Art after History: Mimetic Uses of the

André Malraux’s Museum without Walls (1947) aims to “destroy” art history through the production of an eternal present of art in continuous metamorphosis. My course will focus on the mimetic uses of Malraux’s Opus by very different artists in the 1950s and the 1960s, in order to show an important anti-historical shift not only in art, but in the thought and politics of this period. The universalist formalism of Malraux’s montage of photographs encourages a multitude of formal, philosophical and political appropriations of his model: books, displays, archives, films, artistic conferences may signify the entry into post-history and the legitimation of “ultimate” painting according to Ad Reinhardt in the United States, the analogical and utopian present of the Independent Group in England, and a racialist conception of art by the Danish Asger Jorn. The filmmaker Chris Marker was the only artist who didn’t adopt this anti-historical posture, but found in Malraux’s model a way to express the “tragic of memory,” a possible combination of the universal and the particular, of struggle for freedom and melancholy of defeat. In the last part of my courses, I will attempt to situate the case study of the “Imaginary Museum of Artists” in a more general anti- and post-historical turn in the 1950s, linking mostly art, anthropology and political philosophy.