / Career / After the war
caption_attribution_description: English: U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Madeleine Malraux, André Malraux, U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at an unveiling of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 8, 1963
context_page_description: Georges André Malraux DSO was a French novelist, art theorist, and Minister of Cultural Affairs. Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as Minister of Information and subsequently as France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs during de Gaulle's presidency.
context_section_description: Shortly after the war, General Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux as his Minister for Information (1945–1946). Soon after, he completed his first book on art, The Psychology of Art, published in three volumes (1947–1949). The work was subsequently revised and republished in one volume as The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du Silence), the first part of which has been published separately as The Museum without Walls. Other important works on the theory of art were to follow. These included the three-volume Metamorphosis of the Gods and Precarious Man and Literature, the latter published posthumously in 1977. In 1948, Malraux married a second time, to Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother, Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966. Subsequently, Malraux lived with Louise de Vilmorin in the Vilmorin family château at Verrières-le-Buisson, Essonne, a suburb southwest of Paris. Vilmorin was best known as a writer of delicate but mordant tales, often set in aristocratic or artistic milieu. Her most famous novel was Madame de..., published in 1951, which was adapted into the celebrated film The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), directed by Max Ophüls and starring Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio de Sica. Vilmorin's other works included Juliette, La lettre dans un taxi, Les belles amours, Saintes-Unefois, and Intimités. Her letters to Jean Cocteau were published after the death of both correspondents. After Louise's death, Malraux spent his final years with her relative, Sophie de Vilmorin.
  In 1957, Malraux published the first volume of his trilogy on art entitled The Metamorphosis of the Gods. The second two volumes (not yet translated into English) were published shortly before he died in 1976. They are entitled L'Irréel and L'Intemporel and discuss artistic developments from the Renaissance to modern times. Malraux also initiated the series Arts of Mankind, an ambitious survey of world art that generated more than thirty large, illustrated volumes.
  When de Gaulle returned to the French presidency in 1958, Malraux became France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs, a post he held from 1958 to 1969. On 7 February 1962, Malraux was the target of an assassination attempt by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), which set off a bomb to his apartment building that failed to kill its intended target, but did leave a four-year-old girl who was living in the adjoining apartment blinded by the shrapnel. Ironically, Malraux was a lukewarm supporter of de Gaulle's decision to grant independence to Algeria, but the OAS was not aware of this, and had decided to assassinate Malraux as a high-profile minister.
  Among many initiatives, Malraux launched an innovative (and subsequently widely imitated) program to clean the blackened façades of notable French buildings, revealing the natural stone underneath.  He also created a number of maisons de la culture in provincial cities and worked to preserve France's national heritage by promoting industrial archaeology. An intellectual who took the arts very seriously, Malraux saw his mission as Culture Minister to preserve France's heritage and to improve the cultural levels of the masses. Malraux's efforts to promote French culture mostly concerned renewing old or building new libraries, art galleries, museums, theatres, opera houses, and maisons de la culture (centres built in provincial cities that were a mixture of a library, art gallery and theatre). Film, television and music took less of Malraux's time, and the changing demographics caused by immigration from the Third World stymied his efforts to promote French high culture, as many immigrants from Muslim and African nations did not find French high culture that compelling. A passionate bibliophile, Malraux built up a huge collections of books both as a cultural minister for the nation and as a man for himself.
  Malraux was an outspoken supporter of the Bangladesh liberation movement during the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and despite his age seriously considered joining the struggle. When Indira 
caption: U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Marie-Madeleine Lioux, André Malraux, U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at an unveiling of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Mrs. Kennedy described Malraux as "the most fascinating man I've ever talked to".[49]
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