Ensemble d'épreuves photographiques avec corrections autographes de Malraux pour son Musée imaginaire de la Sculpture mondiale

Set of 43 color photographic prints, 25 of them with copious autograph comments and corrections by André Malraux, for the publication of his Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. Two folded cardboard sheets also bear his handwritten comments. 14 of these proofs are marked "bon à tirer" with Malraux's autograph signature and date. Accompanied by two boxes containing batches of transparent black-and-white ektachrome films for 17 works, as well as 7 black-and-white silver prints and a set of 18 sheets of typescript minutes addressed to Jacques Festy, director of production at Nrf, from Fernand Bussière, in charge of photoengraving.

Unique set of photographic prints annotated by André Malraux.  Genesis of his famous Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, a canonical work in the history of art. The photographs, negatives, silver prints and typescripts trace the author's preparation of the four-color photographic reproductions of 17 masterpieces of sculpture illustrating his famous paper museum.

Published between 1952 and 1954 by Gallimard's Galerie de la Pléiade, the Musée imaginaire consists of three albums containing several hundred images - a milestone in Malraux's vast and winding editorial enterprise, which began in 1947 with Psychologie de l'art, and culminated in l'Intemporel. The masterpieces in this collection come from very different horizons, their dates and places of creation spanning no less than four millennia and five continents. The primitive arts so dear to Malraux mingle with the great classics of Western and ancient art: Romanesque sculpture from the Carrière sur Seine altarpiece, Egyptian bronze of the divine adorer Karomama, masks from the Congo and Oceania, stone Buddha from the Sui dynasty, polychrome medieval Virgin and Child, Sumerian alabaster head and the famous Mari lion now in the Louvre... Each work perfectly illustrates Malraux's universalist spirit. These proofs were produced by Fernand Bussière, Gallimard's regular photoengraver, whose numerous corrections and sketches in black felt-tip pen sit alongside the writer's autograph comments.

Modifications required from three to sometimes six different proofs for the same work. Malraux focused on every aspect of the visual: texture, sharpness, color and shadow balance: " too blue, too smooth " he wrote for a photograph of a Buddha. The margins are often covered with lengthy comments: " It's okay. There are even some excellent things. But we should [...] strongly correct the red of the mouth: scarlet, not purplish carmine " (African mask); ' the beards and hair are always too blue and above all too clearly 'cut' on the faces " (Phoenician chariot). The exercise sometimes proves very arduous: " It's not great, but it's no longer unpublishable. I think we should leave it at that " (correction reported in typescript, October 7, 1952). In the case of the 13th-century polychrome statue of the Madonna d'Acuto, he was not satisfied with any proof: " Impossible. I'd rather do away with the plate. You have to have the material, as we did with the Chinese statue ". Sometimes, he chooses to remain as faithful as possible to the work: " If we correct, let's do it carefully, to preserve the material, which is excellent ', and more surprisingly, we also encounter the opposite situation: ' detach the pupil from the eye - even though it is not very large in the original " (Phoenician chariot, Musée du Louvre). Photographs are annotated by the printer, retouched, blurred, accentuated or scratched, and subsequent states are often annotated again by Malraux before he signs off the final proof as "bon à tirer".

Malraux even went so far as to stage this proofreading work, posing under the lens of Maurice Jarnoux for Paris-Match. In these now-famous shots, he overlooks or reclines like an odalisque among the dozens of photographic prints from his Musée imaginaire - in every way similar to those that make up this rare set - spread out on the floor of his Boulogne home. As a demiurge curator, he rethinks the museum space, with works no longer hanging but lying down. Somewhere between a boneless book and a giant mind map, these prints form part of Walter Grasskamp's exceptional "book on the floor".

With the help of these photographic reproductions, Malraux was able to create a book that was pioneering in every respect: didactic, dreamlike, celebrating the reproducibility of the work of art. "Malraux places the photograph of a work of art at the heart of his method: it is the principal instrument of his rhetoric. Both fertile and complex, this visual rhetoric enabled him to found a new conception of art, a new museum" (Mekouar Mouna). The proofs submitted to his erudite eye served to create, paradoxically, a magnificent tool for the transmission of the artistic domain. A premonition of the digital age, this venture uses photography to bring works out of the walls of institutions and places of worship. Despite his collector's soul, Malraux did not hesitate to consider reproduction as "an opening, a salutary decompartmentalization of the artistic field in general" (quoted by Charlotte Wasser), which detaches works from their context and place of creation. Freed from historical discourse, they become the starting point for an enigma that speaks for itself.

This superb visual ensemble is the fruit of Malraux's aesthetic attention to color and the play of light on carefully selected sculptural works.

Provenance: Fernand Bussière's personal collection, then by descent.