A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art

Selected Writings on Art

CARL EINSTEIN

Edited, translated, and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-46413-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-46427-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226464275.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Einstein, Carl, 1885–1940, author. | Haxthausen, Charles Werner, translator.

Title: A mythology of forms : selected writings on art / Carl Einstein, Charles W. Haxthausen.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021379 | ISBN 9780226464138 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226464275 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art criticism.

Classification: LCC N7445.2 .E3913 2019 | DDC 701/.18—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021379

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Linda

The truth is, we can do very well without art; what we can’t live without is the myth about art. The mythmaker is successful because he knows that in art, as in life, we need the illusion of significance. He flatters this need.

Morton Feldman

CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CH. 1   Notes on Recent French Painting (1912)

CH. 2   Totality (1914/16)

CH. 3   Negro Sculpture (1915)

CH. 4   On Primitive Art (1919)

CH. 5   African Sculpture (1921)

CH. 6   Draft of a Letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1923)

CH. 7   Cubism (1926)

CH. 8   The Berlin Museum for Ethnology (1926)

CH. 9   André Masson: Ethnological Study (1929)

CH. 10   Pablo Picasso (1931)

CH. 11   The Romantic Generation (1931)

CH. 12   The Blaue Reiter / Paul Klee (1931)

CH. 13   Two Chapters from Georges Braque (1934)

CH. 14   Excerpts from The Fabrication of Fictions (1935)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS OF TEXTS BY CARL EINSTEIN

INTRODUCTION

Read in Petite Gironde Carl Einstein has committed suicide; first cut his vein in concentration camp, was saved, released, threw himself in Gave d’Oloron—the river running through Navarrenx—with a stone tied around his neck. Yesterday I was bathing in the Gave. Place not mentioned, but must be close by. . . . Saw him last in Café des Deux Magots in Paris, about 1939; he had been a volunteer officer in Spain, came back already broken by defeat. Remember what sensation his first book on Negro sculpture created in Germany.¹

This brief passage by Arthur Koestler captures, in roughly reverse chronological sequence, the arc of Carl Einstein’s life—from the publication of Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture) in 1915, which established him as a major art critic, to its denouement, his combat in the Spanish Civil War, his internment by the French following the German invasion, and his suicide on July 5, 1940. This life has been succinctly described as a life between art and politics.² Einstein’s tragedy is that he could never effectively join the two.

For most in the Anglophone world who have heard of Carl Einstein, he is known primarily for Negro Sculpture, a landmark in the European reception of African art and in the phenomenon of modern primitivism. But beyond that slender volume, and still mostly untranslated, is a rich corpus of writings that encompasses literary criticism, drama, poetry, fiction, and politics.³ By far the greater part of Einstein’s production as an author—measured by the number of pages easily a good 80 percent of it—is devoted to visual art, and these writings constitute one of the richest and most intellectually ambitious bodies of European art theory and criticism from the first half of the twentieth century. They include the three editions of his major opus, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the 20th Century; 1926, 1928, and 1931), a fiercely opinionated, stringently critical treatment of its subject; and Georges Braque (1934), which ranges far beyond the scope suggested by its monographic title and offers the most complete statement of Einstein’s mature art theory.

What emerges from Einstein’s collected writings is a poignant narrative: the protracted and ultimately failed struggle of a leftist intellectual to justify contemporary art—to himself as much as to his readers—as a transformative social practice. The foundation of his criticism was his belief that art’s transformative power lay in its form. He passionately believed that a change in artistic form had the potential to change human visuality, and by changing human visuality to change human subjectivity and our construction of reality. Artworks were preliminary fragments, an early phase . . . of the real (BA 3, 220, 221).⁴ For the real was a human invention and must always be invented anew, because it is continually dying away (K3, 135).⁵ It lay within art’s power to redefine the real, to create a compelling alternate version of the world, and this was its ultimate function and justification. By the end of the 1920s, Einstein began to identify these preliminary fragments as myth. He hailed the coming of a new mythology, a visual mythology, a mythology of forms.⁶

Einstein’s writing on art was rarely expressly political—to characterize his life as "a life between art and politics" rightly suggests a distance, a tension between the two.⁷ Perhaps the most telling evidence that he believed, ardently believed, in a relation between the two appears in a devastating self-critique dating from 1934: at a critical turning point and in a moment of despair, he savaged himself as a phony revolutionary who had fought for a revolutionary utopia, foolishly, doggedly, believing that it could be achieved by a change in artistic form.⁸ This revolutionary utopia was to be defined by a collective politics that would emerge from a collective visuality.

Einstein was vague about how artistic form could generate specific social and political forms—it is tempting to conclude that this very vagueness is what enabled him to sustain such a belief over so many years. When he finally did experience a collective politics, fighting alongside workers and peasants in an anarcho-syndicalist militia in the Spanish Civil War, art had no role in it. In a late interview Einstein dismissed art’s relevance in such a time of crisis: To make art today is basically a pretext for avoiding danger, he claimed.⁹ In the end he came to recognize art’s limited power in the modern, secular world. Modernity, he wrote, strips art history of all meaning. On the whole what happens in art resembles a sport that has become meaningless. Older art has, if we are honest about it, lost all meaning for us. And the ‘new art’ has been far outpaced by the social and political present (BA 4, 423).

Einstein was half-forgotten when in 1962 a thick volume of his writings appeared, misleadingly if innocently titled his collected works.¹⁰ Ernst Nef, the book’s editor and a literary scholar, observed that the author’s obscurity is probably partly to be explained by the fact that Einstein’s writings are not easy to understand; he speaks a very idiosyncratic language, and what he says is in its unconventionality also not suited to make comprehension easy for the reader; moreover, almost all of his works are heavily loaded with theory.¹¹ Although the book ran to over 450 pages, it gave a grossly skewed view of Einstein’s output as an author. It contained a mere six texts from the years 1920–32, his most fecund period, and only two on visual art.

Three decades later the art historian Klaus Herding lamented that, in contrast to his contemporary Walter Benjamin, Einstein still has not undergone a real rediscovery.¹² This was in spite of the publication of a more comprehensive, three-volume edition of Einstein’s works by Medusa Verlag, continued by the publisher Fannei and Walz with a fourth volume (subsequently incorporated into their own expanded Berliner Ausgabe [Berlin edition]).¹³ But while Benjamin’s collected works had appeared between 1972 and 1989 under the banner of the large, prestigious house of Suhrkamp, Einstein’s corpus was still incomplete (and remains so), and the two editions of his collected writings were put out by small publishers who issued few titles. Neither has survived.

To be sure, Herding exaggerated Einstein’s nondiscovery: in the thirty years since the Nef edition there had been more than a dozen dissertations and monographs on Einstein, several of considerable and enduring merit, and a steadily growing number of scholarly articles.¹⁴ Assessing the situation as an art historian, however, Herding was correct: Einstein still had not been truly rediscovered by art history—virtually all of these publications, including those that addressed his art theory and criticism, were by authors who approached him from the field of literary studies. It was characteristic of most of this scholarship, even the best, that it treated Einstein’s writings on art largely as theoretical texts, in isolation from the objects that inspired them. Illustrations, in the exceptionally rare instances in which they appeared, could be counted on one hand.

To strengthen his point, Herding might have noted Einstein’s virtual absence from two discourses in which he had once played a crucial role, most notably those on modern primitivism and on cubism. Although the publication of Negro Sculpture was a signal event in the former case, Einstein seemed forgotten in the intense critical debates spawned by the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial exhibition of 1984–85, Primitivism in 20th Century Art.¹⁵ The omission was especially unfortunate, since in Negro Sculpture, as well as in his later writings on African art, Einstein’s was an early critical voice that anticipated by more than sixty years some of the polemical responses to the MoMA show.

In the art-historical literature on cubism, for which Einstein was one of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators, he has been mostly overlooked, in contrast to contemporaries such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Raynal, and Einstein’s friend and compatriot Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Where Einstein is cited, it’s almost always his articles published in French, a language evidently more accessible to Anglophone scholars of cubism. Along with his Georges Braque and several shorter essays on Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger, and his Notes on Cubism, most of these appearing in French, Einstein also wrote a lengthy, strenuously argued and original interpretation of this art in the three editions of The Art of the 20th Century. In this chapter the sections on Picasso in the second and third editions are particularly brilliant, but have remained largely ignored in the vast literature on the artist. Yet Picasso evidently thought highly enough of Einstein to engage him for the installation of his large retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris in 1932.¹⁶ Braque, to whom Einstein was especially close, entrusted him with curating his first retrospective, at the Kunsthalle Basel, the following year.¹⁷ Furthermore, Einstein had a decisive role in guiding the collector Gottlieb Friedrich Reber in forming one of the largest and most distinguished collections of cubism of its time, with 160 works by Picasso, including over 60 paintings, and 92 paintings by Gris, as well as pictures by Braque and Léger.¹⁸

Not until the mid-1990s was there a significant awakening of interest in Einstein by art historians. A noteworthy event in this development was the conference Carl Einstein: Art et existence, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in spring 1996, where roughly half of the presenters were art historians.¹⁹ That same year the German art historians Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens produced a new edition of the 1931 version of The Art of the 20th Century, with extensive commentary and documentation, which appeared as the fifth volume of the new and expanded Berlin edition of Einstein’s works.²⁰ In 2000 Georges Didi-Huberman published a long historiographic essay on Einstein in his book Devant le temps, alongside chapters on Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg.²¹ Awareness of Einstein in the Anglophone world received a substantial boost in 2004 when the journal October devoted a special issue to him, edited by art historian Sebastian Zeidler, with essays by him, me, and two others, plus translations of eight Einstein texts.²² The following year Zeidler completed his doctoral dissertation on Einstein, which offered one of the most lucid accounts yet of his art theory and its relation to its sources.²³ Moreover, he did something that, astonishingly, no one had ever done before: he actually looked closely at and analyzed African sculptures and cubist paintings through the lens of Einstein’s theory. In 2006 Fleckner published a major monograph on Einstein, the first by an art historian. The book made up for the acute visual drought in Einstein studies with a veritable deluge of 276 illustrations, most of them works that had accompanied the original publications.²⁴ Around this time Einstein also began to figure in art-historical scholarship by authors outside the circle of Einstein specialists.²⁵ It is my hope that publication of the present collection of Einstein’s writings will further this trend.

Einstein was born in Neuwied, a small town in the Rhineland, in 1885, the second child of Daniel and Sophie Einstein.²⁶ The family moved to Karlsruhe in 1888, when Einstein père was appointed head of a Jewish institute for religious pedagogy, and Carl spent his youth in this provincial city. Daniel Einstein apparently suffered from mental illness and in 1899, while a patient in an asylum near Karlsruhe, died by hanging himself.²⁷

By 1904 Einstein had moved to Berlin, where he matriculated at the Friedrich Wilhelm University for the winter semester and continued his studies, evidently with some interruption, until the summer semester of 1908. There he studied philosophy, history, art history, and classical philology, attending lectures by the neo-Kantian philosophers Alois Riehl and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, and the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, although he never completed his doctorate.²⁸ As a university student Einstein must have cut a striking figure: everything about him is abnormal—his knowledge at twenty-one years, his intelligence—everything, is how one acquaintance described him, who also found him to be a chillingly loathsome human being.²⁹ At twenty-two he published the first four chapters of his brilliant, boldly experimental novella-in-progress, Bebuquin oder die Dilettanten des Wunders (Bebuquin, or the Dilettantes of the Miracle), completed in 1909 and published in 1912.³⁰ In 1910 he published his first essays in art criticism.

Einstein never had the security of a stable position; he lived primarily from his writing. During the years leading up to the war, alongside his major achievements Negro Sculpture and Bebuquin, he published a number of short pieces on art, politics, and literature. In each of these genres the largest number appeared in the newly established radical leftist periodical Die Aktion, edited by Franz Pfemfert.³¹ Einstein volunteered for the German army in August 1914, within days after the declaration of war. He was wounded the following November and hospitalized for at least four months. In spring 1916 he had the good fortune to be assigned to an administrative post in the colonial division of the German military government in Brussels, where he had access to the extraordinary ethnographic collections of the Congo Museum in nearby Tervuren, and his immersion in Africa deepened during this time.³² Between Negro Sculpture and his second slender book on the subject, Afrikanische Plastik (African Sculpture), which appeared in 1921, he published only a single piece on contemporary art, a tepidly positive piece on Rudolf Schlichter. At this time it seems that Einstein’s ambitions were primarily literary.³³

Following his return to Berlin at the end of the war, Einstein was active in the political, left wing faction of the Berlin Dada group, consisting of Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield, and George Grosz. He collaborated with them on two short-lived magazines, Die Pleite and Der blutige Ernst, turning out a dozen articles with a political, often wickedly satirical focus. Yet he wrote nothing on Dada itself. In March 1922 he signed a contract with Ullstein Verlag to write the volume on twentieth-century art for its newly launched series, Propyläen-Kunstgeschichte (Propyläen history of art), and this may have been the catalyst for his return to art criticism.³⁴ Even so, his output was relatively sparse: apart from his Propyläen book, between 1922 and 1928 he published only some two dozen, mostly short texts on the visual arts. Yet during these years art became the virtually exclusive focus of his publications, even if he never abandoned his major literary ambition, a sequel to Bebuquin, on which he worked intermittently from 1922 into the mid-1930s.³⁵ In May 1928, after growing increasingly discontented with Berlin, Einstein moved to Paris where, along with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, he launched the journal Documents the following year. The year and a half of its short life were his most prolific as an art critic. In 1931, a third, extensively expanded and revised edition of The Art of the 20th Century appeared, and at this time Einstein began work on what was to be his final art publication, Georges Braque, which appeared in 1934 after an extended delay.

It is in Georges Braque that we find the most developed articulation of Einstein’s art theory. Although at this time he frequently mentioned working on a book that was to be his aesthetics,³⁶ in fact as a critic he had little to say of art’s aesthetic pleasures—when he did it was usually to dismiss them as a numbing, pernicious narcotic. Artworks engaged him, he wrote, only insofar as they comprise the means to modify the real, the structure of the human subject, and our conceptions of the world (GB, 256). They mattered only when they succeed in destroying reality and generating it anew (BA 3, 221). Most art, he argued, performed a conservative, stabilizing function: it countered the anxieties provoked by the vital flux of nature and the inevitability of death, and it did so by providing images of order, duration, and stability, images that had fixed and rationalized the dynamic flood of phenomena that assaulted the senses. The abundance of surviving art from past eras only reinforced this conservative tendency; these works were not merely objects of a retrospective art history but active agents of past epistemic orders that everywhere hindered the transformation of visuality and hence of the real. Not merely the extant art of the past had this effect, but most contemporary production did as well. Even in the twentieth century a major part of so-called modern art—Henri Matisse, with his metaphor of the painting as armchair, was Einstein’s bête noir in this regard (K1, 31, 33)—continued to serve this purpose; it reinforced the inherited version of the visible world. Such art Einstein scorned as reactionary and life-diminishing, since it cravenly arrests what is past (GB, 275).

The necessary condition of the artwork’s power to transform the real was its attainment of what Einstein called totality (Totalität). He deployed this term idiosyncratically—in Western philosophy, totality has been traditionally associated with holism, yet as used by Einstein the term signifies its antithesis: totality is identified not with coherent collective unities, but with singular self-complete entities: individual, formally autonomous works of visual art. Yet in Einstein’s theory this autonomy is not identified with aestheticism, it has nothing to do with l’art pour l’art, rather it is an essential condition of art’s social agency—all other conventions . . . are altered by art precisely because of its autonomy (K1, 64). Because the totalized artwork is radically autonomous, extrinsic to the world as given, it militates against any illusion of wholeness, any sense of temporal continuity or causal connectedness with that world. Thus the internal totality of the artwork makes it an agent of disruption, of disorder, a weapon directed against the conventional, illusory order of the world. To be effective the artwork had fully to take possession of the beholder, temporarily shutting down memory and extinguishing the sense of self—it effaces all qualities that are not subordinated to the . . . new sensation (BA 4, 184). Einstein sometimes compared the effect to hypnosis or anesthesia. For him this was not nihilism—Negation says absolutely nothing, declares a character in Bebuquin, affirmation just as little. The artistic begins with the word ‘otherwise’ (BA 1, 101). Art’s disruption of the visual order would awaken in us an awareness of the freedom to construct a different version of the world. One no longer accepts the world as something finished but as thoroughly provisional (K3, 162).

For Einstein, cubism—the art of Braque, Gris, Léger, and above all Picasso—showed the greatest promise for realizing art’s radical potential. Cubism, he declared optimistically, will influence how everyone sees; it had transformed the structure of seeing and defined anew the optical world picture, which had decayed into a confused anecdotal mass of objects (GB, 270). To attribute such agency to cubism was to hail it as a cause of the transformation of human seeing, which contradicts one of the principles of totality—the rejection of causality. Einstein was not unaware of this apparent contradiction: in one early essay he wrote that the révolteur (with which he identified) will reject causal explanations (his unilinear fanaticism makes him overlook that he himself thinks in terms of causality) (BA 1, 143). But for Einstein there was a difference between the causality of the given order and one that, in a strike for human freedom, would refigure human visuality.

In his tenacious belief in the potential agency of traditional art media to transform human seeing, Einstein was sustained by a huge blind spot: it appears he never sensed the need to consider how, under what conditions of reception, through what forms of mediation or transmission, that agency would be effectuated. He ignored the critical issue that Walter Benjamin would address—how medium and technology determine the conditions for the reception of works of art and the dissemination of their effects. Painting, Benjamin wrote, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architecture has always been able to do . . . and as film is able to do today.³⁷ Einstein’s writing offers no evidence that he ever seriously pondered such questions. He had little to say about the technology of photomechanical reproduction as such, but where he did mention it he was usually negative—on the whole I can no longer bear to look at reproductions of paintings, he once confessed to Kahnweiler.³⁸ In this regard it should be obvious that Einstein would have disagreed with Benjamin’s claims for the power of reproductions to actualize works of past art, to make them into an instrument of social transformation. Any replication and multiplication of past forms was an obstacle to the new.

Yet Einstein’s critical attitude toward reproduction goes well beyond reproductions of works of art. While he had little to say about technological reproduction, he had much to say about reproduction in a more general sense—it is a central concept, a negative factor, in his art theory. Reproduction is synonymous with repetition, imitation, and tautology. Mimetic art he derided as the stupid reproduction business (BA 3, 219), in another instance as idiotic reproduction (BA 4, 218). It satisfied a craven human need: repetition calmed those who feared death. Images proved more secure and durable than human beings; pictorial doubles fulfilled a longing for eternity (BA 3, 34).

Ultimately Einstein’s use of the term reproduction is directed less against reproduced artifacts than against the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, specifically reproduction as it relates to the faculty of cognition (Erkenntnis). According to Kant, it is a reproductive faculty of imagination (ein reproduktives Vermögen der Einbildungskraft) that enables us to "bring the manifold of intuition into an image" (emphasis in the original).³⁹ The binding synthesis of this manifold is formed into a unity by means of concepts, and it is only through concepts that cognition becomes possible.⁴⁰ This reproductive imagination rests on conditions of experience, that is, of association.⁴¹ What for Kant was a mediating, indispensable function of the cognitive faculty is for Einstein a mechanism for the construction of a static and therefore deceptive image of the world.

Anschauung, intuition, is as crucial a term in Einstein’s vocabulary as it was in Kant’s. Although he is fundamentally anti-Kantian, Einstein nevertheless uses the term in a modified Kantian sense. Anschauung is a cognate of the verb anschauen, to look at, and although Kant uses Anschauung broadly for sensory intuition, the word privileges the visual, and throughout this book I have usually translated it accordingly as visual intuition. For Kant intuition is the direct, spontaneous apprehension of individual sense data prior to their ultimate synthesis in the concept (Begriff). Unlike the abstract, generalizing concept, Anschauung is concrete and singular; it alone constitutes an immediate apprehension of phenomena.⁴² The reproductive imagination, in recalling the previously seen and cognized, sets limits to Anschauung, exerting an inhibitory, conservative effect. Einstein decisively rejected the subordinate role that Anschauung plays in Kant’s epistemology: "Visual intuition [Anschauung] is not merely stable material received from higher powers and realms that it serves unchangingly, it is not merely memory of the given . . . but in art, where it attains autonomy, one also attempts to alter it; for here visual intuition is itself the productive factor. In visual intuition there is the power of creative freedom and its conventional application, which adapts it to a subservient role, becomes disrupted" (K1, 57). What is apprehended in visual intuition, the manifold in all its plenitude, becomes opposed to the concept (Begriff). Painting and sculpture can serve as a critique of the prevailing visuality, a critique in which concepts as such need not come into play (K1, 57).

The concept, which for Kant is the precondition for cognition of an object, is for Einstein an impoverishment of the real (BA 4, 194, 195). In his early theoretical essay Totality Einstein separates the act of cognition from the concept; the creation of the singular, autonomous work of art is itself an act of cognition, cognition unmediated by concepts. By the early 1930s, however, he had come to regard even cognition negatively, as a struggle against the concrete world, as the deadly final phase of thinking.⁴³

Einstein’s privileging of intuition, of direct, spontaneous visual experience, and his hostility to the concept echo Friedrich Nietzsche’s brilliant early essay On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense.⁴⁴ The concept is born by overlooking the individual and the real, by the equating of the dissimilar (Gleichsetzen des Nichtgleichen). Human subjects do not allow themselves to be carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions, they universalize these impressions into less colorful . . . concepts. This great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium; it is the grave site of intuitions (Grabstätte der Anschauungen).⁴⁵

Einstein, like Nietzsche, equated the homogenizing effect of the word with the loss of the uniqueness of direct experience, with a disenchantment, an impoverishment of the world.⁴⁶ In a fragment of his unfinished novel, Bebuquin II, the child BEB (Einstein’s alter ego) experiences in his newly acquired ability to speak a terrifying, deadly power. His secret fairy tales die. Language ages, . . . poisons and cripples him. This foul old stagnant pool of language—created by spirits and the dead—parallels the dead artistic forms of bygone eras that continue to haunt the present, forming a hard, impenetrable crust over the concrete, dynamic real.⁴⁷

In its singularity the visual artwork had the potential to be wholly new, unmediated and unconstrained by concepts, by a system of fixed, iterative signs. Language, by contrast, would be impossible without concepts and repetition, and what Einstein perceived as language’s impoverishment of the real was due in part to its necessarily iterative, reproductive character. The linguistic signified is always a concept, and hence, for Einstein, a pale abstraction of the concrete singularity to be found within the real. Language was a major cause of our propensity to freeze a dynamic, ever-changing reality into rigid signs. The rigidity of things, he wrote, is effected by linguistic habit and . . . produced by our desire for comfortable, that is, repeatable signals for actions (K3, 94).

The failure of language vis-à-vis the flux of reality extended also to the relationship between word and pictorial image. Einstein was scornful of pictorial description, of critics who failed to see the hopeless chasm between discourse and image (GB, 253). His goal, rather, was to determine how the formal constructs of art approach our own state of mind, that is, how they fit into a preexisting image of the world and into our own life, or how they contradict it, unsettle it, or influence it (GB, 255). He sought to identify the visual intuition that generated the form, to evoke the visual character of a body of work, avoiding any impression that he was somehow offering a verbal equivalent, a paraphrase, of a concrete visual experience untranslatable into language (GB, 256).

It was while working on Georges Braque that Einstein’s faith in the avant-garde and his critical project collapsed. His belief in the advent of a collective mythology of forms, he now realized, was but his own private myth, a delusion, a fiction. He gave vent to that disillusionment in a long, rambling book manuscript, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (The Fabrication of Fictions). It is at once a searing, unsparing critique of the avant-garde and Einstein’s brutal self-reckoning with his own former illusions about it. He now turned on artists and intellectuals, vilifying them as arrogant, elitist, and self-deluded, as pampered pseudo-revolutionaries seeking to preserve their own privileged status by providing distraction for the powerful. In the summer of 1936, a little over a year after completing the draft of The Fabrication of Fictions, Einstein and his wife, Lyda, left Paris and set out for Spain, where he took up arms in the anarcho-syndicalist militia of Buenaventura Durruti in the civil war. As he later explained to Kahnweiler, Nowadays the rifle is necessary to make up for the cowardice of the pen.⁴⁸

Yet Einstein did not abandon writing on art. After his return to Paris from Spain in early 1939, he resumed work on his hugely ambitious and incomplete project, a Handbuch der Kunst (Handbook of art).⁴⁹ If The Fabrication of Fictions marked a cathartic reckoning with his own delusions about modernism, the Handbook and another late unfinished project, La traité de la vision (The treatise on vision), may be partly understood as Einstein’s attempt to rethink art, its history, and what he now saw as the failed project of modernism within that trajectory. In the Handbook Einstein’s own former utopian hopes for art became a topic for investigation. It would explore the creation of aesthetic fictions of existence. Art and its claim to influence reality (BA 4, 305).

In the Handbook Einstein aimed to construct a new kind of art history, one that focused on art’s changing functions—social and psychological—within human culture, from prehistoric times up to modernity. His history would encompass not only the arts of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and ancient America, but also the gaps of art history, peoples unrecognized and maligned. Einstein names—a small sampling—the ancient arts of the Aramaeans, Bactrians, Scythians, Parthians, and barbarian peoples, the arts of nomads and Eskimos. European art was to have no privileged status in this account. As best as one can judge from the surviving notes and fragments, an overarching theme seems to have been art’s development from an anonymous collective achievement serving crucial social functions to its status as an autonomous, individualistic, socially isolated achievement in modernity. The Handbook was thus among other things an attempt to view modernism, and Einstein’s own disillusionment with it, in a world-historical perspective. Much of the material seems driven by the idea that art as we know it has come to an end. It is an often dark and painful assessment. Having so fatefully overestimated art’s power, Einstein now looked at it with unflinching sobriety: Our modern world is increasingly becoming optically unrepresentable, so that the visual arts capture only a piece of the periphery of our experience (BA 4, 329). What, he asked, is a nude by Titian compared with the structure of an electron or a blood cell? (CEA 225, p. 6). At bottom, he concluded, we see very little, our eyes are an inadequate instrument (BA 4, 382).

In one of the late notebooks that represent his final thoughts on the subject, Einstein reflected on the decline of art’s power: "As soon as representation became conscious, thus separating image from being, art became less direct, more elastic, and arbitrary—artworks suffered a loss in meaning and consequently in the gravity of their effects, for now they were but mere representations, no longer persons in a particular state (the dead) or powers. . . . They were therefore no longer as complex as the ‘living’ phenomenon. From that moment images began to lose their power."⁵⁰ Where once he had declared that art determined human seeing and defined our visual reality, he now acknowledged that representation is different from seeing (BA 4, 370). This meant an irreversible loss of art’s presumed former agency.

In what must have been the last conversation before his suicide, having found momentary refuge in a cloister in his flight from the advancing German army, Einstein spoke to the abbot of having achieved a newfound clarity about his previous existence. He was convinced that all the efforts of his artistic and intellectual life had been fruitless, and that it wasn’t worth prolonging a useless and wasted life.⁵¹ Not only art had failed, but politics too, as Spain and much of continental Europe succumbed to fascism.

Given that Einstein ultimately rejected his claims for the avant-garde as a fiction and judged his critical project to be a failure, what can we gain by reading him today? From a historiographic standpoint the answer should be obvious. Einstein was arguably the most original and brilliant European art critic of his generation, one whose career unfolded in the art capitals of Berlin and Paris in a time of particular ferment. His writings on African art are major landmarks in its reception and integration into the canon of world art. In his time The Art of the 20th Century was unmatched in scope and intellectual substance. His brilliantly insightful writing on Picasso, up to now largely ignored by scholarship, has no peers among his contemporaries. Reading Einstein, then, can only enrich our understanding of the era.

But beyond his unquestionable historiographic importance, what of Einstein as a model for our own thinking about visuality in our post-Benjaminian era? Can he offer us anything today? Like Benjamin, Einstein developed a theory on the socially transformative potential of contemporary visual practices, but in contrast to Benjamin he failed, until very late, to register the epochal change in the economy of images.⁵² The combination of this blindness with his utopian faith in artistic form as an agent of change would seem to make him at best a counterexample. Yet I believe that Einstein’s notion that the artistic begins with the word ‘otherwise,’ that artworks—and images more broadly—have the potential to alter our seeing, has validity beyond any specific medium, and that it can and does occur within individual experience. As the philosopher Marx Wartofsky eloquently argued, Human vision is itself an artifact; with the advent of human culture the visual system breaks loose from its previous biological domain, and acquires a history; and . . . in this history it is we who shape and transform the modes of visual praxis, of visual cognition and perception. This, he continues, has implications for art: with the development of representational practice, we come to see by means of the forms and styles of visual representation that we create; and . . . our modes of visual perception change with changes in these modes of representation.⁵³ This idea, that art had the capacity to shape human visuality, was, as we have seen, a central tenet of Einstein’s writing. His mistake was to overestimate art’s collective agency in an age of cultural fragmentation.

In choosing the texts for the present selection I have approached Einstein’s corpus of writings on art rather like a curator organizing an artist’s retrospective. I ultimately settled on those that strike the major themes of Einstein’s work and in my judgment best represent the trajectory of his evolution as a critic and theorist of art in those areas in which his contributions are most significant, and I present them chronologically. These are African art, cubism, surrealism, and the work of Braque, Picasso, and Klee. The present selection comprises the full texts of Einstein’s two books on African art, Negro Sculpture (text 3) and African Sculpture (text 5), including the complete illustrations for the latter. A short review of the reinstallation of Berlin’s Museum for Ethnology rounds out this group (text 8). For his writings on modern art, I begin with the first article in which he addressed the state of the new painting in France (text 1). On cubism there is the draft of Einstein’s long letter to Kahnweiler on the subject (text 6) and the complete cubism chapter from the 1926 edition of The Art of the 20th Century (text 7). The impact of surrealism on Einstein’s thinking at the turn of the decade is represented by his ethnological study on André Masson (text 9); the long, greatly expanded Picasso section from the third edition of his Propyläen volume (text 10), along with that book’s surrealism chapter (text 11); and the section on Klee from the chapter on the Blaue Reiter (text 12). The two chapters from Georges Braque (text 13) are more general in nature. In the first Einstein presents a critique of the discourse of art history; in the second he offers a critical diagnosis of liberal bourgeois culture and the status of art within it. The collection’s capstone, too often given short shrift or ignored by Einstein scholars, is excerpts from The Fabrication of Fictions (text 14), his bitter, cathartic, prolix farewell to the avant-garde and his own illusions about it. Except for it and Georges Braque all texts are presented complete, and with the exception of Negro Sculpture, Totality (text 2), and the short manifesto On Primitive Art (text 4), all are appearing in English translation for the first time. Each text is introduced by an essay that places it in the context of Einstein’s evolving thought.

Inevitably any such selection necessitates difficult choices. Apart from the essay on Klee and the preface on the Blaue Reiter that introduces it, there is nothing of Einstein’s writing on German painting, which was often sharply critical, yet contains many brilliant, insightful pages.⁵⁴ There is only one essay from his work for the journal Documents, to which he contributed some two dozen articles during the short life of this magazine, but English translations of four of these are available elsewhere.⁵⁵ Also, Einstein’s expansive prospectus for the entire history of art in one volume that was to be part of the multivolume Handbook of art also exists in English translation.⁵⁶

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

As a writer Einstein abounds in paradox. Pithy, sharply faceted sentences and paragraphs flow into what can seem a formless stream of redundancies, generating an effect of logorrhea, as one commentator described his prose.⁵⁷ It’s easy to agree with Georges Didi-Huberman when he characterizes Einstein’s prose style as at once dazzling and suffocating. Dazzling in the relentless eruption of violent and paradoxical formulations always delivered like frontal blows. . . . But the blows rain down so, the dazzling features follow one another in such a rhythm that the writing becomes suffocating, seizing us by the throat, wearing us down.⁵⁸ And so it does. Yet these very qualities could be seen as Einstein’s tactical weapon in a war of attrition waged against resistant readers, as though by aggressive repetition, by a barrage of brilliant phrases and striking aperçus, he could compel us to see these pictures as he does, to believe in their power to refigure the world.

Michel Leiris, Einstein’s colleague at Documents, described his German as difficult and just about untranslatable (ardue et à peu près intraduisable).⁵⁹ Having spent years laboring over my own translations of Einstein’s flinty prose, revising them again, again, and yet again, I have taken comfort from Leiris’s remark. Ultimately I had to accept that English cannot easily replicate the compacted energy of Einstein’s most stringently inflected German prose.

At the same time I have tried to preserve the idiosyncrasies of Einstein’s writing, such as inconsistencies of tenses, eccentricities of syntax and punctuation, insofar as they do not egregiously obscure meaning. In some of his texts his punctuation disrupts the easy habits of reading as we encounter sentence fragments and interrogatives without question marks. Especially in The Art of the 20th Century there are staccato, bullet-like sentences and others with long chains of multiple clauses, pages-long paragraphs that comprise one or more shifts of topic. He is especially given to writing one (man) when referring to a specific artist or artists. These features I have for the most part preserved in an attempt to convey something of the experience of reading Einstein in German.

A few words of explanation are in order regarding my translation choices for several key, recurrent terms in Einstein’s vocabulary—Gestalt, Bild, and Sehen.

In German Gestalt conventionally signifies a shape, a figure (especially a human figure), or a holistic structure. Einstein employs the word in all of these senses, and in such instances I have translated it accordingly. But at other times he uses Gestalt in a way that is specific to him, namely to denote a subjectively generated artistic image, and in this usage he sometimes opposes the Gestalt to the Gegenstand, the motif or object as it exists in the world of conventional visual habit.⁶⁰ In Einstein’s later writings, under the influence of surrealism, Gestalten are born from visionary or hallucinatory states, potentially transforming or augmenting the world of objects; as such they become transgressive, mythic, giving birth to a new reality—or so he fervently hoped. Yet sometimes, and in the same text, he will also use Gestalt to denote the monotonous forms of the given visual world, which are not less brain-born than those arising from hallucination—they are merely static. In these cases I have left the word untranslated.

Bild can mean image in both an immaterial and material sense, and it can also signify, more narrowly, a picture as a physical object or artifact. The focus of Einstein’s art criticism is overwhelmingly painting, yet while his writings contain numerous references to Malerei as a medium, the word Gemälde, the singular noun for an easel painting, appears rarely.⁶¹ Instead of that medium-specific word Einstein uses Bild. For the most part I have chosen to translate Bild as picture, because Einstein is almost never concerned with the material image apart from painting, and as previously remarked, this reveals one of his blind spots.

Finally, a key word in Einstein’s lexicon is Sehen, seeing, the gerund form of the verb sehen, to see.⁶² In his writing Sehen is expressly contrasted with Wahrnehmung, perception.⁶³ We may often deploy these terms synonymously, but for Einstein they are fundamentally opposed. Wahrnehmen, to perceive, literally means to take as true, and is a word Einstein usually avoids except in a critical, negative sense. A fundamental error of classical realism, he writes, "seems to lie in the simple identification of seeing [Sehen] with perception [Wahrnehmung], that is, from the outset it denied to seeing an intrinsic, metamorphotically productive power. This positivistic approach . . . curtailed the creative power of seeing" (GB, 325). Wahrnehmung implies a passive acceptance of optical sensation and an object world reified by visual habit, while the gerund Sehen suggests an active encounter of the human subject with optical phenomena. Seeing is . . . activated for the benefit of the one who sees, he writes of cubism, as the object becomes dynamic, a symptom of seeing (K1, 63). Einstein also uses another gerund, Schauen, looking or seeing, in the same way. One countered perception with subjective looking (subjektives Schauen). In the act of looking one changes people and the world (K3, 92).⁶⁴ This belief was the germ of Einstein’s art criticism.

CH. 1

NOTES ON RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

1912

This short essay, the sixth work of art criticism that Einstein published, was the first in which he took stock of innovative tendencies in contemporary painting in France, the art that was to be the central focus of his writing over the next two decades. Published in the short-lived journal Neue Blätter, of which Einstein served as editor for the first six issues, the article was written following what was clearly a fruitful visit to Paris.¹

In his first substantive efforts in art criticism, published in 1910 on two marginal, now forgotten artists, the sculptor Arnold Waldschmidt (1873–1958) and the painter Ludwig Schmid-Reutte (1862–1909), Einstein’s frame of reference had been wholly within the German-speaking art world.² There is no indication that, even if he had previously visited Paris, he had as yet had any meaningful encounter with French art after neo-impressionism. If Einstein, who had finished his radically innovative novella Bebuquin, or the Dilettantes of the Miracle, the preceding year, seems surprisingly conservative and embarrassingly parochial in his enthusiasm for Waldschmidt and Schmid-Reutte, those essays nevertheless offer us a preview of a conception of art from which he later assessed the newer trends in French painting. The time for a great synthetic art has returned, he declared. It is needed. Its models were the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the early Greeks, Giotto, and the primitives. They offered a monumental, compelling total plastic conception, a tectonic art—this was lacking in the analytical art of impressionism, in which the painting completes itself in the eye of the beholder (BA 1, 45).³ Even if Waldschmidt and Schmid-Reutte strike us as ponderous and turgid, Einstein found in them a plastic conception that pointed the way out of what he viewed as the overly nuanced, structurally flaccid painting of impressionism and the decorative propensities of neo-impressionism: a rigorously plastic conception that constituted an autonomous