A METAPHYSIC OF MODERN ART
183
notes, quite acutely, that not all art styles have been welcomed into the
Imaginary Museum on an equal footing. Some are kept locked in the
storerooms, rather than being hung, along with the others, in the main
galleries. The art of Tibet, for instance, which represents imaginary
human forms in movement, still has the status of a curio rather than a
style; nor have those periods of Chinese or Persian art that express a
high degree of "humanist refinement" exercised any lasting influence
on modern art. Clearly, a principle of selection has been at work
guiding the resurrections that have molded modern art; and this prin–
ciple, as Malraux puts it negatively, has worked against any art style
that might be "what the eighteenth and nineteenth century took for
civilized." Positively, it has favored any primitive style that obviously
lacked "humanist refinement," or any civilized style from which human
values, as distinct from transcendent ones, have been rigorously ex–
cluded (Byzantine art, where man was "crushed by God"). Here, then,
is evidence that values other than aesthetic have played a decisive role
in modern art. "The conflict that opposed modern art to the museum of
the nineteenth century" Malraux states incisively, "involved an uncon–
scious questioning of humanist values."
Nor does Malraux have any illusions about the precise import of the
questions posed to humanist values by modern art. "From war, a
major demon, to the complexes, minor demons, the demonic domain–
present more or less subtly in all barbaric arts-has re-entered the scene";
and the demonic, far from being humanist, is defined by Malraux as
"all that which, in man, aspires to destroy him." Even more, Malraux
explicitly links this return of the demonic with the principle of selection
employed by modern art in arranging the Imaginary Museum. "The
more the new demons appeared in Europe, so much the more did Euro–
pean art find its ancestors in cultures that had known the ancient dem–
ons." And the disappearance of perspective in modern art, its preference
for the plane, is not merely a stylistic idiosyncrasy: "Satan paints only
in two dimensions. . .. " Modern art, being an accusation against the
values of its culture, calls to its aid those other art styles that were a lso
accusations ;-"a subterranean dialogue is established between the Royal
Portal at Chartres and the great fetishes, as different as the sound of
an accusation that wished itself a redemption can be from an accusa–
tion of despair." Both Gothic and primitive art, in other words, are
united against the optimism of the Renaissance and its faith in man (a
faith that no longer stirs modern art); for they looked exclusively to
that "part of man which, from the art of Mesopotamia to medieval art,
had wished to transcend him and see in him only the miserable mat-
