MALRAUX, André - Lot 450

Lot 450
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15000 - 30000 EUR
MALRAUX, André - Lot 450
MALRAUX, André The Human Condition. Paris, Gallimard, 1933. In-12 (18.6 x 11.7 cm), paperback, grey half-box shirt, case lined with same skin (20th century case and shirt). Original edition. One of the unnumbered copies, this one enriched with an autograph consignment signed from Malraux to Céline and decorated with a small black felt sketch. This mailing is surprising considering the important differences between the two writers, both in their art and in their political and philosophical ideas. The year before the publication of La Condition humaine, Céline had published her Voyage au bout de la nuit, which Malraux knows is a masterpiece of literature. This is also the most probable reason for this mailing, in which Malraux evokes only "artistic sympathy". There does not seem to have been any reciprocal from Celine, nor any other sending from Malraux to him. The relationship between the two men would be stormy afterwards. In a letter sent to his wife Lucette in 1946, Céline called Malraux "a writer with a cocaine addiction, a thief (convicted of theft!), a mythomaniac [...]". Malraux, for his part, tries to differentiate the Voyage au bout de la nuit from the rest of Céline's work, as he points out to Frédéric Grover, a journalist, during a series of interviews in 1973: "Céline had important things to say. He said them in the Voyage. After that, he had nothing more to say. The character of Céline après le Voyage is something halfway between the expressive talent of an extraordinarily gifted artist and the verve of a taxi driver". " PROVENANCE: - Celine (signed autograph). - Dominique de Villepin (ex-libris de Zao Wu-Ki, Bergé sale, Paris, 28 November 2013, n° 131). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dictionnaire Malraux, Paris, 2011. Grover, Six entretiens avec André Malraux sur des écrivains de son temps, Paris, 1978. EXHIBITION: André Malraux Exhibition. Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 13 July to 3
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