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Picasso's Mask: Discussion Questions |
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Exploratory Questions
First Day's Reading (Chapters I - II)
Second Day's Reading (Chapters IV, VI, VIII) Chapter 4
Chapter 5 Summary In chapter 5, Malraux begins describing his visit to an actual Museum Without Walls exhibit. He compares and contrasts the art of Marc Chagall and Picasso, as well as that of Picasso and Goya. He argues that horror in art is not the same thing as ugliness. He then details his responses to stained glass, which he laments its loss of popularity because of the use of light; Romanesque which he sees as the most Christian of art in its form and faces; pre-Columbian art with its deep mystery and obsession with death; Hopi Kaachins, which he reflects on in an almost sentimental way, African art and how it forced the West to recognize a different set of standards and forms; and Oceanic art, which he insists on separating in color and texture from African art. He ends the chapter by reflecting that each art culture reflects the worldview of its culture, yet he sees these as all illusions or myths that seek to cover over the ontological nothingness, and he again observes that modern Western art has no spiritual vision to offer. Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Summary Chapter 7 is primarily Malraux's speech that he made that night after the exhibition. He makes the Museum Without Walls problematic, though he ultimately values it for its time. He points out that Western art is concerned with painting as composition and not as subject matter. The nature of modern technology has made the art world all-inclusive in its study and absorption of other times and cultures, and this factor has replaced God and the religious. Yet, he contends, that this has not jettisoned beauty, vision, nature, expression, and artistic distinction, though it has altered them greatly. All styles are part of metamorphosis and struggle with death. The Byzantine period supernaturalized art; the Renaissance divinized beauty; Romanticism in Goya showed that the world still had mystery at its core, while the late 19th century moved from the question of whether the art object is beautiful to whether it is good. Realism and primitivism both prepared the way for the modern art world in which the sacred was lost since with the loss of beauty comes a loss of immortality. Instead the modern art world looks to the power to create as the power for survival, for metamorphosis releases it from time and eternity. The Museum Without Walls is "not a tradition; it is an adventure" (234). Still, artists always acknowledge the mystery of their creativity, even if the current art world follows the waning of the "superworlds" of religion. It has replaced the sacred with plurality, though even the Museum Without Walls is not eternal.
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Chapter 8
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