ABSTRACT
This chapter examines André Malraux’s controversial proposals for an “Imaginary Museum of World Art” as well as his attempts to concretize this vision during his tenure as France’s first Minister of Culture. In line with the current-day field of World Literature, Malraux’s Imaginary Museum had the ambition to globalize the artistic canon—his vision tellingly remained Eurocentric in scope and amounted to a neocolonial reaffirmation of Western universality. Malraux’s proposals were inspired and actively propagated by organizations like UNESCO, which under the leadership of the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley had launched the controversial concept of “world humanism” as its philosophical guideline. Malraux’s art-historical endeavors are also representative of how the museum as a site of colonial categorization and discursive power relations evolved in postcolonial times. Faced with increasing criticism from anti-colonial voices like Aimé Césaire, Malraux effectively imagined a virtual, technologically enhanced canon of world art aimed at salvaging France’s cultural capital in its former colonies. As such, Malraux’s Imaginary Museum ultimately exemplifies how the contemporary phenomenon we call “globalization” in art, is rooted in the cultural history of decolonization and the contrasting worldviews that shaped the Cold War.
