A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art 9780226464275

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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

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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

T

he 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 xi INTRODUCTION 1

CH. 1 CH. 2 CH. 3 CH. 4 CH. 5 CH. 6 CH. 7 CH. 8 CH. 9 CH. 10 CH. 11 CH. 12 CH. 13 CH. 14

Notes on Recent French Painting (1912) Totality (1914/16) Negro Sculpture (1915) On Primitive Art (1919) African Sculpture (1921) Draft of a Letter to Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler (1923) Cubism (1926) The Berlin Museum for Ethnology (1926) André Masson: Ethnological Study (1929) Pablo Picasso (1931) The Romantic Generation (1931) The Blaue Reiter / Paul Klee (1931) Two Chapters from Georges Braque (1934) Excerpts from The Fabrication of Fictions (1935)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 333 NOTES 337 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 387 INDEX 399

16 23 32 60 64 135 145 194 203 212 247 266 288 309

ABBREVIATIONS OF TEXTS BY CARL EINSTEIN

BA 1 BA 2 BA 3 BA 4

CEA EKC

Werke: Band 1, 1907–1918. Edited by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar. Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1994. Werke: Band 2, 1919–1928. Edited by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar. Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996. Werke: Band 3, 1929–1940. Edited by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar. Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996. Werke: Band 4, Texte aus dem Nachlaß I. Edited by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar. Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992. Akademie der Künste Berlin, Carl- Einstein- Archiv. https://archiv .adk.de/bigobjekt/7062. Carl Einstein and Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler. Correspondance, 1921–1939. Edited and translated by Liliane Meffre. Marseille: A. Dimanche, 1993.

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EWP

ABBREVIATIONS

FF GB K1 K2 K3

LEK

Letters to Ewald Wasmuth and Sophia Kindsthaler, Ewald Wasmuth Papers, Deutsches Literatur- Archiv, Schiller Nationalmuseum, Marbach. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen. Edited by Sibylle Penkert, with essays by Penkert and Katrin Sello. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973. Georges Braque (1934). In BA 3, 251–516. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Propyläen- Kunstgeschichte 16. Berlin: Propyläen- Verlag, 1926. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. 2nd edition. PropyläenKunstgeschichte 16. Berlin: Propyläen- Verlag, 1928. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. 3rd edition (1931). Edited with commentary by Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens. Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 5. Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996. “Lettres de Carl Einstein à Moïse Kisling (1920–1924).” Edited by Liliane Meffre. Les cahiers du MNAM, no. 62 (Winter 1997): 74–123.

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

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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 dan-

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

3 INTRODUCTION

ger,” 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).

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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

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 Ger-

5 INTRODUCTION

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.

INTRODUCTION

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man 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

7 INTRODUCTION

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,

INTRODUCTION

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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

9 INTRODUCTION

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

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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.

11 INTRODUCTION

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 worldhistorical 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 mean-

INTRODUCTION

12

ing 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 postBenjaminian 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

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

13 INTRODUCTION

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.

INTRODUCTION

14

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.

15 INTRODUCTION

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

17 NOTES ON RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

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 plastic order vis-à-vis nature. Two reviews published in 1911 contain perfunctory references to Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and the neo- impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and slightly more substantive remarks on the sculptor Auguste Rodin, yet it was only in the present essay that Einstein writes extensively on the newest developments in France.4 For the work of a relative novice it’s remarkably self-assured and sophisticated in its analysis and its judgments. Cézanne emerges here as the standard-bearer of the new plastic order, the seminal figure for the most promising tendencies in recent art. For Einstein, the central point in Cézanne’s break with impressionism was that, instead of pursuing an analysis of nature, he imposed his subjective conception on it, a synthesis of the demands of pictorial structure and of his own seeing, what the painter called his “sensations.” In other words, a Cézanne is not nature seen through a temperament, as Zola famously formulated it, but rather nature as constituted by a temperament: “One conceives the world and its things as symptoms of an inner process that carries its justification completely within itself. The picture is affirmed as a whole whose totality is achieved through the equilibrium of color translation.” These ideas— that the visual world as we experience it is a “symptom” of our inner visual and mental processes, that the picture is a self-justifying totality— will be central to Einstein’s later writing on cubism. As heirs of Cézanne Einstein singles out Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose names appear here for the first time in his criticism.

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Matisse built upon the “decorative and sensual qualities” of Cézanne, yet his painting is even less dependent on nature than Cézanne’s art; he paints a world in the mind, a self-complete totality— although Einstein would later judge Matisse to have failed to achieve it.5 At this early date, however, Einstein appears to have valued Matisse nearly as much as he did Picasso. Einstein sees Picasso, too, as presenting a subjective version of nature, but in contrast to Matisse he builds on the constructive dimension of Cézanne’s art. He paints with a “formula that permits him to structure every part of the picture plastically and tectonically.” Here Einstein cites another remark of the Master of Aix, the famous one about seeing the forms in nature in terms of the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder—an approach, Einstein writes, that reacted against “every form of flat painting and decoration,” which had become a “raging epidemic.” Einstein never mentions cubism by name, yet it’s clear from his reference to “stereometric spatial structures,” to “pictures in brown, dark yellow, and gray,” the whole “sustained by tectonic contours,” that it is cubism to which he refers. It’s also clear from his overview of Picasso’s art that he must have been able to see a good deal of it. Einstein almost certainly visited the Paris gallery of Picasso’s dealer Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, since Picasso did not exhibit in the salons, and perhaps also saw the collections of the German dealer Wilhelm Uhde and of Gertrude and Leo Stein.6 We should hardly conclude from this early essay that Einstein already had a good grip on Picasso and cubism. He was intrigued by him, to be sure, yet an article published six weeks later shows him to be struggling with what must have been the “hermetic” phase of cubism post- 1910 (fig. 7.2), with its fracturing of the closed form and isolation of line from color in an abstract, open structure that resisted a clear reading of the motif.7 Einstein was skeptical: Picasso “renders the plastic factor by severing it with lines, yet squeezing and dismantling it into planes; he should be doing architecture. . . . He assumes a beholder who orients himself in the picture with a movement of the eyes in two contrasting directions, he is thus borrowing purely architectonic effects from volume. These seem to me to be serious stylistic contradictions.”8 By 1913 Einstein had apparently resolved his doubts: he declared Picasso the “strongest of today’s artists.”9 ■

W

hen looking more carefully one observes that theories do not regulate sensations but are, rather, an expression of them. Insofar as theories refer to art they represent it in a mediated and falsified form. It astonishes me how in today’s France the theo-

19 NOTES ON RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

retical aspect of seeing predominates; it’s not as though one had ever been niggardly with these intellectual expressions of temperament. If formerly one employed them as a polemical instrument, now they have developed into a major component, indeed into a goal. The predominance of theory begins with the great Seurat. It would be wrong to think of a theory of painting as a scientific abstraction; on the contrary it is the expression of an optical sensation. Seurat’s doctrine was in the main a technical one; at the same time it launched the search for an objective painting opposed to the individual handwriting of impressionism. Yet the precepts of Picasso or Matisse indicate a complete absence of technical determinations. These artists adopt a different vantage point, one of inner sensation insofar as it can be expressed as an optical representation. The technical premises of their art were established in the oeuvre of Cézanne. Zola’s formula for his friends was still “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” Here man was understood as the locus of excitement, an external world as the cause of that excitement. More and more inner sensation came to dominate and often even made itself the object of representation. The distance from the familiar object becomes ever greater, its stylization increasingly more violent. (One does not stylize an object, rather one sees something from the very outset as stylized and translated. Stylization is a sensory process, based on specific technical requirements.) Cézanne began with that. He defined painting “as a conception of nature with a view to the picture and the development of the means of expression” and with a dictum such as “light does not exist” he deviated widely from the goals of the impressionists. At the same time he demanded a logic and laws of seeing. One strives for something like an objective, absolutely obligatory painting and so proceeds by and large according to two basic concepts: the picture and the inner sensation. One conceives the world and its things as symptoms of an inner process that carries its justification completely within itself. The picture is affirmed as a whole whose totality is achieved through the equilibrium of color translation. It’s arguably the same with Matisse. This totality and the equilibrium are factors of the mind. We are probably not wrong if we understand this explanation as the bearer of a classical academic tradition, and I believe that even the late, ostensibly radical Matisse stands close to Ingres, Poussin, and the Greeks. We perceive the consequences of certain concepts of the beautiful, of equanimity, et cetera. Matisse has enriched the precept of valeur with one related to drawing, asserting that particular lines are conditioned and interpreted by particular colors. Cézanne’s statements, “as one paints, one draws,” or “drawing envelops (clads) painting,” become entirely a divinatory process of sensation. To every rhythm of movement of a figure there corresponds a simple color, and the entirety of the rhythmical and painterly facture produces the balance of the composition. It’s not difficult to rec-

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ognize that we have drawn nearer to the creation of conventional rites of painting. Light, which previously played such a major role, which, since it came from a particular direction, produced so much movement, is now only a result of the modification of the entire pictorial surface. This deliberate preponderance of the inner conditions undoubtedly carries with it a danger. The inner world of feeling is certainly not without rules or limits, but it seems to me that a boundlessness results if one seeks to realize theories optically and consequently in the individual object. Theory impoverishes, even if it may also clarify, and it is increasingly becoming the object of representation. Yet the consequence of even a subtle theory is either the poster or a purist style. The impact of Matisse lies just as strongly in the seductions of the theoretical as in the undoubted quality of his painting, especially since it attracts the German who desires to be rescued from the boring brainlessness with which impressionism is being used up here. From the precept of the picture there readily follows that of the free translation of color. Seurat already emphasized that colors mutually condition one another, and established the doctrine of complementary colors. Matisse modifies colors according to their value as inner sensation of what is seen, according to their reciprocal emotional contingency. The dynamic of the colors corresponds to the waxing and waning of the lines. Picasso. Matisse stressed the decorative and sensual qualities of Cézanne; we note here that the consequence of the primitive was an even greater primitivity. The beholder is compelled to adapt only to specific conventional elements. From the teachings of Cézanne Picasso chose the one that applied to modeling, to which he added something new. He observes each thing according to its value as a plastic stimulus. Cézanne called the plane the basis of plastic articulation. Picasso sought a formula that permits him to structure every part of the picture plastically and tectonically. Cézanne already recognized that certain basic stereometric forms are inherent in all bodies, elements so to speak of all that is plastic. He named the cone, cylinder, and cube. This unquestionably established a point from which a reaction could be launched against every form of flat painting and decoration. There begins a form of seeing absolutely identical with modeling. It counters the complication of the plastic with a tremendous simplification of the basic forms, and to the delicate nuancing of valeurs it opposes the unity of color. Picasso paints his pictures in brown, dark yellow, and gray, the whole is sustained by tectonic contours. We’re accustomed to seeing things plastically simplified, producing, as it were, a dull photograph in our memory. Picasso seeks out the crucial plastic points, which he interprets not as coloristic elements but rather as stereometric spatial structures. He mutually subordinates all of these, bringing them into a system that shows us how much plastic expression there is in a visual phenomenon. He separates the individual forms by means of

21 NOTES ON RECENT FRENCH PAINTING

simple lines. Standing before these pictures one senses something of Spanish architecture, a complicated Gothic. The picture is conceived as architecture. Picasso brings growing complexity to the plastic richness of his pictures, and if one may perhaps say that Matisse’s logic purifies his pictures more and more and diminishes their corporeal richness, then it is probably no joke to say that Picasso is adding more and more plastic junctures. Picasso has already worked through a few periods and put them behind him; it seems to me that he is approaching the end of one. Undoubtedly he has the strength to do something new, above all he is absolutely keeping his distance from the decorative tendency that is now a raging epidemic. The Douanier Rousseau’s success is symptomatic. Undoubtedly his painting has certain qualities that are as fatally reminiscent of Böcklin as they are, not disagreeably, of the early Netherlandish painters. He typifies the French rage for the primitive. Think of a quite simple man of a certain naïveté and with an instinct for impressive, indeed refined, colorful sensation. Gifted with a complicated porter’s taste that regulates a good and humble soul. There is a touching primitivity of the luxury of the little people, except that among them one seldom encounters the miracle of strong and confident disposition. Rousseau’s primitivity reminds us of a monumental oleograph and a poetic naturalist. One fancies that he struggles against his pure heart for Bouguereau.10 Unquestionably, if we did not have Giotto and the early Netherlandish painters, all of whom he does not know, he would be of a certain importance. A credulous, entirely unconscious soul with a will for refinement. In any case with him we are saved from the theoretical. In all this there is a lot of arts and crafts. One is weary of Louis XV and considers the smashed-in egg crate with four legs as the ideal chair. Some quite well known painters seem to me like members of Die Scholle;11 not a little of their work is ripe for inclusion in Jugend.12 Van Dongen, for example, reveals himself more and more as a gifted pupil of Erler.13 One paints mostly out of one’s head; for the moment the few painting traditions and the remembered forms have staying power. A pure, self-sufficient art has been achieved, which generally consumes itself. Naturally I thought often of Böcklin, these people have a powerful logic in their heads. Above all one plays the primitive. Occasionally one thinks that the Hellene Matisse and his so easygoing theory of equilibrium are nihilistic and disintegrative, at least in their consequences. Painting is becoming increasingly ideological, and primitivism has extorted the poster. Not far removed from this— one can call it idealist painting— are the Italian futurists. One thing separates them from the French, a lack of traditional technique. Here, too, the conceptual dominates, although it is much more literary in character. They render the dynamic of the états d’âme.14 A horse at rest gives the psychological sensation of two legs, one that gallops that of twenty. The houses collapse onto the horse, which races through the

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streets. It’s sufficient to render a shoulder, an ear, et cetera, the other side is produced by the beholder, who is drawn into the picture by lines of force. The person sitting on the sofa enters the sofa, the sofa takes possession of him; for all things have equal worth. One has only to render the mental sensation, the dynamic relation, not the “passé” object. The basis of painting is an inherent divisionism. The only one of them who can paint anything is Severini. No other impressionist exerts so much influence in France today as does old Renoir. The young are searching for laws and tradition. If Renoir does not possess the former, he is all the more an example of the latter. He mostly renders a fragment of a familiar composition in an impression. His colors are reminiscent of folk songs that are not far removed from a chanson. Renoir has redeemed the animalistic nude of Fragonard in a quite solid kind of painting. His drawings, which Vollard will soon publish, show a consummate mastery full of popular qualities.

CH. 2

TOTALITY 1914/16

“Totality” is the most important of Einstein’s early theoretical essays, articulating ideas that would shape his writing into the early 1930s. It is also his most hermetic, obscure text— not surprising given its explicit dismissal of the claims of logic. That obscurity is compounded by the absence of any explicit reference to a single thinker, artist, movement, artwork, or example of any kind.1 The concept of totality had occupied a special place within the discourse of German philosophy since Immanuel Kant.2 Einstein makes no reference to any of these thinkers, yet to a striking degree he formulates his theory of totality in terms that occur in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of the Power of Judgment— but does so decidedly against the grain.3 Making an indirect reference to Kant, Einstein rejects the “doctrine of aesthetic judgment” that had become “the foundation of aesthetics.” Other terms prominent in Kant’s critiques appear here— besides totality (Totalität) there is cognition (Erkenntnis), lawlike regularity (Gesetzmäßigkeit), quantity (Quantität), and quality (Qualität)— yet Einstein radically alters the relations between those terms. Significantly the words pleasure (Lust), displeasure (Unlust), beauty (Schönheit), sublimity (Erhabenheit), and taste (Geschmack), all

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fundamental to Kant’s aesthetics, do not appear here.4 For Einstein they are not essential to the concerns of art. “Schön häßlich ist das Urteil,” he quipped elsewhere— judgment is beautifully ugly.5 In this essay a fundamental distinction between Einstein and Kant concerns the issue of the relationship of art to cognition (Erkenntnis). Kant regarded the “feeling of pleasure and displeasure” under which he considered art in The Critique of the Power of Judgment as having nothing to do with the faculty of cognition.6 In an early fragment Einstein had directly challenged Kant on this issue: “Critique of judgment or the cognitive faculty and art. The forms of seeing were interpreted as the forms of the knowing subject. Seeing relied on cognition for form.”7 In other words, for Kant art represented forms as already cognized, as already produced by the cognitive faculty and its concepts. This Einstein rejected: “With the artist cognition occurs through the act of seeing” (BA 4, 268). For Einstein art is not a mere product of seeing objects previously cognized—“the individual artwork itself,” he writes in “Totality,” “constitutes a specific act of cognition and of judgment.” This act of cognition differs from that of Kant, for whom knowledge of an object subsumes it under the “unity of the concept,” suppressing its concrete individuality, so that every object becomes a replication, a reproduction of the concept.8 Einstein divorces cognition from the concept: “art considered as cognition is not based on concepts but on the concrete elements of representation”; it creates “concrete objects.” Einstein introduces the term totality only in the third section of his essay. It is, to say the least, a difficult concept that is radically at odds with Kant. For Kant totality “was nothing other than plurality considered as a unity,” and in his table of a priori concepts he placed it under the category of quantity.9 For Einstein, however, “Totality is not unity; for unity always implies repetition, namely, repetition into quantitative infinity”; rather it is “a self-complete system of specific qualities,” “already organized in itself.” Totality does not exist in nature, as it did for Kant;10 it is a construction of the human mind with an internal lawlike regularity.11 It is totality that makes artworks and enables them to be realized. It is important to note that the “system” of totality for Einstein does not extend to a class of objects, but is limited to a single concrete object— it is a system of concrete singularity.12 Hence totality is not style; it is radically self-complete, noncontingent, and unrepeatable. Einstein displaces the locus of aesthetics from the spectator to the artist and the artwork, from the act of judgment to the creative act. The beholder no longer judges the artwork, as in Kant; rather, seeing itself should be determined by the artwork. Einstein enunciates this fundamental belief in the opening sentences of the essay: “Above and beyond its uniquely separate role art determines seeing in general. . . . Art trans-

25 TOTALITY

formed all seeing, the artist determines our common mental images of the visual world [die allgemeinen Gesichtsvorstellungen]. Hence it is art’s task to organize them.” Art, then, has the capacity to alter and to structure human seeing. It processes “the material of physiological seeing so as to endow it with human significance.” And where Kant held that space and time constitute “pure intuition,” the a priori forms in which we experience our concrete sensible intuitions, Einstein corrected him: space and time were not a priori forms of perception; they were “the forms of what has been perceived” (my emphasis).13 These intuitions weren’t “pure,” they were shaped and altered by art. For Einstein the artwork must be characterized by totality. Totality was defined by a radical autonomy, a momentary, internally coherent constellation of qualities isolated in space and time. In its absolute selfcompleteness a total artwork leaves nothing to be augmented, imagined, or otherwise consummated by the beholder, for the “total object absorbs every psychological process that is purposely directed toward it.” It must impose its vision on the beholder. Einstein expressed this idea a few months earlier in a catalog text: “A compelling art is expected to transcend personal optical experience, pressing toward something commandingly elemental, strong enough to transform, to organize persons and things in accord with the vision of its truth; for the picture is the painter’s means for reshaping human beings according to the truth of his visual intuition.”14 In that short text it is clear that Einstein believes to have found such an art in cubism, and above all in Picasso. It’s significant that he titled an earlier draft of the first section of “Totality,” this text without names, “Picasso.”15 Although Einstein mentions no names in “Totality,” there is ample evidence of his engagement with the work of two other thinkers, both of whom also took issue with particular aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy: Konrad Fiedler and Henri Bergson. Fiedler, the late nineteenthcentury art theorist, sought to correct what he considered a fundamental error in Kant’s aesthetics, namely the belief that “art has only to do with the life of feelings of pleasure and displeasure.” “Art as such has nothing to do with the judgment of taste, for its task is actually the cognition of things.”16 “Artistic activity,” he declared, “is an operation of the cognitive faculty, the artistic result is a cognitive result.”17 Einstein’s assertion that art “determines seeing in general,” that the artwork is a “cognitive act” (Erkenntnisakt), is thoroughly Fiedlerian. But what Fiedler and Einstein mean by cognition should not be confused with Kant’s meaning: in their usage cognition avoids the generalized, iterable abstraction that defines the concept (Begriff ); it is, rather, a cognition that preserves the singularity, spontaneity, and concrete plenitude of intuition (Anschauung). A passage in Negro Sculpture, probably

26 CHAPTER TWO

completed shortly after “Totality,” elucidates this point: “form is that perfect identity of visual intuition and its individual realization, which are structurally isomorphic and therefore do not relate to each other as the concept does to the individual case.”18 True to the instantaneous nature of intuition, for the artist totality does not produce a stable visuality, a system of repeatable forms— it is self-complete yet temporary. For Fiedler artistic activity “exhausts itself in every single moment in order to begin anew in the moment that follows.”19 Einstein holds that totality “can begin at any moment,” it “enables us to see our experiences as a whole at any given point.” The fleeting, momentary nature of totality removes it from any chain of causality, ensuring its autonomy, singularity, and discontinuity with conventional reality— and it offers an opening for human freedom (GB, 296). Einstein’s discussion, in the later sections of his essay, on “intensity” and the experience of time as quality rather than as quantity, is related to this idea, and reflects his reading of Bergson’s Time and Free Will.20 In that book Bergson presented a critique of Kant’s theorization of time, specifically his treating time the same as space, as a homogeneous medium whose contents, like those of space, can be quantified and measured. This, Bergson argued, was Kant’s “great mistake.”21 He countered with the proposition that we can experience time as “pure duration,” stripped of any spatial association, as quality, as intensity, as simultaneity, which are unquantifiable— and therefore nonrepeatable.22 We will encounter these ideas in Negro Sculpture, for which “Totality” effectively serves as a theoretical prolegomenon. ■

1

A

bove and beyond its uniquely separate role art determines seeing in general. The memory of all previously seen art weighs on the viewer when one looks at an individual picture or absorbs an impression of nature. Art transformed all seeing, the artist determines our common mental images of the visual world. Hence it is art’s task to organize them. To structure the collective eye, laws of seeing are necessary for assessing the material of physiological seeing so as to endow it with human significance. Our mental images of space [räumlichen Vorstellungen] become significant for us because through art we have the capacity to shape and to alter them. Art becomes an effective power insofar as it is able to order our seeing according to laws. Too often one naively conflated the types of psychological process experienced by the viewer of art with actual laws, by naively merging the beholder with the work of art.

27 TOTALITY

Laws of art do not originate from the concepts that constitute the basis of aesthetic judgments; rather, laws of art are based on the basic forms that underlie a potential artwork. Under the influence of philosophy one overestimated the doctrine of aesthetic judgment, making it the foundation of aesthetics, believing that on this basis one could establish what was specific to art. Such was the consequence of the doctrine that philosophy is a science of the concepts that form the basis of our cognition, from which one deduced that aesthetics was the doctrine of the concepts that form the basis of our judgments on art. Here the consequences of an indirect method are clearly evident, namely that it is not the given facts that are established as premises but a surrogate psychological process or an intellectual content whose function is, as it were, underpinned with metaphysical substrata. Judgment of an artwork is not crucial, since the process of artistic creation has a claim to being at least equally important. Rather it is the simple fact of the existence of a series of achievements that constitute art. Certainly one could assume that through judgments grounded in the knowledge of art one might determine what art actually is, where it begins and where it ends; especially since there is an oppressive glut of so- called art that is described as bad, vulgar, or inartistic. Here the concept of qualitative judgment comes into play, which, to be sure, does not aid us in constructing an object from what is given, yet neither does it limit itself to the given substance of art. Especially since the beholder, through his judgment, transforms and establishes the facts for himself. These contradictions are conditioned by the nature of aesthetic judgment itself, since this is not an intellectual matter, rather it proceeds from the elements of form. Perhaps, in order to arrive at a clearer conception of aesthetics, one should no longer regard it as a methodological field of philosophy that investigates the method for attaining understanding of art [Kunsterkenntnis], namely understanding defined in the sense of something posthumous. Rather one would do better to shift notions concerning the understanding of art to the specific act of creation itself, in the sense that the individual artwork itself constitutes a specific act of cognition and of judgment [Erkenntnis- und Urteilsakt].23 The subject matter of art is not objects but figured seeing [das gestaltete Sehen]. The point is the requisite seeing, not the objects that happen to be seen. In this way one penetrates to the objective elements of an a priori knowledge of art that plays itself out only a posteriori in judgment of the work. The cognitive act, that is, the reshaping of our image of the world, takes place neither through creation of the work nor through viewing it, but through the artwork itself. For cognition, which is more than just a critical operation, is nothing other than the creation of contents that are generated by laws, that is, are transcendent. Logic’s conformity to law is not universal, rather logic is a specific science like physics or any other, one that has its proper objects, yet it may

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not venture to falsify those objects by turning them into the content of a general science. From such presumptions of logic arose the mistaken notion that with the aid of logic one could destroy religious systems, yet all one proved was logic’s inability to grasp or fathom the entire spiritual dimension of existence. Just as Scholasticism believed that being was produced by means of judgment, so one now succumbed to the no less dangerous error that the legitimacy of spiritual and intellectual systems should be grounded in logic. Logic is nothing other than the doctrine of those concepts that are peculiar to logic itself, but which cannot be used to control or justify the larger intellectual and spiritual world, being linked to it only insofar as they also represent a particular part of this domain and for that reason have a few characteristics in common. From this mistaken, overly universalized application of logic antinomies turned up in every specialized domain,24 which disappear as soon as one tests each area as to its particular, objective, properly cognitive substance. Logic as a universal science is a comparative technique, from which the dialectical character of logical practice developed directly, and this undermines any possibility of establishing laws based on it.

2 Psychology is nothing but a reaction against logic. One hoped to obtain more definitive results if one constructed individual capacities or functions. Psychology grounded its knowledge for the most part in facts that lie completely outside the domain of philosophy, facts that, although probably constituting components of our being, can never explain what is distinctly constitutive of total realms generated by laws, for psychology may address the preconditions of such phenomena, but not their immediate content. (It should be added that psychology frequently operates with hybrid concepts.) Psychology is just as prone as logic to the erroneous assumption that a science is capable of making claims about something besides itself. This is due to the lack of a universal metaphysics, which, although no more capable than any other science of consolidating rules for specialized domains, may have validity for us simply as a supreme reality unto itself, as the most intensive power, but not as an extensively universal one.

3 What sets apart all of these constructs of the world of the mind [Gebilde der geistigen Welt] and thus enables them to achieve a distinctively formed being is totality. Constructs exist only when they are explicit, attaining form; only totality, their self-completeness, makes them objects of cognition and enables them to be realized. For every realization, every manifestation

4 Totality is a concept that can in no way be extrapolated, that can neither be derived from parts nor be traced back to some higher unity (it legitimizes every living being). Totality never excludes anything; that is, before it there is neither a positive nor a negative, for the contrast, in other words the unconditional unity of opposites, constitutes totality. Totality is never in any way determined quantitatively and can always occur in accord with purely qualitative presuppositions. Every individual organism must be total. Totality is not unity; for unity always implies repetition, namely repetition into quantitative infinity; whereas totality as a finite system exists only when all the discrete and varied parts within the system come into play.

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of consciousness means nothing other than delimitation; totality is nothing other than a self-complete system of specific qualities, and this is total if the totality is accompanied by sufficient intensity. Totality means that the goal of all knowledge and effort no longer lies in the infinite, as an indefinable overall purpose, rather it is resolved in the singular, because totality justifies the concrete being of individual systems, endowing them with meaning. Totality makes possible the establishment of qualitative laws, to the extent that now the individual system’s conformity to law rests not on the varied repetition and the return of the same, but on the character of specific, elementary constructs. By this means one succeeds in setting up qualitative laws, laws that always yield a unified system and do not vary quantitatively, but intensively, which do not recur endlessly, but detach themselves qualitatively, so that it’s possible to apply such laws to temporal process, for example, to biology, without the need to destroy what is individual in the facts. We stress that cognition does not constitute a critical operation, rather it is the creation of ordered contents, that is, of total systems. What we understand by system is no longer the integration of a multiplicity displaying certain one- sided characteristics, nor do we mean a somehow quantitatively determined order, that is, one that comprises a certain number of objects; rather what we mean by system is every concrete totality that cannot experience an ordering or articulation by means of some external instrument, but which is already organized in itself. By defining cognition as the creation of concrete organisms, we dissociate cognition from the doctrine of a selfrepeating generality. In this way cognition is wrenched from its theoretical isolation and insignificance, cognition becomes equated with creation, and something immediate [ein Unmittelbares] is created that was, to be sure, latently there yet was not represented.

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Accordingly anything that tends to lie beyond the limits of thought is eliminated within the operative law. Totality makes concrete intuition [Anschauung] possible and by means of it every concrete object becomes transcendent. As intensity totality has nothing to do with the extensive magnitude of the spatially infinite, from which physicists derive their notions of the temporally infinite.

5 In the course of our psychic processes we apprehend total, that is to say selfcomplete, structures. These constructs constitute our memory and function as self-complete qualities, for it is precisely totality that constitutes their significance, to the degree that they derive their qualitative specificity from that totality. We would never be able to conceive anything specific if our memory did not represent the consolidation of concise qualitative constructs, without which— totality being a function and as such one that can and must experience a temporal determination— time could never be differentiated for us. Time, conceived purely, must mean a qualitative difference of experiences, which considered allegorically on the basis of geometrical ideas, means spatial sequence, while time is only a difference of quality. Because we define cognition as the creation of concrete objects, principles are conceivable only in light of their being, on the basis of this mode of cognition. The a priori basis of a principle is its quality or totality. All qualitative principles are a posteriori paraphrases of totality. Art considered as cognition is not based on concepts but on the concrete elements of representation. The total object absorbs every psychological process that is purposely directed toward it, and therefore every causality. Causal analysis is purely retrospective, which always exceeds the concrete object; causes are substituted, but not the totality. The causes of an object lie in another, posthumous plane than the object itself. Causal thinking dissolves into an unarticulated multiplicity and disposes of its object as an allegory of an insensible process that lies outside of the object. For that reason it says nothing about form, its quality. Memory is the pure function of qualitatively different experiences that become subordinated to their quality and are simultaneously latent, in order to act within a qualitative experience that takes in something analogous or antagonistic. In concrete experience we possess time immediately, conscious of its relation to the qualitative. Scientifically we measure time mediately with the help of magnitude and transform it into a simultaneously spatial factor, while it is immediately a difference of quality.

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In the relationship of the concrete experience to the qualitative functions of mnemonic representations we grasp time immediately. Every object can be total provided there are no simple objects. Totalities differ from one another on the basis of intensity, that is, the more complex and powerful are the references of their contents, the more strongly these themselves represent multifaceted elements. This mode of thinking applies above all to the creation of objects and is most closely linked to the immediate life process, which, like memory, is defined purely qualitatively; for number is the medium of retrospective thinking, which passively and posthumously gives rise to the delusion that a continuity is guaranteed only by number and the nonqualitative. Totality on the other hand evinces a minutely articulated sequence that can at any given point be interpreted temporally, that is, as qualitatively immediate, whose intensity now increases, now decreases, depending on the kind and intensity of the experience, and which in fact can begin at any moment.25 Totality enables us to see our experiences as a whole at any given point, and time is the synonym for quality.26 Quantitative consideration forbids us from remaining at any given point, because its continuity may never be qualitatively defined, which precludes delimitation. The quantitative consideration of experiences does not permit us to determine even the smallest unit, that is, our experiences would fully dissolve into chaos and we would lose any means of interpreting our experiences as particular latent functions, which, defined qualitatively, can emerge at any given point. Since the quantitative cannot generate anything new but represents only the repetition of a unit, so, too, it can never be used to represent temporal processes, except when these are themselves of a purely quantitative kind, that is, one retroactively repeats a process, which appears impossible to us in the immediacy of life, since intuition in time always represents a new constellation. This continuous qualitative differentiation notwithstanding, our being does not shatter into fragments, since by its very qualitative dimension it represents one of the totalities.

CH. 3

NEGRO SCULPTURE 1915

Widely reviewed, Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture) established Einstein as a major critic at age thirty.1 A second edition appeared in 1920, before he had yet published anything of substance on modern art.2 Today it remains by far his best- known work and one of his few writings on art that has had a broad reception outside of the specialized Einstein literature. A few ethnologists were writing admiringly on African sculpture as “art” even before it was “discovered” by the European avant- garde.3 In 1897, in a book notably titled The Fine Art of the Africans, the German Leo Frobenius expressed the view that “in a technical and artistic respect the sculpture of the Negroes achieves more than that of most other primitive peoples.”4 A year later, in a paper surveying the Benin “antiquities” only recently looted by the British, the Berlin ethnologist Felix von Luschan felt no need to qualify his laudatory assessment with

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the designation “primitive.” Conveying enthusiasm and astonishment, he praised the Benin sculptures as technically equal to the finest that Europe had produced; in its best pieces, the “great and monumental” Benin art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was on the level of the best European art of that era.5 The art historian Karl Woermann, integrating African art into his History of Art of All Times and Peoples two years thereafter, repeated this assessment.6 By 1906 European artists had begun to take note of African sculpture, and a specialized market developed for these objects.7 Einstein’s interest in Africa seems to date from a sojourn in Paris in 1912, when he became acquainted with Joseph Brummer, the transplanted Austro- Hungarian sculptor who became one of the pioneering dealers of African art.8 In August 1913 Einstein wrote to Luschan, by then professor of anthropology at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, requesting photographs for a special issue of the magazine Der Merker on the “great achievements of primitive peoples,” specifically naming “Negro sculptures [and] Mexican works.”9 The project never came to fruition. Yet by the time Einstein wrote the text for Negro Sculpture less than a year later,10 he was at pains to dissociate these objects from the prevalent “misguided concept of the primitive.” Here he set out to assess and valorize African sculptures not as exotic products of a “primitive” culture but as “structures,” as unique, exemplary achievements in the medium. His slender book was the first publication in any language dedicated to an intensive consideration of the formal properties of these objects as sculptures.11 Negro Sculpture consists of an introductory text of just over twenty pages divided into five sections, followed by 111 black-and-white plates illustrating ninety-four sculptures. The works are presented without any identifying information whatsoever— there are no captions and no list of illustrations.12 In the first section of his introductory essay, Einstein explains the formidable challenge of his project and seeks to justify his method. The state of knowledge about Africa was “slight and imprecise.” Little was dated; a single region might present a plethora of different styles; constructing any art-historical narrative on the basis of style was therefore out of the question.13 “Hence,” he concludes, “the attempt to say anything about African art appears rather hopeless.” Ethnographic knowledge will not help here, Einstein insists, so he will “disregard subject matter and its related contextual associations” and build his case on the only reliable evidence, “the African sculptures themselves!” If, he argues, these objects sustain a rigorous formal analysis, then “it is implicitly demonstrated that the forms in question are art.” But before this point in the text Einstein has already tipped his hand: barely a few paragraphs into his introduction he asserts that “scarcely

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anyone had . . . practiced a given mode of artistic production with such purity as the Negroes.” In making a formalist case for African sculpture, Einstein, despite his professed agnosticism regarding the ethnographic scholarship, nevertheless argues that the formal and spatial properties of African sculpture were integrally related to religion. For him that connection was crucial. In the third and longest section of his text, Einstein offers a dense, intricate argument about African freestanding sculpture, the forms of which grew from what he termed the African’s “cubic intuition of space” (kubische Raumanschauung). Yet he offers no commentary on any specific African object, makes no reference to any illustrated work, and mentions only the ancient Benin culture by name.14 The “formal analysis” with which he claims to make the case for African sculpture remains abstract, disembodied from the illustrated objects—“completely philosophical,” Hermann Hesse called it in his review of the book.15 Another reviewer, Wilhelm Hausenstein, complained that Einstein’s book read more like an “epistemological deduction” than an analytical account of art.16 In Negro Sculpture Einstein not only argues for African sculpture’s status as art; he dogmatically declares it the only “pure” sculpture. As one exasperated reviewer summed up the argument, “Only Negro sculpture is sculpture. . . . Negro sculpture alone cultivates, isolates the pure form. All other sculpture bypasses it or misunderstood its task, which for Einstein consists solely of achieving a ‘fundamental, unified conception of space.’”17 Indeed, as Einstein declares in his second section, “The Pictorial,” it is precisely the genuinely sculptural vision of the African that makes this art so inaccessible, so incomprehensible to European eyes. Not content merely with persuading his European readers to accept African sculpture as art, Einstein surely relished turning Europe’s condescension toward Africa and the myth of its “own absolute, indeed fantastic, superiority” on its head. In “purifying” African sculpture, Einstein presents it stripped of its functional and ritual accoutrements, turning it into sculpture in a Western sense. Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, the German- born Paris gallerist, remarked in a letter to Einstein that while he greatly admired Negro Sculpture, “it should have had a different name, for it was a wonderful treatise on sculpture in general.”18 In effect, Einstein uses African objects to offer a normative theory of sculpture that serves as a countermodel to the equally normative theory presented by the German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand in his Problem of Form in Visual Art, the most influential German- language treatise on art from the two decades preceding the First World War.19 The key concepts in Einstein’s account of the formal characteristics of African sculpture are adapted from Hildebrand—

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against the grain— and directed against his conception of sculpture.20 For Hildebrand it is the sculptor’s task to rescue the viewer from the “unresolved and uncomfortable condition” of struggling to form a unified visual image from the temporal experience of three dimensions, of the “cubic”; the sculptor should purge the cubic of its “disturbing” aspect by providing the viewer with that unified image, producing an effect of space and volume in the viewer without actually exemplifying it as it is in nature. Indeed, Hildebrand asserted that “so long as a sculptural figure makes itself felt as a cubic form, it is still in the beginning stages of its articulation”; only when it functions as something essentially planar does it achieve artistic form, that is, significance for the visual imagination. The ideal solution is therefore to be found in relief, the essence of which is to “form the cubic into a unified visual impression.”21 Einstein explicitly criticizes Hildebrand’s solution, in his view representative of European sculpture since the Gothic period, as a “complete conflation of the pictorial with the sculptural,” as “an essentially pictorial treatment of cubic form” in which “three-dimensionality is summed up in a few planes that suppress its cubic nature.” This formal practice had culminated in “a total defeat of sculpture.” As Hildebrand theorized it, a sculpture was constructed with an effect on the beholder in mind. This meant, as Einstein argued, that the beholder became “an inseparable functional component” of the sculpture. African sculpture by contrast found a “pure solution” to the problem, embracing the cubic, “the prerequisite of all sculpture,” and offered an instance of “undiluted sculptural seeing” in which the “figure is . . . treated not as an effect but in its immediate spatiality,” irrespective of the viewer. This meant, according to Einstein, creating a form that “absorbed” features of the motif that could normally be perceived only in time and from separate points in space, concentrating them into a single unified form in which all these features were simultaneously visible.22 The sculpture was “noncontingent, self-complete, and autonomous.” In short, it fulfilled Einstein’s principle of totality (text 2). If Hildebrand provided the conceptual framework for a formal analysis of African sculpture that negated his very model, Einstein found a positive model— and most probably a major interlocutor— for his own study in a newly published book on ancient Egyptian sculpture by Hedwig Fechheimer.23 Einstein and the author had been close friends since as early as 1905 and enjoyed an intense intellectual exchange over the ensuing decade, up to the time he wrote Negro Sculpture.24 That he admired her book is evident from his draft for a review of it, apparently contemporary with an early draft for Negro Sculpture.25 There are several striking parallels between the two books.26 Both Fechheimer and Einstein argue against notions of historical progress, stressing the affin-

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ity of their respective art forms with contemporary artistic practice and their artistic superiority, because truer to the nature of the medium than was sculpture in the European tradition. Both stress how, in their respective cultures, sculptural practice is integrally related to religion. Yet the most crucial similarity is that, without mentioning Hildebrand by name, Fechheimer offers an account of Egyptian sculpture as a “pure” formal practice, one decidedly at odds with his theory of sculpture. Where Hildebrand sees sculpture as calculated to produce an effect of volume in the mind of the beholder, for Fechheimer Egyptian freestanding sculpture is a self-complete spatially autonomous entity that never addresses or implies the presence of anything outside itself, a characteristic that Einstein attributed to African sculpture.27 Most striking, however, is her point about the “vigorous emphasis of the cubic elements” in Egyptian freestanding sculpture (my emphasis).28 Especially interesting in relation to Hildebrand— and to Einstein— is Fechheimer’s treatment of Egyptian relief. Where Hildebrand sees relief as the optimal solution for a predominantly planar representation of the cubic, for Fechheimer Egyptian relief, “the most severe planar sculpture that we know,” is a distinct medium that makes no concessions to the deceptions of perspective or the illusion of volume, as would the reliefs of the ancient Greeks.29 The Egyptian relief incorporates the depth of the figure into its breadth; it offers a “summation” of viewpoints, “giving an equation [Gleichung], not a representation of the spatial value of the figures,” resulting in an “optical unity of the selected individual views” (emphasis in the original).30 “Equation” is the very term Einstein would use to characterize the spatial treatment in African sculpture: “The work of art must present the entire spatial equation.” Moreover, Einstein’s description of African freestanding sculpture is strikingly similar to Fechheimer’s characterization of Egyptian relief (more so than it is to her analysis of freestanding sculpture): the figure, perceived from different angles by the viewer in movement through space, “becomes a unity and is made simultaneously visible. . . . [E]ach part . . . must be deformed in such a way that it absorbs depth, so that the mental image of how it appears from the opposite side is incorporated into the frontal, yet nonetheless three-dimensionally functional side.” Yet Einstein not only does not connect this claim to any specific object; in some cases the visual information provided by reproduction of multiple views of twelve of the full-length sculptures seems to contradict the thesis, or at least beg for a clarification of it (figs. 3.1 and 3.2), since the alternate views sometimes reveal aspects of the figure that can’t be surmised from the frontal view.31 Further, in the case of nearly all of these figures, we are dealing with a greatly simplified anatomy and conventionalized, symmetrical poses, which requires no great effort to form a “mental image” of the rear side.

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3.1. Fang reliquary figure, Cameroon. Plates 36 and 38 in Negro Sculpture.

Einstein’s account of the incorporation of features seen from different viewpoints into a unified form is in fact more evident in Egyptian relief, where the heads and legs appear in profile while the upper torso appears as though seen frontally, than it is in African sculpture. More significantly, his account also evokes cubist painting of 1908–9.32 An ad from the publisher of the first edition notably characterized Einstein’s text as founded “on the basis of fundamentally cubistic intuitions.”33 In fact a decisive catalyst for Einstein’s writing of Negro Sculpture may

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3.2. Baule statuette, Ivory Coast. Plates 54 and 55 in Negro Sculpture.

have been the dual exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Berlin in December 1913, Picasso * Negerplastik, in which cubist works by Picasso were shown simultaneously with African sculptures, although evidently in separate rooms.34 The exhibition consisted of sixty-six works by Picasso, including forty- four paintings from the period 1901– 13 and twentytwo works on paper, and nineteen African sculptures.35 The exhibition must also have offered a rare opportunity to study African sculptures in

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space, instead of tightly crammed into glazed cabinets of Europe’s ethnographic museums (fig. 8.1).36 One can certainly see an affinity between Picasso’s art of 1907–8, represented by more than a dozen works in the exhibition, and certain African sculptures37 (and, since Einstein, many have), but his claim for African sculpture is not primarily about that, but about the experience of space, the integration of multiple viewpoints into an image that confronts us frontally. In making his argument for African sculpture on the basis of what he claimed to be its cubic intuition and plastic realization of space, Einstein was developing what was to become a central idea of his art criticism, which he had first touched on briefly in his “Totality” essay (text 2), written about the same time as Negro Sculpture: “Our mental images of space become significant for us because through art we have the capacity to shape and to alter them.” To change the human experience of space was to change human beings and their construction of the world. Einstein would develop this idea in the 1920s. How much did Einstein know of Africa when he wrote Negro Sculpture? Not much, one suspects.38 Since his book included neither any reference to previous authors nor a bibliography, we can only surmise what he had read of the ethnographic literature, drawing tentative conclusions from the information contained in the book.39 Einstein’s curt dismissal of ethnographic research on Africa (“for now neither our historical nor our geographical knowledge permits even the most modest determinations about this art”) reads suspiciously like a rationalization for his own ignorance. To be sure, ethnologists were themselves candid about the limited, fragmentary nature of their knowledge, and the challenge of gaining reliable information from their African subjects. Nevertheless, by the time Einstein wrote Negro Sculpture there was a wealth of detailed published scholarship and field reports on African material culture and religion. A lengthy state-of-research report on sub- Saharan Africa, published in 1906 by the Berlin ethnologist Bernhard Ankermann, is a useful source in this regard.40 In it Ankermann wrote something about almost everything— the various peoples, their respective language groups, their material culture, agriculture, and religion. He also devoted three pages to bodily decoration— painting, scarification, tattooing— and “deformations,” practices that Einstein discusses with palpable excitement in the final section of his text, “The Mask and Related Things.” Where Ankermann’s article is most valuable with reference to Einstein is in what he tells us about the state of knowledge on African religions. A more recent German source would have been Leo Frobenius’s Und Afrika sprach (The voice of Africa), a report of a two-year expedition published in 1912 in both a 670- page popular edition and an expanded, four-volume scholarly edition.41 Frobenius’s book contains

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extensive discussion of Yoruba religious beliefs, rituals, and related artifacts.42 What he and Ankermann report, however, has next to nothing in common with the fanciful and one-dimensional account in Negro Sculpture, and neither has much to say about the role of sculptures in religious practice.43 Repeatedly Einstein writes of the sculptures as “cubic” embodiments— notably not as representations— of “the god” or “the gods” but never goes beyond this generality to specify their differing functions and powers, let alone their names.44 His claim that the sculptural object “will never mingle in human actions” would scarcely have found support in the ethnographic literature. Similarly, his account of the attitude of the African sculptor toward the object he is carving seems purely imagined. Further, at the time he wrote Negro Sculpture Einstein was evidently ignorant of the central role of ancestor worship in African religion, the pervasive belief in the agency of the spirits of the dead— his silence on this is a strong indication of the limited state of his knowledge. Correspondingly, he makes no reference to rituals, offerings, priests, or geomancers— what he describes evokes private devotion such as it might be practiced during a visitation in a Roman Catholic church, without, of course, the same spatial experience. He had not traveled to sub- Saharan Africa,45 and it’s hard to imagine him finding information to support his theories of the religious foundation of the “cubic intuition of space” from accounts in the ethnographic literature; in Negro Sculpture he most likely invented religious practices that supported his intuition of the spatial qualities of African sculptural figures. Since none of the sculptures ostensibly exemplifying “cubic intuition of space” was captioned, the reader wouldn’t be aware that not one of them represented a “god.”46 “Einstein thinks and imagines,” concluded one scholar; “he does not conduct research.”47 Evidence suggests that Einstein’s ideas about African art were of recent origin— there is no reference to it in his art criticism before October 1913. An essay he wrote on Aristide Maillol, published in September 1913, gives the distinct impression that he had not yet developed the ideas about “cubic space” that form the core of his claims in Negro Sculpture— the word “cubic” does not appear, nor does “totality.”48 But what is most striking is that Einstein regards it as a virtue of Maillol’s sculptures that they present a closed form “from every angle,” yet that closed form “does not prevent us from trying out other viewpoints.” 49 Even if Einstein had previously seen African sculpture, it seems likely that the crucial encounter for the thesis of Negro Sculpture was the exhibition of Picasso and African sculpture at the Neue Galerie in December 1913. If Einstein’s ideas about sculpture appear to have been evolving in the years 1913–14, another important element of his Negro Sculpture was in place before the Neue Galerie exhibition: his views about the relation

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between art and religion.50 How crucial this art-religion nexus was for Einstein in these years is evident from his fundamental essay “Antike und Moderne” (Antiquity and modernity), probably dating from 1912 (BA 4, 140– 45).51 There he wrote that the emerging “synthetic notion of art . . . led inevitably to the recognition that art . . . is always symbolic and closely bound to the religious. Thus we finally grasped why for ancient man art and religion were a unity; in this we see not a lack of sophistication but a sign of his complete, unbroken wholeness” (my emphasis; BA 4, 144). This is the central issue for Einstein. He does not cite African sculpture in this text (he had probably not yet had a meaningful encounter with it), but his predisposition is nonetheless clear. African sculpture represented a radical countermodel to the contemporary culture of the West, with its markets, parliaments, relativism, individualism, and the absence of compelling religious belief. African sculpture is the unnamed art that lurks behind Einstein’s essay “Totality,” in which he asserted that religion remains immune to the operations of logic, which was unable “to grasp or fathom the entire spiritual dimension of existence.” In African sculpture he believed he had found a living example not only of an art, but of an entire visuality, a “mythic reality,” that was generated out of collective religious belief. A key passage for understanding what was at stake for Einstein in his interpretation of African sculpture comes toward the end of the first section, “Notes on Method.” Referring to the influence of African art on certain contemporary artists in their pursuit of “unmediated apprehension of space” (clearly he had cubism in mind), he drew a crucial distinction, one that “powerfully sets Negro sculpture apart from the art that looked to it. . . . What appears in the latter as abstraction is, in the former, nature presented unmediated.” Negro sculpture was, then, for the African “the most potent realism.” This was an example of Einstein’s claim in “Totality,” that “art determines seeing in general.” This was his hope for cubism. In Negro Sculpture Einstein writes how the sculpture, which “is the god,” transforms (verwandelt) the worshipper into a “mythic being . . . dissolving his human existence.” At the end of his Neue Galerie introduction, Einstein predicted that the new art “will transform [verwandeln] the beholder and in this way permeate him.”52 It should come as no surprise that this wasn’t merely an aesthetic matter for Einstein; it extended to politics— we find similar sentiments expressed in his important political essay “Notes on Politics.”53 What was lacking in modernity was a belief in “unambiguous, intransigent powers: yet these come always from the religious” (BA 1, 144). In Negro Sculpture Einstein writes with evident admiration for the “despotic, absolutely sovereign religion,” which leads to the sacrifice of individual identity in the cult practices of tattooing and masking. “What

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a remarkable sort of consciousness is this,” he enthuses, “which conceives of one’s own body as an unfinished work, and which alters it in a direct fashion.”54 In transforming oneself through tattooing, the individual sacrificed his or her natural body for an imagined, universal one, while the mask transformed the wearer into the animal or spirit that it embodied.55 Einstein saw both practices as instances of self-loss and selftransformation through the sacrifice of individual identity for the sake of a collective myth, notions that were to be seminal for his later writings on modern European art. It is tempting to conclude that Negro Sculpture was the product of a theory in search of an object— Einstein’s recently articulated radical theory of totality; that his thesis of the cubic intuition of space, of sculpture that collapsed the quantities of time and space into a single form instantaneously apprehended and characterized by qualitative “intensity,” was fundamentally theory driven, not a result of the unbiased visual intuition that was the conditio sine qua non of his aesthetics. Einstein invented a fiction about the making and reception of African sculpture through which he could offer a model of totality. Ethnographic research would only have undermined his argument— no, rendered it insupportable. It is noteworthy that in his African Sculpture, written after he had begun to immerse himself in the ethnographic literature, there is no mention of totality, although in modified form it would remain fundamental to his writing on twentieth-century art. To focus on the ethnological vagaries and inadequacies of Einstein’s account of African art, however, is to miss the point of it and to overlook not only its historical significance but also its radical agenda. Negro Sculpture, then, should be seen less as an introduction to its subject than as an intervention— not into the discourse on African art but into the world of contemporary European artistic culture, indeed of culture tout court. For all of his fanciful talk about its rootedness in African religious practice, Einstein’s isolation of African sculpture from the kind of iconographic and contextual detail available in ethnographic scholarship was arguably essential to his project of deprimitivizing it and presenting it as a countermodel to the tradition of European sculpture and most of contemporary sculpture as well. By mostly ignoring particulars of African sculpture’s cultural otherness, he is able to stress its formal otherness, to absolutize it as an exemplar of an alternate mode of visual, spatial, and bodily experience. In this sense, his book is more prescriptive than descriptive. In his draft review of Fechheimer’s Die Plastik der Ägypter, Einstein concluded that the book would “remain authoritative for a long time and absolutely determine how everyone sees this art” (my emphasis).56 It seems reasonable to assume he envisioned the same goal for his own book. Further, Negro Sculpture is the most rigorous articulation of

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here is scarcely any art that the European approaches as warily as that of Africa. At first he is disposed to deny that it is “art” at all, and responds to the distance that opens up between these objects and the Continental approach with a contempt that generated a veritable terminology of negation. This distance and the prejudices that follow from it impede any aesthetic assessment, indeed, they render it completely impossible; for in the first instance such an assessment presupposes that a sympathetic approach has been achieved. Yet the Negro is from the outset considered inferior, to be investigated unsparingly, and whatever he produces is condemned a priori as flawed. He has been the object of facile evolutionary hypotheses; for some he had to serve a misguided concept of the primitive, while others abused their defenseless object for the purpose of polishing such equally seductive and false phrases as “people of eternal prehistory”

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two ideas that would become central to Einstein’s project: the idea of art not as representation but as the constitution of the real, and the idea of metamorphosis— the effacement of memory and the self, the fusion with something that is not I. Writing three years after the second edition of his book had appeared, Einstein complained that “without the little pictures not a bloody soul would have read Negro Sculpture and only a couple of people in France understood it.”57 Hyperbole to be sure. Yet Einstein’s theory of African sculpture seems to have had little resonance or impact in the subsequent literature on Africa written by art critics and historians. Nevertheless, the book served to introduce and legitimize African sculpture as a topic of art-historical discourse, and as such it constituted a landmark. Although the book was followed over the next six years by illustrated books in English, French, Russian, and Einstein’s own African Sculpture, Negro Sculpture, with ninety-four objects (eighty-four of which were actually African) in 111 plates remained, outside the specialized ethnographic literature, the largest pictorial source for African sculpture until 1923, and it served as an important source for certain German artists.58 It is noteworthy that, in 1923, the Propyläen- Verlag dedicated the first volume of its prestigious series of art-historical surveys to the art of indigenous peoples, with the arts of Africa given a preponderant place in text and illustrations. “That we place a major accent on Africa,” wrote the author, Eckart von Sydow, “reflects the progressive, thoughtful, and empathetic elucidation” of its art, “for whose beginning we thankfully acknowledge Carl Einstein and also Leo Frobenius.”59 ■

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and so forth. One hoped to capture in the Negro something like a beginning, a condition that would never evolve beyond its initial stage. Many opinions about the African rest not least on such prejudices, concocted to serve a comforting theory. In all of his judgments the European proceeds from one assumption, namely that of his own absolute, indeed fantastic, superiority. In fact our lack of respect for the Negro merely reflects our ignorance of him, which only burdens him unjustly. Perhaps the plates in this book will establish this much: the Negro is not undeveloped; a significant African culture has gone to ruin; the Negro of today relates to what may have been an “antique” Negro perhaps as the fellah relates to the ancient Egyptian. Several problems in recent art have provoked a less superficial engagement with the art of the African peoples; as always, here, too, current developments in art led one to construct an appropriate history: in its midst arose the art of the African peoples. What had previously seemed useless now acquired significance in the recent efforts of contemporary artists; it was discovered that scarcely anyone had addressed certain spatial problems or practiced a given mode of artistic production with such purity as the Negroes. It turned out that the earlier verdict on the Negro and his art applied more to the judge than to the judged. This new relationship was soon matched by a new passion; one collected Negro art as art; passionately, which is to say: with this activity now validated one constructed a newly interpreted object out of the old materials. This short study of African art may not disregard the experience of more recent art, especially since what is effective in history is always a consequence of the immediate present. These contemporary connections, however, will be explored later so that we may stay focused on a single topic and not distort it by comparisons. What we know of African art is on the whole slight and imprecise; apart from a few pieces from Benin nothing is dated; several types of art object are commonly identified according to the sites where they were found, but I believe there is nothing useful to be gained from this knowledge. Peoples migrated and shifted throughout Africa; moreover, we must assume that here as elsewhere tribes fought over the fetishes and that the victors appropriated for themselves the gods of the defeated so as to benefit from their powers and protection. Completely different styles often originate from the same region; several explanations can be offered for this phenomenon without any possibility of determining the correct one; one can assume that it’s a matter of earlier and later art forms, or that two styles emerged alongside each other, or that a type of art had been imported. In any case, for now neither our historical nor our geographical knowledge permits even the most modest determinations about this art. The obvious objection would be that by organizing the material on the basis of stylistic criticism one might force it into a historical sequence, proceeding from the simple to the complex.

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Yet let us forgo the illusion that what is simple and what comes first are possibly identical; all too happily we delude ourselves in imagining that the preconditions and methods of thought are identical with the beginnings and the nature of process in general; when in fact every origin, by which I mean an individual, relative beginning— for we can never factually ascertain any other kind— is highly complex, since even in specific cases human beings would like to express so much, indeed too much. Hence the attempt to say anything about African art appears rather hopeless. The more so since a majority still demands proof that this is art at all. So we must fear being reduced to describing external facts that never yield anything more than, for example, that a loincloth is indeed a loincloth, which at no point leads to any general conclusion about the larger domain to which all those loincloths and protruding lips belong. (To view art as a means to anthropological and ethnographic insights seems to me dubious, since artistic representations reveal hardly anything about the facts upon which this kind of scholarly knowledge is based.) Nevertheless we will proceed from facts and not from some specious surrogate. More reliable, I believe, than any possible ethnographic or other knowledge is this fact: the African sculptures themselves! We will disregard subject matter and its related contextual associations, and instead analyze these formations as structures [Gebilde]. One will try to determine whether a global conception of form emerges from the sculptures’ formal properties that is homologous with artistic forms. One method is to be followed, another to be avoided: one is to stick to the visual domain and proceed within its specific laws; never should one impute the structure of one’s own reflections to that visuality or to the creative impulse: one must refrain from interpolating comforting evolutionary schemes and must not equate one’s thought process with what happens in the act of artistic creation; one must rid oneself of the prejudice that psychic processes could simply be reversed, and that reflecting on art is simply the opposite of creating art; on the contrary the former is generally a different process, one that precisely goes beyond form and its world so as to integrate the artwork into what is happening generally. Describing sculptures as formal structures achieves considerably more, however, than does an account of their subject matter; the latter moves beyond the given formal entity by treating it not as a formal entity but by appropriating it as a guide to some practice outside of its proper domain. Analysis of forms, on the other hand, remains within the domain of the immediately given; for all that it presupposes is the existence of forms; yet these are more conducive to analysis than individual things because as forms they also say more about ways of seeing and laws governing visual intuition, thereby directly compelling a mode of cognition that remains within the sphere of the given. If a formal analysis proves possible, one that addresses and encompasses

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the particular unities of spatial creation and the act of looking, then it is implicitly demonstrated that the forms in question are art. One may perhaps object that willfulness and an inclination to generalize secretly dictated such a conclusion. This is false; for the individual form contains all the legitimate elements of a visual intuition within itself; indeed, it represents them, since they can be represented only as form. The individual case on the other hand has nothing to do with the specificity of the concept, rather, the two have a dualistic relationship to each other. It’s precisely the essential congruence between the general visual intuition and its realization that defines a work of art. One should also consider: artistic creation is just as “arbitrary” as the necessary tendency to link the individual forms of visual intuition to laws; for in both cases organization was the goal and was achieved.

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The European’s habitual incomprehension of African art corresponds to its stylistic power: for this art represents a significant example of sculptural seeing. Continental sculpture, one may argue, is strongly permeated by pictorial surrogates. In Hildebrand’s Problem of Form we possess the ideal reconciliation of the pictorial with the sculptural; even such a striking art as French sculpture seems, up to Rodin, to be concerned with, of all things, the dissolution of sculptural form. Even frontality, which is frequently considered a rigorously “primitive” manifestation of form, must be characterized as an essentially pictorial treatment of cubic form; for here three-dimensionality is summed up in a few planes that suppress its cubic nature; one is emphasizing, after all, the forms closest to the beholder and arranging them as planes, while treating the more distant parts as incidental modulations of the foreground plane, whose dynamic character is thereby weakened. One is emphasizing the most frontally placed motifs. In other cases, one replaced the cubic by a formal equivalent for movement in the motif itself or conjured away the crucial element, the unmediated expression of the third dimension, by a drawn or modeled movement of form. Even perspectival experiments undermined sculptural seeing. For this reason one can easily understand that the firm and necessary boundaries between freestanding sculpture and relief have been steadily dissolved since the Renaissance, and that a pictorial excitement, playing about a mass that is cubic only in a material sense, overwhelmed every three-dimensional formal construction. It is thus easy to understand that it would be painters and not sculptors who asked the crucial questions about three-dimensionality. It goes without saying that given these formal tendencies it was inevitable that our art had to pass through a period of a complete conflation of the pictorial with the sculptural (the baroque) and that such a practice could only

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culminate in a total defeat of sculpture, which, in order to capture at least the artist’s excited state and convey it to the beholder, had to be thoroughly pictorial and impressionistic. Three- dimensionality was eroded by optical sensation; personal handwriting dominated. This history of form was necessarily beholden to psychic processes. Artistic conventions seemed like paradoxes; the consensual goal was a maximally intense creator and, correspondingly, a maximally stimulated beholder; the dynamism of individual processes held sway. These were what mattered, and one doggedly persisted in this view. Preludes and postludes became the decisive phases, increasingly the work dissolved into a conduit for psychological excitement; the individual flow, cause and effect, became fixed. These sculptures were more like declarations of a genetic process than objectified forms, a lightning- like contact between two individuals; often the histrionics of aesthetic judgment were deemed more important than the work of art itself. Inevitably, any concise canon of form and of the visual act had to be dissolved. The artist strove for an ever- increasing differentiation of sculptural form, for an increasingly disjunctive proliferation of technical means. The legend of the “palpably apprehended” life model, spruced up as realism, was no remedy for the actual absence of sculptural form, rather it confirmed the very lack of a fundamental, unified conception of space. Such conduct destroys our distance vis-à- vis things and values only the functional significance that they harbor for the individual. Such an art means the potential accumulation of a maximally functional effect. Indeed, we saw that in several recent experiments this potential factor, namely the spectator, was made virtual and visible. In Europe, only a few styles diverged from this path, most notably the Romanesque- Byzantine style: yet it demonstrably had its origins in the East and quickly evolved into an art of movement (the Gothic). From that point on the beholder became interwoven with the sculpture, he became an inseparable functional component of it (e.g., perspectival sculpture); he became united with the primarily psychological transvaluation of the maker’s personality unless, judging it negatively, he contravened it. The sculpture was the subject of a conversation between two persons. What most interested this kind of sculptor was to predetermine both the effect and the beholder; in order to anticipate and test the effect, he was inclined to transform himself into the beholder (futurist sculpture), and the sculptures ought to be considered descriptions of that effect. Temporalpsychological factors completely outweighed spatial definition. To achieve the goal, even if unconsciously, the beholder became identical with the maker; only in this way was an unlimited effect possible. It says something about this state of affairs that one regards the effect on the beholder mostly as the inverse of the creative process, even though it involves little intensity. The sculptor subordinated himself to most of the

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psychological processes and transformed himself into the beholder. While working he always adopted a distant vantage point corresponding to that of the future beholder and he would then go on to model the effect accordingly; he shifted the emphasis to the visual activity of the viewer and modeled with touches,61 so that it would be left to the viewer to construct the actual form. The construction of space was sacrificed to a secondary, indeed to an alien means, namely that of material movement; cubic space, the prerequisite of all sculpture, was forgotten. A few years ago we witnessed in France the crisis that redefined the issues. Through a tremendous mental effort one came to recognize the questionable basis of the procedure. A few painters were strong enough to turn away from mechanically routine craftsmanship; distancing themselves from the usual means, they investigated fundamentals of the apprehension of space, what generates and determines it. The results of this important effort are sufficiently known.62 At the same time, out of necessity, one discovered Negro sculpture and recognized that, in isolation, it had cultivated pure sculptural forms. Usually one characterizes the efforts of these painters as abstraction, even though it cannot be denied that it was only through a prodigious critique of misguided metaphors that an unmediated apprehension of space could be approached. This, however, is essential, and it powerfully sets Negro sculpture apart from the art that has looked to it and has gained selfawareness in the process; what appears in the latter as abstraction is, in the former, nature presented unmediated. In formal terms, Negro sculpture will prove to be the most potent realism. Today’s artist acts not only for the sake of pure form, he still senses it as opposed to his own prehistory, so that an all too reactive strain is woven into his efforts; his critique, necessary as it is, reinforces the analytical side.

RELIGION AND AFRICAN ART The art of the Negro is defined above all by religion. As with many an ancient people, sculptures are objects of worship. The maker creates his work as the deity or its guardian, which means from the beginning he maintains a distance from the work, which either is or captures the god. The sculptor’s labor is a form of remote adoration and the work therefore a priori autonomous, more powerful than its maker; the more so as he infuses it with all of his intensity and, as the weaker being, sacrifices himself to it. His labor must be characterized as a form of religious service. As a deity the work is free and isolated from all else; artist and worshipper stand at an immeasurable distance from it. The work will never mingle in human actions, and if it should, then as something powerful and, again, remote. The work’s transcendence is presupposed and conditioned by its religious

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nature. It is created in adoration, in dread of the god, and such is its effect. Maker and worshipper are a priori psychological, which is to say essentially identical; the effect resides not in the work of art but in its presumed, unquestioned being as a god. No artist would presume to compete with the god by striving for an effect; for the effect is a given and is predetermined. To make the artwork for the sake of effect is pointless, especially since the idols are often worshipped in darkness. The artist produces a work that is self-sufficient, transcendent, and unentangled. To this transcendence corresponds a spatial intuition that precludes every function of the beholder; a completely exhaustive, total, and unfragmented space must be given and guaranteed. Here the isolation of the space does not mean abstraction but is rather unmediated sensation. The self- completeness of the work is guaranteed only if a cubic space is fully realized, such that nothing further can be added. Any activity of the beholder is out of the question. (In the case of religious painting, then the image will be entirely confined to the picture surface so as to produce a similar effect. This kind of painting cannot be achieved by a decorative or ornamental approach; those qualities are merely by-products.) I said that the three- dimensional must be perfectly and uncompromisingly realized, the visual intuition is predetermined by religion and reinforced by religious canon. With this determination of the act of looking, a style is achieved that is not subject to any willfulness by the individual but that is instead canonically determined and can be changed only by religious upheaval. The beholder often worships the images in darkness, in prayer is wholly devoted to and consumed by the god, so that he will scarcely affect the character of the sculpture or so much as take notice of it. The situation is the same when a king or chieftain is represented; indeed, even in the sculpture of the common man something divine is envisioned, revered even; here, too, this divine quality determines the work. In such an art the individual artist’s model and the portrait have no place, at best they constitute a profane, marginal art that is either difficult to distinguish from religious art or else contrasts with it, as a little regarded, less essential area. The work is erected as a typological manifestation of venerated power. Negro sculptures are marked by a pronounced individuation of their parts; this, too, is motivated by their religious purpose. The parts are oriented, not according to the beholder’s point of view, but from within themselves; they are perceived as confined by mass, not as diminished by distance; as a result, both the individual parts and their contours will be reinforced. There is another striking feature: most of these works dispense with a base and other features related to display, which one might find surprising, since by our standards the statues are extremely decorative. But the god is never presented except as a self-sufficient being, unneedful of any aid. There is no shortage of pious, reverent hands when it is borne by worshippers.

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Such an art will seldom objectify the metaphysical, which is taken to be self-evident. The metaphysical must reveal itself entirely within the completed form and condense itself in that form with astonishing intensity; form, in other words, is fully developed so as to achieve a maximum of selfcompleteness. A powerful realism of form will emerge here; for only in this way do those forces become active that achieve form not in an abstract or reactively polemical way but which are themselves unmediated form. (The metaphysics of today’s artists betrays even now the preceding critique of the pictorial and is incorporated into their representations as an essence of form and subject matter, so that the absoluteness of religion and art, their strictly delimited correlativity, became entangled in a destructive mixture.) In formal realism, which should not be understood as a mimetic naturalism, transcendence is a given; for imitation is out of the question. Whom would a god imitate, to whom would it submit? The result is a consistent realism of transcendent form. The artwork will be viewed not as an arbitrary and artificial creation but as a mythic reality, whose power surpasses that of nature. The artwork is real by virtue of its closed form; since it is self-sufficient and exceedingly powerful, the sense of distance will compel a powerfully intensive art. Insofar as the beholder is summoned to perform an active optical function, the European artwork is subject to interpretation of an emotional or even a formal kind, while the Negro artwork is defined unambiguously, not only for formal but also especially for religious reasons. It signifies nothing, it does not symbolize; it is the god, who preserves his hermetic mythic reality, into which he draws the worshipper, transforming him, too, into a mythic being and dissolving his human existence. Formal and religious self-completeness correspond to one another; so, too, do formal and religious realism. The European artwork became the very metaphor of the effect that invites the beholder to indulge in an effortless freedom. The religious artwork of the Negro is categorical and possesses a concentrated mode of being that resists every constraint. In order to establish a delimited existence for the artwork, every temporal function must be eliminated; that means any movement around the artwork, any touching of it, must be prevented. The god has no genetics; that contradicts its legitimate existence. Hence the need to invent a kind of representation that immediately expresses itself in solid material without recourse to modélé, which would signal the presence of an impious, personal, and hence diminishing hand. The intuition of space evinced by this kind of work must totally absorb cubic space and express it in a unified way; perspective or the customary frontality are prohibited here, they would be irreverent. The work of art must present the entire spatial equation; for it is timeless only when it excludes a temporal interpretation based on kines-

CUBIC INTUITION OF SPACE It is a mark of every argument over concepts, however closely tied it may be to our visual intuitions, that it takes on a life of its own and, for the sake of its own specific structure, does not express all the divergences of what happens in art. First we shall examine the specific formal organization of the intuition of the visual world that is the foundation of African sculpture. We can now completely disregard the metaphysical correlate since we have identified it as a self- evident contributing factor of formal organization and since we know that it’s precisely the work’s religious determination that compels us to posit the existence of an independent form. This presents us with the task of a formal analysis of the particular visual intuition that is manifested in this art. We shall avoid the mistake of degrading the art of the Negro to an unconscious memory of some European art form, since on formal grounds African art stands before us as a separate domain. Negro sculpture presents us with an instance of undiluted sculptural seeing expressed as fixed, stable form. Sculpture’s task is to render threedimensionality, hence to naive people it will seem a perfectly straightforward practice, for it works with a mass that is already defined by three dimensions. The task presents itself as difficult, indeed at first as almost insoluble, if one considers that three- dimensionality is to find expression not as some object in space but rather as form. Thinking about it one is overcome by an almost indescribable excitement: this three-dimensionality, which cannot be apprehended in a single glance, must be organized not as some vague optical suggestion, but as a self- complete, actual expression. European solutions are familiar to our eyes and persuade us mechanically and by force of habit, but judged against the example of African sculptures they show themselves to be avoiding the problem. Frontality, multiple viewpoints, transitional modélé, and sculptural silhouette are the most common devices. Frontality nearly cheats the viewer out of the experience of the cubic and concentrates all power onto a single side. It arranges the foremost parts according to a single viewpoint and endows them with a degree of plasticity. The simplest naturalistic aspect is chosen, the side closest to the beholder, the one that habitually orients him psychologically and representationally. Through a pattern of rhythmic interruptions, the other, subordinate aspects suggest a sensation that corresponds to an idea of three- dimensionality

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thetic mental images [Bewegungsvorstellungen].63 It absorbs time by integrating into its form what we experience as movement.

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based on our kinesthetic mental images. From abrupt movements, above all those connected by the motif, emerges an idea of spatial unity that has no formal legitimacy. Something similar happens to the viewer with the sculpture’s silhouette, which, occasionally supported by perspectival tricks, offers a mere suggestion of the cubic. On closer inspection it reveals itself as a convention derived from drawing, which is never a sculptural element. In all these cases one finds a procedure derived from painting or drawing; depth is suggested, but rarely constructed directly as form. These procedures are rooted in the prejudice that the cubic effect is more or less a guaranteed by-product of material mass, that the metaphorical inscription of an inner excitement into that mass or a single-sided formal directive would suffice for the cubic to exist as form. Such methods wish rather to suggest or connote the sculptural instead of addressing it in a consistent fashion. Yet by such means this would hardly be possible, since here the cubic is conceived as mass and not directly as form. Yet mass is not identical with form; for it cannot actually be perceived at a single glance; these procedures are always bound up with the psychological experience of kinesthetic acts that dissolve the form into something genetic and thereby utterly destroy it. Thus there arises the difficulty of fixing three-dimensionality in a single act of optical representation and viewing it as a totality so that it may be grasped as a single integration. But what, in cubic terms, is form? What is clear is that this form must be apprehended all at once, yet not as a mere suggestion of an object; a kinetic act must be arrested as an absolute. The three- dimensionally situated parts must be represented simultaneously, which means that the dispersed space must be integrated into a single field of vision. Three-dimensionality may be neither interpreted nor rendered absolutely as mass, but must be concentrated as a determinate mode of being, while that which generates the visual experience of threedimensionality and is habitually and naturalistically sensed as movement, is here constructed as a formally fixed expression. Every three-dimensional point within a mass can be interpreted in infinite ways; this fact alone seems to present insurmountable obstacles to any unambiguous determination and to rule out any possibility of totality; even the continuity of the point’s relations in fact impedes any hope of a definite solution, however much one may flatter oneself that through a gradual, slowly directed function one might suggest to the observer a definite unified impression; no rhythmic arrangement, no graphic relationship, no proliferation of movement, no matter how rich, is capable of deceiving us into believing that the cubic has here been directly concentrated into the unity of form. The Negro seems to have found a valid, pure solution to this problem. He discovered what must initially seem paradoxical to us, a formal dimension.

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The conception of the cubic as form— this alone, and not a material mass, is the business of sculpture— directly leads one to determine first just what constitutes that form; these are the parts that are not simultaneously visible; they must be gathered with the visible parts into a total form that defines a single act of vision for the viewer and corresponds to a fixed three-dimensional visual experience, so that the otherwise irrational cubic motif manifests itself as something visibly formed. The optical naturalism of Western art is not the imitation of external nature; the nature that it passively imitates is merely the vantage point of the viewer. Whence the geneticism, the excessive relativism that characterizes most of our art. This art adapted itself to the beholder (frontality, the image as seen from a distance), and increasingly the production of the final optical form was entrusted to an actively participating beholder. Form is an equation, like our mental images; this equation is artistically valid when it is grasped unconditionally and without reference to anything extraneous. For form is that perfect identity of visual intuition and its individual realization, which are structurally isomorphic and therefore do not relate to each other as the concept does to the individual case. Visual intuition may encompass several possible cases of realization, but it has no higher qualitative reality than they do. It follows that art represents a special case of unconditional intensity, and that quality must be generated undiminished within it. It is the task of sculpture to form an equation in which naturalistic sensations of movement, and hence of mass, are completely absorbed and in which their successive differentiation is converted into a formal order. This equivalency must be total, in order that the artwork will no longer be felt as an equation of mutually opposed human tendencies, but rather as something noncontingent, self-complete, and autonomous. The dimensions of ordinary space are threefold, but the third dimension, a dimension of movement, was merely quantified rather than being investigated for its specific nature. Since the work of art generates specificity as such, this last dimension undergoes a bisection. Movement is usually conceived as a continuum that delimits space by strolling through it. Yet because the artwork by definition fixes its object, this unity is split up into two opposite directions and so articulates two completely divergent tendencies that elsewhere, for example in the infinite space of the mathematician, are quite meaningless. In sculpture, however, thrusts into depth and into the foreground are entirely distinct ways of producing space; their difference is not gradual, they rather constitute supreme differences of form, assuming they are not fused impressionistically, again under the influence of naturalistic ideas of kinesthetic mental images. From this knowledge it becomes apparent that sculpture is in a certain sense discontinuous, especially since it cannot dispense with contrast as an elementary device for creating space.

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The cubic should not be obscured as a secondary, suggestive modélé and should therefore not be introduced as a materialized relation, but rather be foregrounded as the essential thing. The viewer of a sculpture readily believes that his impression is formed by a combination of seeing on one hand and of imagining the more distant parts on the other; because of its ambiguity such an effect has nothing to do with art. We stressed that sculpture is not a matter of naturalistic mass but solely of formal elucidation. Therefore what matters is to represent the nonvisible parts in their formal function as form, the cubic— or the depth quotient, as I should like to call it— as form in the visible parts; to represent it, to be sure, only as form, without mixing it up with the object, with the mass. The parts, therefore, must not be represented materially and pictorially, but rather in such a way that the form through which they become sculptural and which is present naturalistically in the viewer’s act of motion becomes a unity and is made simultaneously visible. That means each part must become sculpturally independent and be deformed in such a way that it absorbs depth, so that the mental image of how it appears from the opposite side is incorporated into the frontal, nonetheless three-dimensionally functional side. Every part is therefore a result of the formal idea that creates space as a totality and results in a complete identity of the individual optical phenomenon with the general visual intuition, rejecting the surrogate compromise that weakens the spatial effect by reducing it to mass. Such a sculpture is strongly oriented toward one side, because that side now offers the cubic as an undistorted totality, as a resultant, whereas frontality merely summarizes the foremost plane. This integration of the sculptural must generate functional centers around which it is organized; these cubic points centrales readily produce a powerful and necessary division that may be characterized as a vigorous individuation of parts. This is understandable; for it’s precisely the naturalistic mass that is irrelevant here, the famous compact, unperforated mass of earlier art is of no importance; the figure is here treated not as an effect but in its immediate spatiality. As the dominant presence the body of the god withdraws from the synthesizing hands of the craftsman; the body is apprehended functionally from within itself. Negro sculpture is frequently chided for its so-called errors in proportion; let it be understood that the optical discontinuity of space is translated into a clarification of form, into an order of parts that, since sculptural plasticity is the issue here, are valorized according to their sculptural expressiveness. The decisive factor here is precisely not their relative size but rather the cubic expression assigned to them, which they must represent without compromise. Certainly one thing the Negro spurns is the interpolation of modélé as an elementary means, a compromise that tempts the European; for if there is one thing that this purely sculptural procedure requires, it is firm

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divisions. The sides of the motif are, as it were, subordinate functions, since the form must be concentrated and intensely deployed in order to be form; for, again, the cubic is represented independently from mass, as resultant and expression. And only this is permissible: for art, as a qualitative phenomenon, is a matter of intensity; the cubic must represent itself in the subordination of viewpoints as tectonicized intensity. This brings us to touch on the concept of monumentality. This notion arguably belongs to periods that, lacking any distinctive visual modality, measured out their works with yardsticks. Since art deals in intensity, monumentality, as magnitude, will be eliminated. And one more thing needs to be disposed of. These sculptural orders should never be achieved by means of linear interpolations; such an approach betrays a mode of seeing weakened by conceptual memories, nothing else. One will understand the Negro’s unbowed realism when by looking one learns to see how the delimited space of the work can be immediately fixed. Again, the factor of depth is not expressed through measurements but through the directional resultant of spatial contrasts that welds them together instead of representing them additively as properties of the object, and which in a kinesthetic mental image of mass will never be able to be seen as a unity; for the cubic resides not in the individual differently placed parts but rather in their overall cubic resultant, which is always apprehended as unity and which has nothing to do with mass or geometric line. This represents the cubic mode of being as an ungenetic, absolute result because movement has been absorbed. Now that we have examined the principles of sculptural concentration its consequences are easily explained. Some have objected to a lack of proportion in Negro sculptures, even as others treated them as documents of the anatomical structure of the members of the different tribes. Both positions can be dismissed; for the organic, since it merely signifies the actual possibilities of movement, has no particular relevance for art. By equating reflection on art with the making of art, even if in reversed sequence, a theoretical edifice was constructed from disjointed concepts, as if art somehow used the model as its starting point and then proceeded to abstract from it. It’s evident that this kind of procedure already presupposes a fully developed notion of art; an analytical endeavor ought never leave the plane of its object, otherwise one will be talking about many things, but not about the object in question. Both “abstract” and “organic” are criteria that are alien to art (one is conceptual, the other naturalistic), hence they are completely extraneous. By the same token, vitalist or mechanistic explanations of artistic forms should be disregarded. Broad feet, for example, are not broad because they are load bearing, but because at times the downward glance expands laterally, or because the artist has sought to create a contrasting equilibrium to the pelvis. Since form depends neither on the organic nor on mass (the so-called organic occasionally requires a base as a geometric

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and compact contrast), most Negro sculptures dispense with a base; if one should indeed be used, it will be accentuated sculpturally, through sharp edges and the like. But back to the question of proportions. These depend on the degree to which depth is meant to be expressed by the all-decisive depth quotient, by what I am calling the sculptural resultant. The relations of the parts to each other depend solely on the degree of their cubic function. Important parts demand an appropriate cubic resultant. This is how one should understand the so-called twisted joints or limbs of Negro sculptures; this coiled bending represents in a visible and concentrated way the cubic character of two otherwise abruptly contrasting directional movements; recessed parts that could otherwise merely be intimated become active and functional within a focused, unified expression; they become form, and as such they acquire necessity as elements of an unmediated representation of the cubic. The remaining sides must be subordinated to these integrated forms for the sake of that otherwise rarely achieved unification, but they do not remain unworked, merely suggestive material; they become formally active. Furthermore, depth becomes visible as totality. This form, which is identical with a unified visual modality, expresses itself in constants and contrasts. These, however, are no longer infinitely interpretable; rather, the twofold movement into depth, forward and backward, has been bound into a single cubic expression. Every cubic point can be interpreted according to two directions; here it’s incorporated and fastened into the cubic resultant and for that reason contains within itself— and not as an interpolated relation— both depth contrasts. With Negro sculpture, as with some so-called primitive art, one may be struck by the unusual slenderness and elongation of some of the statues; in these cases the cubic resultants are not overly pronounced. Perhaps the slender form is the expression of an unbridled will to grasp the cubic in its raw state, as it were. These thin, compressed, simple forms are considered impervious to their ambient space. I wish to add but a few words about the sculptural group. It visibly confirms what has already been said, namely that the cubic is expressed not by mass but by form; for otherwise the sculptural group would be a ridiculous paradox, as indeed would be any sculpture that is pierced by spatial intervals. The group represents the extreme case of what I would like to call sculptural distance effect; upon close inspection, the relation between two parts of a group is not different from the relation between two distant parts of a single figure. Their connectedness manifests itself in their subordination to a single sculptural integration, unless we’re simply dealing with a contrasting or additive repetition of the formal theme. The contrasting figure’s charm derives from its reversal of the directional values and hence of the meaning of the sculptural orientation. A sequential organization on the

THE MASK AND RELATED THINGS A people for whom art, religion, and custom have an effective immediacy will seek to render visible the powers that dominate and surround them. To tattoo is to turn one’s own body into the medium and object of a specific mode of visual experience. The Negro sacrifices his body and enhances it; his body is visibly dedicated to the universal, which acquires palpable form in him. It is a mark of a despotic, absolutely sovereign religion and humanity when, by tattooing, man and woman transform the individual body into a universal one; it also signifies an intensified erotic power. What a remarkable sort of consciousness is this, which conceives of one’s own body as an unfinished work, and which alters it in a direct fashion. All across the surface of the naturalistic body the tattooist reinforces the form sketched by nature, and the body drawing attains its peak when the natural form is negated and an imagined one surpasses it. In this case the body is at most canvas or clay; indeed, it becomes an obstacle that must provoke the strongest application of form. To tattoo oneself presupposes an unmediated self-awareness and, correspondingly, an at least equally strong awareness of the objectively exercised form. Here, too, we find what I called a sense of distance, a tremendous gift for objective creation. Tattooing is only one part of this type of self- objectifying activity that seeks to influence the entire body, to produce it consciously, and not only in the direct expression of movement as, for example, in dance, or in its fixed expression, as in coiffure. The Negro determines his type so strongly that he transforms it. Everywhere he intervenes in order to give expression an inalterable signature. It makes sense for a person who deems himself a cat, a river, and a type of weather to transform himself accordingly; he is these things, and he implements the consequences on his all too unambiguous body. The European, disposed both to psychologizing and theatricality, most readily understands this attitude as it relates to the mask. A human being constantly undergoes minute changes even as he strives to preserve a certain continuity, an identity. The European in particular has turned this attitude into a veritable hypertrophic cult; the Negro, who is less inhibited by a subjective ego and pays honor to objective powers, must, if he is to hold his own alongside them, transform himself into them, especially when celebrating them most intensely. Metamorphosis is his means of balancing out the destructive act of adoration; he prays to the god, he dances ecstatically for the tribe, and he transforms himself through the mask into the tribe and

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other hand gathers the variations of a sculptural system into a single field of vision. Since in both cases we’re dealing with a unitary system, both will be apprehended as totalities.

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the god; this transformation offers him the most powerful comprehension of objectivity; he incarnates it within himself, and he himself is this objectivity in which all individuality is annihilated. Consequently: the mask has meaning only when it is inhuman, impersonal; which is to say a construct, free from the lived experience of the individual; perhaps he honors the mask as a deity when he is not wearing it. I would like to call the mask fixed ecstasy, and perhaps also a medium that may at any given moment serve as a powerful stimulus to ecstasy because the face of the venerated power or animal is fixed in it. It may come as somewhat of a surprise that it’s often especially the religious arts that cling to the human form. To me, the reason is self-evident, for it is established convention that the mythical being exists independently of its form. The god has already been invented, and exists indestructibly, however he may manifest himself. It would almost be a contradiction for such a formally rigorous artistic sensibility to exhaust itself on issues of subject matter instead of reverently channeling all its energies into the form— the existence of the god. For only artistic form corresponds to the being of the gods. Perhaps the worshipper seeks to chain the god to man when he represents him as human, and in the process enthralls him through his very piety; for there is no greater egotist than the worshipper, who may offer everything to the god, yet unconsciously makes him human. Here we should also comment on the peculiarly rigid expression formed on the faces of these masks. This rigidity is nothing but the ultimate intensity of expression, freed from every psychological origin; above all it makes possible a lucid formal structure. I have included illustrations of a sequence of masks that ranges from the tectonic to the intensely human in order to reveal the diverse psychological capacities of this people. Occasionally it appears to be virtually impossible to determine which expressive type a given Negro work represents: the terrified or the terrifying. Here we have a beautiful proof for the ambiguous indifference of psychological expression. After all, our own experience teaches us that the physiognomic expressions of opposite emotions are identical. I am deeply stirred by the animal masks, for here the Negro assumes the face of the animal that is otherwise his prey. The god resides even in the slain animal, and perhaps it’s with overtones of self-sacrifice when, by putting on the mask, the Negro makes amends to the slain creature and approaches the god within it; when he recognizes in the animal a power greater than himself: his tribe. Perhaps he escapes revenge for the dead animal by transforming himself into it. Between the human mask and the animal mask there is the one that captures the transformation itself. Here we’re dealing with hybrid forms that, despite their fantastic or grotesque content, display the classic African equi-

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librium. It is religious feeling, for whose excessive yearning the visible world no longer suffices, that generates a world in between; and in the grotesque the inequality between the gods and their creature erupts menacingly. I offer a few brief remarks on the stylistic aspects of the Negro mask. We saw how the African condenses sculptural forces into visible resultants. Even the masks resonate with the power of cubic vision, which makes the planes thrust against one another, gathering up the entire significance of the foremost parts of the face into a few sculptural forms and deploying the minor three-dimensional directional vectors in their resultants.

CH. 4

ON PRIMITIVE ART 1919

“On Primitive Art” was Einstein’s first published piece in five years to address contemporary art. The language and substance of this short text— more a manifesto than an essay— leave no doubt that it dates from early 1919, when hopes for a radical German revolution were still high and calls for an art integrated with the life of the masses were widely heard.1 It appeared in Ludwig Rubiner’s almanac, Die Gemeinschaft (Community), which brims with confident tidings of the passing of capitalism and recklessly utopian hopes for the revolution. Einstein had written four explicitly political essays before the war,2 and like so many artists and intellectuals he was radicalized in the waning days of the conflict, as soldiers and workers, weary of wartime conditions and inspired by the example of the October Revolution in Russia, set up Räte (soviets or councils) throughout Germany and in German-occupied Belgium.3 He proudly declared himself a communist, and was identified as such in the press. He was one of a select group of six speakers at the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg. En route to Nürnberg, where he was to give a speech at a communist gathering, he was arrested and detained for five days.4 These politics found pointed expression in “On Primitive Art”

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and subsequently in his writing for the radical left satirical magazines, Die Pleite and Der blutige Ernst, both of which were exclusively political in focus.5 Einstein’s last published criticism from 1914 revealed his growing disillusionment with the contemporary art world.6 It appears that after publishing Negro Sculpture (text 3) his immersion in Africa, which he furthered while stationed in Belgium during the war, succeeded in estranging him even further from current European art. That his next substantive piece of art writing, published in 1921, was African Sculpture (text 5) would seem to support this hypothesis. In any case, “On Primitive Art,” in which he characterizes modern art as a “formalist fiction” whose real function is the production of commodities in the service of speculation, snobbism, and providing “inner security and strength to the propertied class,” trenchantly confirms his alienation. Einstein, obviously, had been moved to write on art again by the hope that revolution might change all that. In invoking “primitive art” in his title and, once more, at the conclusion of his text, Einstein makes no reference to any culture outside of Europe. In Negro Sculpture he had used the term only to dissociate African sculpture from “a misguided concept of the primitive,” namely a crude, archaic stage of artistic or cultural development. Here “primitive art” has a different, positive meaning— it is now linked directly to politics. Einstein calls for an art of “the simple masses” that will reject the art traditions of capitalist Europe. This political meaning of the primitive Einstein had initially articulated seven years earlier in his essay “Politische Anmerkungen” (Notes on politics), where it was identified with “impoverishment” (Verarmung) and “an active critique of all dross,” including history, which the primitive person effortlessly discards (BA 1, 143–46).7 Here, in the first sentence, the primitive becomes identified with the word unmittelbar, unmediated or immediate, a key term in Einstein’s theoretical vocabulary, associated with intuition (Anschauung) and totality.8 Writing of new developments in the arts in an essay on Paul Claudel (1913), Einstein identified their common promise in offering an experience of das Unmittelbare: “Elements that are the foundation of life; the necessary, the long forgotten. One may address some of our contemporaries as artists of the immediate.” Picasso, in his cubist work, was one of these: he “unveils the mental components through which we physically sense and construct shape” (BA 1, 186). To be immediate, then, was to be open to experience unfiltered by conventional signs— it was to make seeing a creative act. To be mediate, by contrast, was to perceive reality through stale, reassuring signs, frozen metaphors for experience that had once been immediate. The apparatus of the art world— the

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dealers, the critics, and the “painters of paraphrases: indirect, secondhand people, rentiers living off tradition”— was mediate. The “simple masses,” in contrast to this bourgeois culture, were immediate, and Einstein linked this condition to their lack of possessions— not only material but cultural possessions, including the acquisition of knowledge. In poverty life was more about function and process— was therefore dynamic— than it was about objects, possessions, and cultural memory. In his May speech at the meeting of the radical Rätebund (League of Soviets), Einstein explained that for the communists the working class had a privileged role in the revolutionary task ahead “because they are immediate and therefore creative [unmittelbar, und daher schöpferisch], [while] the intellectual is burdened with science and history, incapable of sensing existence within himself or believing in experience [Erlebnis].”9 Einstein’s idealization of the working class was hardly rooted in orthodox Marxism, nor was it merely a product of the revolutionary mood of the moment— it had been an important element of his theory at least since 1913, when he published his essay “Der Arme” (The pauper).10 The pauper was not to be thought of in narrow economic or material terms (this was the view of the propertied), but as a different kind of human being. The soul of the pauper “was filled with experiences [Erlebnisse], but not those of acquisition and knowledge” (BA 1, 157). For this reason, the pauper was capable of action that was “immediately unconventionally surprising” and will be “marvelously creative.” “Greatness will pass from the individual onto the poor” (BA 1, 158).11 When Einstein calls here for art to join in “social reorganization” (sozialen Umbau), he is not, we can be sure, thinking of the kind of socially engaged art practiced by George Grosz and John Heartfield, with whom he collaborated on Der blutige Ernst and Die Pleite. They strove for “giving pictures a content that befits the workers’ struggle for liberation, that teaches them how to emancipate themselves from the yoke of a thousand years of oppression.”12 Einstein was unsympathetic. He would later write of Grosz that he desired “not art, but truth,” and wondered whether his hostility to art was a compensation for “weakness of form” (K1, 150, 151). Yet Einstein did not check his politics at the art gallery door. Art’s social agency, he insisted, lay not in critical or didactic subject matters, but in its form; a socially effective art demanded an “organized eye” (BA 1, 230), a stringently articulated and coherent artistic vision that would gradually and fundamentally reshape human subjectivity. He called for dictatorship, not of the proletariat, but a Diktatur des Sehens, of a new way of seeing.13 The sentiments expressed in “On Primitive Art” seem to have been just as short lived for Einstein as they were for most of the left intel-

W

hat the European world lacks in immediate art we make up for with the surplus of those who exploit art, among whom we count above all the scribes and painters of paraphrases: indirect, second-hand people, rentiers living off tradition, in short: mediate Europeans. European art is entangled in the process of a refined capitalization. The time of formalist fictions is over. With the ruin of Europe’s economy its art is also collapsing. In the face of such human and economic misery one must ask: what can art made for property owners by indecisive petit bourgeois still accomplish, and how much of it should be salvaged in a society with a purpose; for undoubtedly the existing society has proved purposeless for the majority of people— assuming that one does not equate human purpose with the attainment of honors stemming from the deification of the state. Every artwork is a piece of reactionary snobbism, prehistoric, if it does not join in social reorganization that alone gives it meaning. What value can the capitalist art tradition, from which producers and consumers derive their income, have for us, unless it be in the form of purposeless, that is, snobbish excitement. The European artwork serves even now to provide a sense of inner security and strength to the propertied bourgeois. It offers the bourgeois a fiction of aestheticized revolt in which every desire for change can find a harmless “spiritual” outlet. The collective art we need: only a social revolution contains the possibility of change in art, is its premise; it alone determines the value of a transformation of art and presents the artist with his task. Primitive art: rejection of the capitalized art tradition. European mediatedness and tradition must be destroyed, there must be an end to formalist fictions. If we explode the ideology of capitalism, we will find beneath it the sole valuable remnant of this shattered continent, the precondition for everything new, the simple masses, who are today still burdened by suffering. It is they who are the artist.

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ligentsia.14 In any case expressions of solidarity with the working class and overt sympathy for leftist politics would disappear from his writings for more than a decade. His letters from this period to the Paris gallerist Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler and the painter Moïse Kisling suggest that a year after writing “On Primitive Art” Einstein, brimming with new writing projects, had made a pragmatic accommodation with the capitalist art world.15 ■

CH. 5

AFRICAN SCULPTURE 1921

While Einstein’s Negro Sculpture is his best known and most widely discussed text, African Sculpture is one of his most neglected, even in the specialized Einstein literature. The book appeared six years after Negro Sculpture and one year after the publication of that book’s second edition. When Einstein published Negro Sculpture, he was an emerging young critic just turned thirty years old, who in the space of four years had published over a dozen short pieces of art criticism and become involved in the Berlin art market.1 Yet in the six years between the book’s publication and that of African Sculpture, Einstein published only one article on contemporary art, from which he had clearly become disaffected.2 To be sure, he had been in the military for the length of the war, for which he had enthusiastically volunteered.3 During this caesura, it is clear, he had read widely on Africa, acquiring knowledge that he conspicuously lacked when he wrote Negro Sculpture. His real education

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probably began in spring 1916 when, serving in the civil administration of the German occupation forces in Belgium, he was appointed to a position in the colonial ministry in Brussels.4 This allowed him easy access to the library and the major African collections of the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Tervuren.5 “Here I am becoming totally negrified,” he wrote to Franz Blei; “an African excess.”6 Writing to his friend the painter Moïse Kisling (1891–1953), Einstein referred to African Sculpture as the “second volume of my Negro Sculpture,” as though it were the second installment of a single project.7 Yet apart from their subject matter the two books are vastly different in substance and approach. To Kisling, Einstein described Negro Sculpture as “something quite theoretical. The second volume will be more explanatory; in it I play the agreeable ethnographer.”8 This was a striking volte-face from his earlier book, in which, presenting a rigorously argued interpretation of the sculptures’ formal and spatial qualities, he had blithely dismissed the value of ethnographic research. He turned to ethnography, he explained, to “undermine a little the muddy lies that one has fabricated on this subject.”9 And in fact in African Sculpture he pushes back against the modish enthusiasm for things African to which his earlier book had contributed. He was so “annoyed” by the fashionable “exoticism” that had swept Germany that he delayed by a number of years the publication of what he called his “African mythology,” a greatly expanded collection of the tales and legends he had published in 1917.10 Indeed, “exoticism” and the “unoriginal” European artist who “negrifies awkwardly” are targeted in the opening sentences of African Sculpture— he has not, Einstein makes pointedly clear, written this book to provide such artists with “a new treasure trove of forms.” Quite the contrary, he seems intent on shielding African art from trendy appropriation by emphasizing its cultural otherness. If in Negro Sculpture he treated sculptures above all as “formal structures” removed from any specific ethnographic or ethnological context, here he ethnologizes African sculpture, seemingly to make it resistant to the vogue of what he scornfully dismisses as “romantic primitivism.”11 African Sculpture appeared as the seventh book in Wasmuth Verlag’s popular line of short monographs, Orbis Pictus. Published in twenty volumes between 1920 and 1923, the series had a standard format of a short introduction followed by forty-eight plates. At twenty-three pages Einstein’s text was the second longest in the series and was significantly longer than most. Moreover, the text consists mostly of descriptions and commentaries on individual objects, making it a rarity in his writing on art. A perusal of other books in the series reveals that such commentaries were not standard; their inclusion must have been Einstein’s choice.12

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Preceding his commentaries on specific objects, Einstein offers a general introduction similar in nature to that in Negro Sculpture. He comments on the precarious and fragmentary state of knowledge about Africa, the difficulty of historical reconstruction, the challenge of recuperating the meaning of older African objects. Again he rejects the idea of considering African art under the rubric of “primitivism.” Where primitive forms were found in Africa— and Einstein did not deny that they were— he regarded them not as a sign that African peoples existed in a frozen state of prehistory, but as the result of destructive historical forces: “The energies that created Africa’s cultures are considerably exhausted. The old traditions crumbled under colonization, the ancestral image world mingled with imported visuality.” In his introduction to African Sculpture Einstein announced an ambitious goal: he was motivated to write the book, he declared, “out of the wish that art-historical investigation of African sculpture and painting may begin.” Such a claim may seem amusingly grandiose for such a slender volume, aimed primarily at a lay readership. Yet at this date no art historian or art critic had written of African sculpture in such detail. To be sure, Einstein characterized his book as only a “modest beginning,” but even with so many gaps in knowledge, he insisted, African art “must be accepted without reservation . . . into the orbit of arthistorical research.” The significance of this agenda should not be underestimated, for as the Africanist art historian Z. S. Strother has pointed out, at this date “to write a history of art for Africa” was a “revolutionary project.”13 So what did Einstein’s “art-historical investigation” of Africa look like? Although there is little in the way of formal analysis, he asks distinctly art-historical questions about the transmission and development of style. Merely to ask such historical questions of African art was still a radical position in 1921. It reflected the “cultural-historical” or “diffusionist” ethnology that had emerged in Germany in the decade before the First World War, a progressive tendency in that it posited a history and development rather than viewing the cultures of African and Oceania under the fixed category of “natural peoples.”14 While Einstein now has little to say about the formal issues in African sculpture, he has much to say about issues of iconography and, occasionally, function, issues that he had ignored in Negro Sculpture. He relates objects to African myths and rituals, making an effort to provide that context that was missing in the first book. Finally, although African Sculpture has only forty-eight plates (illustrating fifty- eight objects), it gives a stronger impression of the aesthetic quality of African sculpture than the earlier book, which had more than twice as many illustrations. Where Einstein apparently relied on the Paris dealer Joseph Brummer for many of the photographs

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in Negro Sculpture, nearly half the works illustrated in this second book are from museums, including twenty-two from the Berlin Museum for Ethnology.15 He clearly took pains with African Sculpture. With his discussions of the migration of styles and motifs and references to the ethnographic literature, it is the most conventionally “art-historical” of Einstein’s writings— perhaps because of his stated goal of legitimizing African art as an area of art- historical research.16 This very conventionalism is likely one reason for the book’s relative neglect in Einstein scholarship. This suggests that African Sculpture, far from being a “second volume” of Negro Sculpture, was almost everything that that book was not. There Einstein had offered a rigorous formal and theoretical reading of African sculpture without making reference to a single object, leaving it up to his readers to discern for themselves the “cubic space” purportedly realized in the illustrated works. African Sculpture, by contrast, includes commentaries on almost every illustration, in one case more than two pages long— something one is hard pressed to find elsewhere in Einstein’s written corpus. To be sure, he makes a point of stating that “[o]n the whole I dare to stand by the arguments of my first book: African sculpture displays cubic solutions of rare purity and consistency.” But he adds that the recognition “that the African sculptors solved formal problems with which our artists grapple today . . . brings us no closer to a satisfactory explanation of African art.” In Negro Sculpture Einstein had treated African sculpture as homogeneous; now, having familiarized himself with the ethnographic literature, he writes that the art of the diverse African peoples “teach us that one may not look at African art according to some fixed formula.” In Negro Sculpture Einstein argued that the formal autonomy achieved by the “cubic intuition of space” was integrally linked to the religious function of the sculpture as the embodiment of a god, although in fact none of the illustrated sculptures represented a deity.17 Now, having become familiar with the ethnographic literature and the variety of African sculptural production, he makes numerous references to ancestor worship, of which there was nary a mention in Negro Sculpture, describing it as “the religious center of African artistic creation.” Although there are fewer works illustrated than in the earlier book, in African Sculpture we’re presented with a wider range of categories of artifacts. In their variety of functions they do not lend themselves to Einstein’s theory, formulated in Negro Sculpture, of the radically autonomous sculptural object that “will never mingle in human actions” (see text 3, p. 48). Here we get decidedly nonautonomous bow holders, columnar sculptures, drinking cups, sculpted drums, and stools. It is a “general feature” of African art, he now writes, that “the artwork serves

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a specific practical purpose.” He seems to cast a critical sideward glance at contemporary European art as he observes of Africa, “There art does not lamely withdraw into itself.” What of Einstein’s claim to be initiating the historical study of African art? Paradoxically, after announcing this agenda, he appears to declare himself virtually agnostic about its possibility, soberly offering a string of caveats on the challenge of constructing such a history. There are no fixed dates, no reliable chronology; even the Africans themselves, he concedes, have only a loose grasp of their own history. Nor can one construct a stylistic history from a study of the formal characteristics— the former student of Heinrich Wölfflin declares that “we know of no laws that govern the history of style.”18 What Einstein offers in the individual commentaries is not anything resembling an overarching historical narrative, but a recognition that these objects have a history, that they are shaped by events, they do not exist in a timeless precolonial “ethnographic present.” Just how forward looking Einstein’s agenda was becomes evident in Sidney Littlefield Kasfir’s fundamental article on the historiography of African art. Writing more than six decades after the publication of African Sculpture, Kasfir observed that historians of African art, following the approach of anthropologists and ethnologists, had chosen “the ethnographic present as its time frame.”19 With few exceptions, art historians had treated styles in African sculpture ahistorically, denying them a temporal dimension, adopting a model that “precludes any possibility of stylistic change.”20 Even as Einstein recognized the daunting challenge to any stylistic history, he at least acknowledged a diachronic dimension in African sculpture. He recognized that in Africa, as in Europe, styles evolved, they were affected by historical processes. Many of Einstein’s commentaries on specific objects in African Sculpture also comprise microhistories that attempt to explain the origin of a style and motif.21 Still, direct description and formal analysis are relatively rare; more often Einstein discusses artifacts by comparing them with others. His most common method is to say that the sculptural object produced by people x has elements that resemble those found in peoples y and/or z, and that from such relationships we may possibly infer something about the migration of peoples and styles. Such contextualization, such an inference of causality, of historical continuity, had been anathema to the author of Negro Sculpture, with his radical ideal of totality, of the absolute, hermetically self-complete artwork, which is not organized according to some external factor but is “already organized in itself.”22 Now, in ethnologizing African sculpture Einstein has inevitably “de-totalized” it, stripping the sculptural object of its ostensible autonomy. African Sculpture may have represented only the “modest beginning”

Dedicated to the painter Kisling in friendship

E

xoticism is often unproductive romanticism, geographical Alexandrianism. The unoriginal artist negrifies awkwardly. Yet the value of African art is not diminished by the incompetence of inconsequential people. Here I am hardly going to consider African art under the

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of a history of African art, yet it was the prelude to a much more ambitious undertaking by Einstein that was intended to advance that project. In the spring of 1925, directly after completing the manuscript for The Art of the 20th Century (text 7), he took up Africa again. The time had come, he had written in African Sculpture, for the “consideration of African art to be detached in equal measure from the romantic as well as from the purely ethnological stage. For this we need the collaboration of the ethnologists and art historians.” In the spring of 1925 Einstein embarked on just such a collaboration. He traveled to London and began work with the British Museum ethnologist Thomas Athol Joyce for a comprehensive history of sub- Saharan art.23 Shortly after his arrival he described the project in his correspondence: “J[oyce], we are thinking, will do the ethnographic historical for the Congo and Nigeria, I probably for Cross River, Ogowe, Pangwe, Cameroon. Together we are doing the south (Bushman, Zimbabwe) and a short excursus on the more northerly ones. I will then write again on stylistic kinship with the Mediterranean. Byzantine influences from Abyssinia, influence of Arabian ornament.”24 What is striking here is that Joyce and Einstein have divided their labors not by discipline but by region; both are doing “ethnographic historical” research, although Einstein alone is responsible for the arthistorical task of determining stylistic relationships. A subsequent letter reveals further details on the nature of the collaboration: “Each sends the other his chapters and illustrations for critique. No one signs his chapters, because they have over time come about through mutual consultation until they are, after all, joint works.”25 Unfortunately the book was never completed.26 Yet the ethnological turn in Einstein’s African Sculpture was to have broader ramifications, namely in his writing on contemporary European art. This is evident from the title of one of his first contributions to Documents, “André Masson: Ethnological Study” (text 9). Although much of the ethnographic information in African Sculpture has become dated, it nevertheless remains, as a work by an art critic on African sculpture, a historiographic landmark and foreshadows important aspects of Einstein’s later writings. ■

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aspect of today’s art scene; it is not for stimulating those lurking unproductively with a trick (a new treasure trove of forms), but rather out of the wish that art-historical investigation of African sculpture and painting may begin. Ethnography has completed its first task by establishing a comprehensive framework for research. Now it is changing its method and viewpoint to treat individual issues. From the refinement within ethnology the art historian gains new tasks. The present book represents a modest beginning. It was done without the aid of indispensable foreign collections. But the more embarrassing handicap is that in considering African art we’re missing the foothold of a clear history, of fixed time. African history glimmers faintly in overgrown or collapsed traditions of families and tribes. Much that is said about Africa resembles a lovely, unfathomable tale. Time and space remain questionable in the uncertain slumber of the mythological; what survives is marked by violent decay or such disfiguring degeneration that to draw conclusions based on the present excessively diminishes the African past. The energies that created Africa’s cultures are considerably exhausted. The old traditions crumbled under colonization, the ancestral imaginary mingled with imported visuality. This coupling of spiritually incompatible things resulted in a barely penetrable haze, inner vacillation, and an almost childlike capriciousness of the African mentality. The uncertainty, the dubiousness of these conceptual domains might be a terminal phenomenon. Let us reconstruct African history with caution; for one slips easily into idealizing it and becomes numbed by the modish ideas of a romantic primitivism.27 The African climate grants evidence from the past only a short duration. Then again, the population shifts that have unsettled this continent through the centuries have produced shaky and distorted governance and cultural structures. It seems that African skill is in the final stage of decay. Frequently the native peoples no longer know the meaning of their older art, and anxious concealment of revered, beloved artworks often turned into heedless incomprehension of their own history. The western and central African kingdoms, which left an important artistic legacy, no longer exist. Consider the kingdom of Benin, of the Lunda, the empire of the Kashembe, and other states. I readily concede the difficulties of explaining African art. One is all too quick to foist on it the intentions and problems that weigh on today’s artists. I don’t fail to recognize that the African sculptors solved formal problems with which our artists grapple today. But that realization brings us no closer to a satisfactory explanation of African art. Initially it may appear seductive, even persuasive, to emplot history with stylistic, so-called developmental sequences.— Yet honesty demands our admission that we know of no laws that govern the history of style. The primitive can mark either the beginning or the decay of an art; the degree of technical as well as formal accomplishment is not defined by temporal

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factors alone nor by personal talent. The range of African art cannot be circumscribed according to stale, boring expressionisms; little is achieved with fashionable concepts or descriptive tricks. Fortunately African art is stronger than the fashion for Africa. Nothing is gained by fraudulent feelings and newly stenciled ideologies with a desperate resemblance to fantasy. Above all we should not wish to extrapolate from African art the flimsy idea of a primitive art. A significant quantity of African works are anything but primitive, nor are they necessarily always constructive. The difficulty of arriving at a formal analysis can lead to psychological snuffling, although we can hardly begin to grasp the objective spiritual content of these works. So we blithely relate, with superior ease, feelings that we would like to read into them and fantasize about, benumbed by something we do not understand. The consideration of African art should be detached in equal measure from the romantic and from the purely ethnological stage. For this we need the collaboration of the ethnologists and art historians. Even the attempt at a convincing grouping of what we possess in African art brings tremendous difficulties and is an ungentle reminder of our negligible knowledge of Africa. The geographical division of African art, which may be illuminating in the beginning, soon proves inadequate. Within the same region we find often conflicting formal intentions pursued concurrently. It’s easy to draw a certain picture of the art of a region if we ruthlessly exclude opposing tendencies. Let us take as an example an artwork from the Congo basin: often it’s difficult to determine the tribal identity of those who executed the object. In this area there has for a long time been a constant shifting of the population. The tribes are not only settled alongside one another geographically, they crisscross in equal measure. How are we to identify with any certainty a tribe that since the disappearance of the major kingdoms has sunk back into familial communities? When the great kingdoms still existed there, certain tribes were absorbed, the ancestral families of the chiefs were integrated into the great political imperial complex. In this region tribe signifies not so much a sharp ethnic separation as a descent from or a blood relationship to some chief’s family, a family of holy blood. A tribe is to be distinguished from the usually fragile, elastic kingdom, which encompasses several tribes that are subordinated to a dominant supreme tribe. Due to such confusing circumstances one is easily tempted to emphasize the art of a particular tribe or region, isolating it from the stylistic whole, perhaps on account of some distinctive technical trait. This happened, for example, with Benin art and Bushman painting. Beyond the distinctive technical traits that stand out amid the confusion one may recognize a stylistic commonality. The Benin bronzes, for example, lose the confusing character of technical abnormality if we examine them in connection with Yoruba art and trace their further development in Cameroon. Yet attempts at explanation should be approached with caution and

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restraint; for anywhere we want to look in Africa we find a dense tangle of inextricable questions, where even determining the problems becomes a delicate task. The problem of Yoruba art is just as unsolved as that of the Benin bronzes or the Zimbabwe sculptures. The question of origin and migration is a continually pressing one. Sometimes one would like to turn to the myths for assistance, in order at least to determine the meaning of a representation. Yet myths and sculptures often belong to entirely different currents of tradition. New tribes, with a mythology of a different cast, overran the older inhabitants; the conquering tribe imposed its own mythology onto the art that it found there; the myths degenerate through Christianization, and the meaning of the work shifts and grows obscure. Like many natives, when standing before old African things we must answer: we do not know. Africa, where moribund as well as emergent peoples are bubbling about, eludes with slippery skin the European desire for knowledge. African statues are often called fetishes and everyone uses the word; yet it explains nothing, can signify anything, and conceals the meaning of these sculptures and most of all our own ignorance. Under the mass of meanings of this word the exact sense of the object evaporates into vagueness. It’s not any better with the so- called intellectual concepts of today, which can be defined as one pleases. What all do not spirit, form, et cetera mean to us? The philosopher defines his concept of form, yet hardly touches the full content of this concept, the delicately balanced complex of meanings that an era connects to it. One gives a coloration, an accent. These things, lived as part of life, remain theoretically ungraspable because felt and experienced in countless variants. Abstraction remains distanced from the object and no pile of accumulated commentaries will change that. I have already indicated how dangerous it is to want to explain the spiritual mood of an exotic work. Here nasty errors can occur. A facial expression that seems cheerful to us may have given the Negro a terrible fright, and a demeanor that to us appears frightful may have cheered him. Things that may seem an incidental detail to us may have an extraordinary meaning for the Negro and have endowed the statue with its right to exist. Psychological empathy along with merely formal observation have limited heuristic value, and if carried out one-sidedly only generate confusion. If one occupies oneself with African art over a longer period a respectful feeling of embarrassed uncertainty grows stronger and one is inclined to become increasingly cautious. Agreeably intoxicating hypotheses assert themselves as we contemplate an individual piece; bewitched, we believe to be closer to a solution, which, when applied to a longer sequence of sculptures evaporates, as we realize with pained regret. Nonetheless, one thing is more persuasive than any hypothesis: the stylistic unity of African art. Removed from ethnological inquiry we may track the formal relatedness of African sculptures— a small consolation. Because

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the possibilities of formal training are limited, it requires considerable naïveté to attribute particular solutions to every tribe or territory.28 Neither our knowledge nor the tool of comparative stylistic criticism are refined enough for that. Inversely, different eras and lands frequently produced works that display formal similarities. Consider the affinity of so-called primitive art with, for example, cave painting, or the tendency of eras in decline to bid a primitive farewell in imitative archaisms. Even with an individual artist we observe tremendous changes in stylistic as well as technical expression, which we discover only through the accidental knowledge that these dissimilar things come from one and the same person. With joy in experimentation, the gifted artist pursues opposing solutions simultaneously; thus with Poussin, Dürer, or Cézanne we can speak of the dialectics of their creation. Knowing the banal, trivial fact that such different things come from a single hand, one is fond of daring aesthetic or psychological outbursts. African art automatically forbids such things, because no artists are known to us. Hypotheses then evaporate into lovely fairy tales. Formal explanations might seem authoritative to us; but whether such conclusions are correct from an African viewpoint, who can say? Certainly art may follow laws or appear to us do so, since today we’re so receptive to dogma. Yet it is not always formed in consciousness of such laws. I am not speaking here of the silly, stupidly calculating genius of bad novels: still, an artist’s intention often takes a different direction than the interpretation of the professional, badly remunerated explicator. On the whole I dare to stand by the arguments of my first book: African sculpture displays cubic solutions of rare purity and consistency.29 It pursues the problems of spatial relations and concentration; in this respect Egyptian sculpture comes closest to it. In contrast to African art, Oceanic art by and large seeks out ornamentally decorative problems of spatial dissolution and plays consummately with the means of spatial rupture, of the tirelessly varied spatial interval. As cubism was in its beginnings, we investigated African artworks and found consummate examples. From this standpoint the highly esteemed arts of Yorubaland and Benin, despite their technical refinement, have for us no decisive significance for African art. To form a judgment it’s not sufficient to be favorably disposed to technical skill or to value the so-called lifelike impression. And yet the artists of those lands teach us that one may not look at African art according to some fixed formula. One often speaks of the sophistication of continental European art or culture. Our fragmentary overview of African art reveals it to be no less nuanced; we must not let the slogans about the primitive art of natural peoples [Naturvölker] seduce us into a false and narrow attitude. The fact of the nuanced character of African art suggests a long process of formation, whose origin and development remain up to now unknown.

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Even if African art absorbed foreign influences and non- African forms, something still remains: an extraordinary, distinctive repertoire of forms that belongs to the African soil. African art offers sculptural, ornamental, and pictorial solutions that justify placing this art alongside any other. Even if the content as well as the historical placement of this formal province remains for the moment unexplained, it must be accepted without reservation alongside Oceanic and American art into the orbit of art-historical research. By way of introduction: in this book I am presenting examples of African art from Yorubaland, Benin, Gabon, Angola, Chokweland, the Kasai District, and Urua, as well as an example of Zimbabwe art from Mashonaland. The sequence of African art offered here is not complete. I omitted the art of Sierra Leone, of the Ivory Coast, as well as the strongly arabicized art of the northern Niger Crescent. The French Congo is weakly represented. Numerous significant examples from the Ivory Coast and French Congo are to be found in my first volume. Lack of space as well as the circumstances at the time caused this limitation. Nevertheless the present work provides a survey of the West African art region and demonstrates its unity. With the art of the Yoruba we come to a center of the West African art region. This art province should not be regarded as an isolated wonder, but should rather be seen in context with the art of Benin and Cameroon. Here is a tightly knit complex that, reflecting its historical and geographical variety, appears in technically modified form. Among the Benin people there was an oral tradition that the dominant upper social stratum comes from Yorubaland. The Bini have the same animal symbols, a similar style of ornament, and the same compositions as the Yoruba. On the other hand Ankermann was able to establish that the inhabitants of the Cameroon Grasslands immigrated from the north and brought woodcarving and ceramics from there; in similar fashion brass casting came to the Grasslands with the tribes from Tikar out of the northeast who fled to Cameroon. This demonstrates the historical connection between the closely related art provinces. To indicate how far this art district stretches to the south, we note that we find one of the decorations related to Yoruba ornament among the Bakuba, who are settled between Sankuru and Kasai. Here, too, there is a tradition that these tribes came from the north. We will often ascertain this relationship and unity of the West African art region, caused by stylistic relatedness as well as the similarity of themes. We begin by addressing the connection between Yoruba and Benin. We find related subject matter; the same totemic animals such as the catfish, serpent, ram, lizard, et cetera. I point to the same representations of riders of both territories; the objects that Frobenius called Ifa boards strikingly resemble bronze panels from Benin, like those Pitt Rivers reproduces in plates 18 and 21 of his book.30 The clay heads that Frobenius found in Yoruba-

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land, now on display in the Berlin Museum for Ethnology, were considered isolated miracles of African skill and this seemed to warrant dating them very early. For stylistic reasons they should be related to the Benin heads and they can hardly be older than the Benin bronzes. The Benin head from Rushomore, reproduced in Luschan’s Altertümer von Benin, easily establishes a link between the Frobenius clay heads and Benin art. The thematic similarities in Benin and Yoruba art can be readily explained by their practice of the same cults. An early English observer, Burton,31 writes, “The religion of the Bini I immediately recognized as the confused and mysterious mythology of Yoruba. Here, too, Shango, the God of Thunder, is worshipped.” Gallaway [sic], another observer, calls Benin a powerful theocracy, similar in this regard to the Yoruba.32 Because the Benin and Yoruba cultures might be identical, it’s not acceptable to date Yoruba sculptures much later than Benin works without specific reasons for doing so. In any case the Yoruba heads of the Berlin Museum are stylistically related to the Benin bronzes. Figure 5.1.33 This ram’s head displays the same stylistic expression as the better-known leopard or elephant heads from Benin, which were executed in ivory or metal. The Yoruba as well as the Benin artists compress the horns into the plane. The barely modeled eyes are garlanded with rays. As with Benin animal imagery the nose traverses the head as a vertical axis. Similar masks were found in the Cameroon Grasslands. Figure 5.2. We have already pointed out the relationship between the Ifa boards and the Benin bronze panels. The Ifa boards are used in prophecy in combination with palm seeds. We see this animated relief in the ivory carvings of the Bini, above all in the large carved ivory teeth. The flat mask that dominates the board recalls numerous Benin heads and also Cameroon dance adornments. It should be pointed out that the lid of the boxes made by the Bakuba for preserving pigments are carved into flat masks similar to those of the Ifa boards. Figure 5.3 [left]. Decorative board of a Shango priest.34 Compare the decorative bead ornament of this piece to the ornament in Benin chairs, bronze plates, or vessels. In the same way there appears to be a connection with the ornament of the Kasai tribes, above all the Bakuba. An in-depth examination of African ornament goes beyond the task of this book. The freely sculpted small head at the center undoubtedly recalls Benin and Cameroon heads, above all heads that we know from Cameroon chairs and door posts. Figure 5.3 right. Ivory fragment from Benin. A quite similar treatment of kneeling is to be found in a piece from a Yoruba excavation, an 8- centimeter-long quartz handle from Ife, which is exhibited in the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. In both pieces the legs are decoratively wound through the arms at the elbow, the hands support the face. Similar solutions are found in the small Cameroon fetish figures out of clay. We note that the

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5.1. “Head of a ram as image of Shango, Yoruba. Height 30 cm, wood. Folkwang Museum, Hagen.”

Benin style was preserved the longest in the Cameroon Grasslands. Due perhaps to timely emigration the tribes living there were saved from the decline of the Benin style, or the degenerated coastal style was revived in the Grasslands. The latter assumption is more likely, since in the numerous Cameroon juju dance adornments we are familiar with types of the later Benin style. In the isolation of the Cameroons, protected by the mountains,

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5.2. “Ifa board, Yoruba. 50 cm wide, 30 cm high. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

the Benin style was resurrected with distinctive vigor, and it experiences an agrarian renaissance, ridding itself of European influences that had influenced the coastal style; once more one became convincingly African. To be sure, the technique of metal casting was severely limited in the Grasslands, since there had been no European import of metal. Figure 5.4. Equestrian sculpture. This sculpture may represent Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder, borne by the goddess Oya.35 We find stylistically quite similar sculptures among the Bini. Above all, one recalls reliefs

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5.3a. “Decorative panel from the grave of a Shango priest, Yoruba. Wood, 38 cm high. Folkwang Museum, Hagen.” 5.3b. “Ivory fragment with crouching figure, Benin. Ivory, 10 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 17373.”

in which nobles from Benin were portrayed, accompanied by small figures on the side. On the other hand, compositions that we find on Yoruba clay pots correspond to these Benin reliefs. A clay pot from Yoruba, in the Berlin Museum [for Ethnology], corresponds strikingly to the Benin reliefs in which men with catfish bones are represented. The female bearer of the rider recalls the figurative Cameroon and Urua stools that are illustrated toward the end of our book.36 There is in fact a definite stock of African motifs that are employed and transfigured within the entire West African cultural region. This Yoruba equestrian sculpture reminds us instinctively of early Romanesque works. I refer to a surprisingly similar south German chessboard figure of the fourteenth century in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Somehow the affinities between African cultures lead us to assume that this culture came into existence as populations that are today separated, knowing hardly anything of one another, lived in close proximity before emigrating, perhaps from multiethnic Abyssinia, to the south and west. Here we recall that we can conclude from the similarity of Benin and Yoruba sculpture that the latter cannot be significantly older than the former. Figure 5.5. A wood relief from Yoruba. If African sculpture displays a

5.4. “Equestrian sculpture of Shango. Supporting figure probably the goddess Oya, Yoruba. Height 1 m. Wood, Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 27410.”

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5.5. “Piece from a wooden border, Yoruba. 30 × 20 cm. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 27235.”

distinctive plastic energy, reliefs often remain within a quiet, simple play of planes without modeling. One should, however, be wary of generalization. Older pieces in particular, such as the illustrated Ifa board or Benin relief, are endowed with dramatic movement. Certainly the Ifa board is older than this low relief; at the same time the workmanship in this later piece is simpler

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and more primitive. For art does not under all circumstances develop from the simple to the more complex; certainly stylistic change often moves in the opposite direction. This relief is a beautiful archaizing piece; perhaps its maker sought respite from the resurgent wild strain of the native style. Was this primitivizing appearance a deliberate archaizing or, as in ancient Egypt, were two opposing styles practiced parallel to one another? It’s difficult to decide either way. In any case, this primitive gesture was more than a dull dozing; for if tradition existed anywhere, then in Africa, where the practice of art is today still associated with certain families, and where at the time of the great kingdoms there was a court art and priestly art, which, one may say, was practiced by a caste. With such a tradition a fully developed artistic consciousness necessarily emerges, which is today nonetheless largely buried. With the African kingdoms and dynasties tradition broke apart, and this affected not only art but the Central African religious systems. Remains of an artistic tradition that consciously preserves the individual formal motif and distinguishes it from others could still be found among the Bakuba, which gave a special name to every motif in a weaving or woodcarving. The quiet, even planar style of our Yoruba relief can be found on many doors, posts, and chests as far south as Kasai or Sankuri. Perhaps the most beautiful piece of this genre is a chest of the Tervuren Congo Museum, which is classified there as a work of the Bakuba. This piece attests to a surprising connection between Central African wood reliefs and Bushman painting. The stylistic similarity with the latter is so convincing that Dr. Maaß of the Congo Museum treated this chest as a work of the Bushmen. We now come to the better- known types of Benin bronze art. This art is the most accessible for the typical European. There he finds what is for African conceptions a strong naturalism and he delights in the opportunity to marvel at technique and skill. Nothing, however, raises suspicions about the artistic quality of these bronzes more embarrassingly than their proximity to average European taste. A similar exaggeration in African artistic production can be seen in the overrated clay heads and the bronze head of the Olokun from Yorubaland. Technically these are record achievements, but not stylistically. Should one wish to become acquainted with stylistically pure African art, one should concern oneself with the art of Cameroon, where the Benin refinement, with its aftertaste of an import, is discarded and large, simple forms are rediscovered; consider, for example, the products of the Ivory Coast, of Gabon, of the Kasai and Tanganyika districts. How then did this refined art come to Benin? According to a tradition of the Bini the bronze casting technique was introduced unexpectedly under the rule of King Esigie, the tenth of the royal dynasty. But there is another, more likely tradition, according to which the kings of Benin came from Ife, in Yorubaland, and brought this art from there. The latter version is supported by the qualities that Benin and Yoruba culture have in common. The

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Benin received cast metal chiefly from seafaring merchants, mostly Portuguese and Dutch, who are frequently represented in the reliefs. On numerous panels we also see so- called manillas, bracelets made of copper and lead, which served for casting. On the whole Benin art has been firmly adapted to the West African style. We stressed its close relationship to Yoruba and Cameroon art; in both we find the same pictorial themes, the same totemic animals: catfish, leopard, serpent, ram, et cetera; thus works of the Yoruba correspond to those Benin images of creatures who, in place of legs, bear catfish tails. I recall the Hamburg Yoruba wooden box, in which a representation of a fish is capped with a human head. We also point to the close kinship between the Benin chair bases and the plinths of the Benin heads with the ornament of the Ifa boards. Sculptures from Benin and Yoruba show the technical refinement of which the African was capable; how long it took to achieve such heights of technical culture we do not know. African antiquity has remained obscure up to now. Perhaps someday Egyptian art will no longer be considered in isolation, but connections with Central African art, about which one speculates only reluctantly today, will be proved. For now we reject the dating of several authors who, for example, as though using some mysterious lottery, conjure up dates like the twelfth century, et cetera, for wood statues. We have a vague sense of an African antiquity, but as of today we are not able to fix it more precisely. The Benin bronzes were selected purely on the basis of quality. We are not able to give an overview of this diverse art. I don’t wish to say anything about the purpose of these heads; in any case they are not the same type of bronzes that serve as stands for the carved elephant teeth. Figures 5.6 and 5.7 definitely give the impression of being portraits. With the biased opinion that African art is a primitive art of types one easily overlooks the finely nuanced portrait art of Africa. African art, like that of Egypt, is rooted in the service of the dead, the cult of ancestors. Here we grasp the religious center of African artistic creation. The animal representations— on the whole we are dealing with totemic animals— also belong to this magic circle. In his classic study “Beliefs about the Soul and the Ancestor Cult among African Peoples,” Ankermann analyzed the ideas of the soul with unusual critical acuity.37 He pointed out the variety of these visualizations and extrapolated the concept of the imagesoul [Bildseele], of the memory image, which is older than the purely spiritual notion of the soul. This is how the Zulus answered Callaway38 when he asked whether the shadow that he cast was his soul: “No, it is not your Itongo, but it will be the Itongo or ancestor spirit of your children when you are dead.” We frequently hear of natives that they refuse to enter a room in which images are displayed “because of the souls that are in the

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images”; the Wasu answered Dannholz, “That which separates from the body at death is the shadow.”39 Nyendael relates similar things about the Bini: “They call the shadow of a man ‘passador’ or guide, which must bear witness whether that person has lived well or badly.”40 Therefore here, too, we find the shadow image, the image-soul. The Bini also said to Dappert [sic], “The shadow images of the ancestors appear to him who sleeps.”41 These ideas recall the importance that the Egyptians attributed to the Ka. A magical conception of human representation and the ancestor’s relation to the totem animal permit the artist to aim freely for religious-fantastic hybrid forms. Depending on whether the memory image of the dead is stronger or weaker the ancestor image will be more or less portrait-like. Yet we also know of authenticated portraits of living persons. Thus, according to Bakuba tradition, during his lifetime the chief Shamba Bolongongo had a statue executed so that coming generations would remember him and in times of turmoil would find consolation in looking at his statue.42 It is characteristic that portraits of the living are deliberately made as ancestor stations for posterity. Therefore the Benin bronzes might simultaneously be ancestor images and portraits. A number of more recent heads were found on the altars of the juju; the old bronzes were discovered half- forgotten in treasuries, or rather junk rooms, by members of an English penal expedition. Figure 5.6 might, like figure 5.7, be a portrait. The bronze may represent a noblewoman or a princess. This is evident from the height of the coral necklaces that were especially important for the Benin. One of their most important feasts was the coral festival, which they celebrated in the presence of the otherwise hermetically concealed king. On this occasion sacrifices were offered over the coral; they were sprinkled with blood of the decapitated victim. A prayer has come down to us that the king uttered over the coral that had been consecrated with blood: “Oh pearls, when I put you on, give me wisdom; do not permit either juju or bad magic to come close to me.” On her head the princess wears a pearl net headdress; on the base the tribal totem, a fish, is portrayed. The head shows Benin portrait art at its height. Despite the difference of the material and chronological distance, we recognize the kinship of these pieces with the Cameroon headdresses, which were cut in wood and covered with animal skin, usually that of the antelope. Figure 5.7. Above all one should take note of the sharply slanted axis of this child’s face.43 We find this treatment of the axis in several Yoruba heads, then chiefly in sculptures from Majombe, which often seem to us like degenerate Benin. Earlier authors already pointed out ship routes between Benin and the Congo estuary. One is also struck by the strong directional contrast between the straightly positioned chin and the sharply angled axis of the head. The piece is thinly cast and seems to be an earlier work. One assumes that in Africa especially thinly cast pieces were highly valued. I refer

5.6. “Head of a woman, Benin, bronze, sixteenth century. 48 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 12507.”

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5.7. “Head of a girl, Benin, sixteenth century. Luschan describes the piece as ‘head of a rachitic girl with a sunken-in nose,’ bronze, 15 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 12514.”

to the Bakuba tradition according to which two men of holy blood fought over the title of chief. It was granted to the one who knew how to cast the lightest piece of metal. Figure 5.8. A curious piece, whose meaning is unknown.44 The flatly laid eyes, the treatment of nose and mouth as well as of the entire face strongly recall Majombe heads. A similar treatment of the eyes can be found in Urua pieces. The curious head decoration distantly recalls Cameroon masks, in which the coiffure is represented in bold ornaments and in greater dimensions. Figures 5.6, 5.7, and 5.8 show works that have a portrait-like effect. With astonishing richness African art modulates the broad repertoire that lies between the individualizing portrait and the merely magical representation, the sign. The portrait is an important implement in the ancestor cult, which repeatedly generated new artistic activity. Ancestor images encompass the range of possibility that begins with portrayal of a living person or an individualized memory image, to the opposite of a portrait, where the

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5.8. “Head, Benin, bronze, 15 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 12513.”

images lapse into symbolic representations, with a totemic animal or sign replacing the ancestor. We observe the same range of pictorial possibility in masks. In general ancestor art avoids dynamic psychology and agitated functionalism; Egyptian sculpture is the same. The association of death, which surrounds these creations, compels monumentality. The functional aspect of these sculptures lies in their magic effect; to ensure its power the maker imagines the deceased with clairvoyant precision; these curiously ecstatic statues are then the result, as the sculptor deeply immerses himself in his desire for magical or religious suggestion in the sculpture and pro-

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duces a work that is more an instrument of magic than an image. This symbolism has a religious correlate in totemism: the tribal totem represents the ancestor; often the symbolism drives the fantastic aspect beyond the relevant object, one erects only the spirit hut or installs, instead of a sculpture, an object, to which the magical forces of the deceased are somehow bound. Such magical objects are not to be explained animistically; the objects are not animated, rather the spiritual power of the ancestor takes possession of or inhabits them. This is how we understand what to the European mind are abstruse derailments of religious art; pictorially the religious dimension can be tremendously intensified, but it can just as well have a destructive effect, in that it puts forth pictorially unimaginable ideas to be represented. Precisely the fantastic element in religion sometimes dissolves powers of precise plastic realization, resulting in works that can be justified only by faith in magic. Figures 5.9 and 5.10 show famous animal images of the Bini.45 It’s interesting how in figure 5.9 the landscape is reinterpreted as an ornamental ground. In this animal motif we see a consistently applied parallelism— observe the twisting of the axis in the bodies of the animals. Up to the rear shanks we see the view from above, which, consistent with the design, is pressed against the plane. The rump, rear leg, and tail are rendered in a side view, resulting in a cohesive effect of the chief viewpoints. These animal reliefs as well as the free sculptural representation of the leopard are artistically so autonomous and undemanding that as we view them we hardly think of their religious aspects. Yet African religion teaches that these representations of animals, despite their relative naturalism, derive from a totemistic vision and the cult of ancestors. Figure 5.11. Ekoi mask. For this curious piece I quote two sayings of the Ekoi that I take from the work of Ankermann: The Ekoi describe the spirits of the dead as follows: “When the person’s body decays a new form emerges from it, in every way like the person as he was still on earth.” Rarely does an African mask achieve such astonishing naturalism. With this slice of wood we sense that it should in every respect resemble the person as he was still on earth, that as the Ekoi say, the sculptor “wanted to render the form of the soul, compressed into a small space.” In some respects the mask is close to Benin reliefs, although I know of no Benin work in which the mouth is represented so naturalistically. One finds similar qualities in the Cameroon juju headdresses, into which particularly scrupulously rendered teeth have been set. The Ekois are settled on the Cross River, and therefore this mask can be approached in some respects as a link between Benin and Cameroon. Figures 5.12 to 5.20 offer an overview of the art of the Cameroon Grasslands. The overrefined court and town culture of Benin succeeds in attaining powerful forms once more in the robust farmland, and the decayed coastal tradition revives in a late primitive rebirth. The Grasslands inhabitants had

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5.9. “Two panthers, bronze relief, Benin. 30 cm long, 20 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 8486.”

fled surging assaults, for example the Fulbe, moving from the north into the protected area of Cameroon; with these refugees the tradition of coastal art may have come into the Grasslands. This Cameroon agrarian culture seems like a pre- Homeric idyll. If late Benin art outdid itself in refinement and technical skill, in Cameroon renewal came in large constructive forms and a style was found that suited the changed milieu; the simple powerful

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5.10. “Panther, Benin, bronze, 48 cm high, 29 cm long. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 10877.”

themes, original to African art, are taken up once more; sculptors no longer model the refined portraits of courtly types and noble ladies; a stockier peasant fantasy turns back to constructive form, and without the confusions of a variegated civilization there is a recollection of the old themes. The urban Benin architectural sculpture spreads into leisurely rustic figures and the old African motifs of mask and dance headdress are tirelessly shaped into grand types.

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5.11. “Mask, Ekoi, Cross River, 26 cm high, wood. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 12606.”

In Benin an artistic complexity was achieved that was probably reflective of religious diversity. In Cameroon, artists chiefly made works that scarcely went beyond the ritualistic meaning of the dance; masks were cut and carved, as well as ancestor figures that danced their way in by night, headdresses that clearly manifest the skull cult. Certainly the Benin heads had

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5.12. “Dance headpiece, man with spider on head, Cameroon, Bafum Region, locale of Mbang, 29 cm high, 22 cm wide. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

evolved from a skull and ancestor cult and served it; but they are extremely aloof and often evoke little of the cult, appearing to be no more than a utilitarian art, for which reason they strike us as somewhat un- African. These bronzes dispense with elemental construction and display an embarrassing academic polish. They are more mannered than they are typical, more full of classicistic mechanics than of canonical severity, and for that reason they are pleasing above all to the conventionally minded European. There in Cameroon, on the other hand, one made masks that appear to us like powerful memorial chapels for the dead; an undercurrent of feelings of terror and agitated piety were rediscovered in this simple landscape. Figure 5.12. This mask abandons for all intents and purposes the technique of the autonomous Benin portrait; it is a headdress and is meant to be worn by the dancer. Here there are no modulating gently fused planes; the skull is built up in simple masses. The piece is one of the ancestral images of cubism; the eyebrows are serrated into pointed arches, the eyeballs protrude, abruptly elliptical spherical superstructures; the nose clamps together the exploding parts, the cheeks burst out as balls, linked by the gaping mouth cavity through which the dancer breathed; the skullcap zigzags like a mountain range. Upon the head sits the totem, the spider. Astonishing how this creature, which was frequently conceived as a graceful ornament, is here plastically developed. Behind the spider is the coiffure, two choppily

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notched lobes. In composition the mask displays the close link between the ancestor and the tribal totem. A great distance exists between the individualized slice of the Ekoi mask and this piece. In the former we see psychology and circumvention of the plastic means; in the latter one indulges oneself in volumes and it succeeds in tracing every part back to its cubic element. Figures 5.13 and 5.14 show a mask of large dimensions.46 The face is divided into substantial sculptural masses. In the mask with the spider the sculptor worked with brittle wood; here the artist chose a soft wood, which allowed him to be bold and at the same time to smooth out the individual masses. If the face is captured purely cubically, the volume of the rear of the head is flattened and stretched upward into a curved plane, through which the artist attains the contrast of powerful volumes with an ornamental surface. The division of the coiffure flows into the bridge of the nose. This mask presents a powerful example of how the African artist translates natural volumes into consciously willed form. We now turn to other Cameroon masks that space does not permit us to reproduce. In Cameroon we find the double mask, the Janus head, a motif that we encounter in Kasai in the Bakuba cups, which doubtlessly were used in a skull cult. The Cameroon sculptors used a similar theme in freestanding sculptures; they represent male and female, back to back, just as closely linked compositionally as the masks. Then we find large masks that carry a decorative superstructure on the head, a kind of crown one could say, which is often formed from totemic animals coupled together. In other cases the animal form disappears in ornament. I believe that the superstructure with the animal motif is the older kind, since it’s still constrained within the old idea of the totemic animal. The animal often crouches on the mask, the head of the ancestor; indeed, there are representations in which one can still divine the hands within the ornament. It should be pointed out that in the Congo one frequently finds masks of ancestors in which not an animal but a statue of another ancestor is mounted (see fig. 5.46); in this we no doubt have an interesting variant of the ancestral post. We find the tribal totem added to the head of the ancestor mostly in the ancestral posts of the Cameroons, which are installed as protective guardians before the houses of the jujus and chiefs. I note that in Benin we already find the type of the crown mask in the form of small bronze or ivory masks, which were perhaps utilized as belt buckles or attachments. We find similar attachments again in Tanganyika (see fig. 5.42). The finely crafted Benin bronze animal masks are found again in Cameroon in a simplification of types. Perhaps there is also a connection between the ram’s head of the Yoruba Shangos and the ram mask of the Grasslands, just as we suspect a connection between the diademed bronze head of the Olokun and the Cameroon crown masks. It’s

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5.13. “Headpiece, wood, Cameroon, Bamenda City. 67 cm high, 52 cm wide. Falk Collection.”

not impossible that the dance headdress (figs. 5.13 and 5.14) is a variant of the crown masks. Figure 5.15. This mask-headdress brings us back very close to the old Benin tradition. The same treatment of eyes and mouth. Among the Bini a sharp refinement and gentle melding of planes, among the Cameroon

5.14. “Headpiece, wood, Cameroon, Bamenda City. 67 cm high, 52 cm wide. Falk Collection.”

5.15. “Headpiece, wood, northwest Cameroon, Fungong, 38 cm high. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

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5.16. “Palm-oil vessel from Wum, Bafum Region, Cameroon, height 37 cm, diameter 32 cm. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

farmers a return to the broadly articulated, fanatically clarified form. The subdivision of the head is underscored with white paint. There might be religious significance to this white pigment, since even in today’s rituals the ancestral images are coated with a white tone, the so-called pembe, just as the worshippers adorn their bodies with signs in white. Figures 5.16 and 5.17. Two vessels for palm oil. The African is the craftsman par excellence. Here art does not lamely withdraw into itself; how well one understands how to fuse vessel and sculpture into a whole. The round shape of the vessel is repeated by the winding fishes. These fish are already

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5.17. “Vessel from Wum, Cameroon, Bafum Region. Wood, h. 36 cm, diameter 31.5 cm.”

known to us from Yorubaland and Benin, where they were often represented. The animal on the lid provides the second contrasting direction, the diagonal diameter. These totemic animals protect the contents of the vessel, the nourishment and him who eats from it. Figure 5.17. The two vessel carriers show an ancient African motif; the Cameroon sculptor likes to portray man and woman, back placed against back. A lovely old piece of this kind is in the collection of Herr Garvens in Hannover.47 In Cameroon the woman is often represented holding a bowl for food or palm wine. Figure 5.33 shows that this visual motif stretches over the entire art region of West Africa as far as Tanganyika. With this representation one might be inclined to think of a religious motif, perhaps

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a Ceres. Often in Cameroon the mother is portrayed with the child on her arm; this motif, too, does not belong exclusively to any single art province but to the entire West African artistic culture. Especially outstanding are the representations of mother and child that we find among the Chokwe and the Kasai tribes. Figures 5.18 and 5.19 present examples of Cameroon architectural sculpture. In the houses of the chiefs as well as of the jujus the doors and windows are decorated with sculpture. The compositions are adapted to the architectural forms. The ancestors are probably portrayed as guardians, they stand one atop the other and are installed as ancestral posts at the house entrance on both sides of the door frame. At the heads of the ancestors sits the totemic animal. Figure 5.19 shows parts of a door entrance, also guardian figures who are linked by cross beams, in which masks or totemic animals are carved. The ancestral posts are installed in simple parallelism, the representation of men and woman alternate rather uniformly. Architectural sculpture may have evolved from an old African architectural style; it can hardly be assumed that grandly conceived architectural sculpture emerged from primitive hut construction. In all things, Cameroon art points to the West African coastal culture of the old kingdoms, whose tradition was rescued to Cameroon. Figure 5.21.48 This head is an example of the art of the Fang, also called Mpongwe.49 From this culture we know a series of impressively worked heads. Two representational types among the art of the Mpongwe are known to me. First there are heads, which strike one by the simple manner of the descending coiffure. The head is worked up like a concave triangle, the chin is pressed forward wedge- like, the neck is a round cylinder, the flatly placed, bonnet- like descending hair mass serves the head as background. It’s reported that the Fang advanced from the northeast; this is supported by south Sudanese works that are close to the Fang sculptures. The eyes in Fang heads are especially distinctively treated, hollows carved into the head. In this tribe there is a second sculptural type that can be observed as far away as the Congo. These are wood sculptures whose heads usually correspond to the piece reproduced here, while the bodies are rendered in a curiously baroque manner. The limbs are twisted into screwlike bulges. One should take note of the especially beautiful mythology of the Mpongwe. Figure 5.22. An example of the art one finds on the southwest side of the Congo. The small head sits on an ornamented, staff- like base whose significance is unknown. The Berlin Museum for Ethnology is in possession of beautiful examples of Chokwe art. Alongside a shabby art from the coast we know statuettes from the Chokwe region, which are among the most peculiar of African sculptures. I mention the consummately executed statuettes of “Mother and Child” that we know from this area. With that one finds in the Chokwe region a motif that was developed in Cameroon

5.18. “Posts from chieftain’s hut, Bangu, Cameroon, length 3.20 m, width 28.5 cm. Umlauff Collection.”

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5.19. “Door frame from chieftain’s hut, Bangu, Cameroon, height 1.85 m, width 1.23 m. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

and was later documented in the interior of the Belgian Congo, above all among the Bahuana in the Lualaba- Kasai District. The formal motifs of the West African art region are of a unified type. The subtlety of Chokwe art permits the conclusion that it is of considerable age, perhaps these are the remains of the art of the Congo kingdom. Little can be said of its derivation. According to a communication of the distinguished Chokwe expert, Dr. Schachtzabel,50 they came to the Congo under the pressure of the Chagga migration from the southeast, like the Balubas. This migration may have taken place in the sixteenth century. It will be difficult to determine whether the art of the Chokwe, like that of the Baluba, originated with these tribes from the south, or whether the immigrants, one group in the Congo estuary, the other in Urua, assimilated an art that they found there. Also striking is the similarity of statuettes of mother and child from the Chokwe region with the statues of Bakuba chiefs, of which one is reproduced in figures 5.38 and 5.39. I would like especially to refer to a sample of Chokwe art in the Berlin Museum for Ethnology, a statuette that depicts a man standing on a turtle. This wooden statuette betrays a technique equal to that of the Benin in its treatment of details and a certain psychological naturalism, which is stylistically at odds with the religious utensils— a mirror box, for

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5.20. “Palaver stool from Bandenkop, flute players, Cameroon. Height 49.5 cm, diameter 47 cm, Falk Collection.”

example— that one added to the statuette. This mirror box serves the magician for incantations. In this box the magic power of the statuette, the ndozi, may be contained.51 If the statue is interrogated, it answers with the weak voice of a human. Then there are still more recent, rather inferior statues found in the Congo estuary, into which many hooks have been inserted. A quotation is supposed to explain the meaning of this custom. One speaks to these statuettes: “If the [named person] brings havoc, then pierce through his body with the point of your hooks and let him return under the earth.” We now arrive at the Central African art of the Congo- Kasai basin, an art region of the Bantu, where the stylistically purest of African art was created. The seminal work of Ankermann allows us to integrate these tribes into a larger framework. German researchers were the first to discover the important tribes of the

5.21. “Head, French Congo, Gabon, Pahouin, height 26 cm. Paul Guillaume Collection, Paris.”

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5.22. “Head on decorative headdress, Vachibokwe, Belgian Congo, height 33 cm. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 778.”

Kasai region, the Baluba and Bakuba. Wißmann52 encountered the Baluba under the leadership of Kalamba, who, supported by his sister, methodically carried out an iconoclastic campaign in order to establish a hemp cult. The vassals and subchiefs were forced to destroy their old ancestor figures, the Riamba cult overgrew the old customs; one began to differentiate between two types of gods, the gods of the east, which smoke hemp, and the false gods of the west, which are still depicted in portraits and who do not smoke. The Baluba are not the original inhabitants of their area. They moved in from the southeast, probably from central Sambesi, at the beginning of the sixteenth century under the pressure of the Chagga. Baluba means people

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of Luba, of the great mythic founder of the kingdom; Luba means sick, mistake, error. Besides this great migration a series of ancillary migrations can be ascertained, which led to the division of the Baluba into the Bena Luluas in the west and the Bahemba in the east. The latter founded the Kasimba kingdom in the landscape of Urua (Katanga District). The Riamba cult did reach there, so that the spoils in statues were considerably richer than with the westerly Baluba. We’re indebted to the Wißmann expedition for the best pieces that have come to us from the Bena Lulua— they are the ancestral figures of great chiefs. The statue in figure 5.23 was acquired by Wolff [sic].53 He took it from a rebellious Baluba subchief, who identified it as Makabu Buanga, protector god of the Bashilenge.54 The depicted chief carries as a sign of dignity the three-pointed sword and a leopard skin over his thighs. This figure displays the ancient Kasai art. A buloweh is represented, an invulnerable prince of holy blood, the guardian deity of the race or blood community, perhaps the man under whose leadership the Bashilenge conquered their land and constituted themselves as a tribe. This figure may have symbolized the tribal independence of the Bashilenge. Everywhere among the Bantus we encounter these grandly conceived leaders, who suddenly emerge and carry a group with them. The history of the tribe is crystallized in these bulowehs; the chief is of supernatural origin, has links to divine powers, and the genealogy of the chiefs is identical to the history of the tribe. We must, however, concede that such genealogies are of little help in constructing a history, since the chiefs usually bear the same name. Tribal history means genealogy of the chiefs and limits itself to a chronicle of the bulowehs. The unity of Kasai culture expresses itself in the kinship of the buloweh families. This culture is a Bantu culture and came with it into the Congo region; for the tradition of these tribes attests that before them the Batuas, a hunting culture of small physical stature, “the little vanquished people of the mountains,” were there. The bulowehs preserve the totemic signs and fetishes of the tribe, which are bound up with the bufumuh, the dignity of the chief. Therefore one can say that according to tradition the Bashilenge chief lost his bufumuh, his chiefly dignity, when he gave up the Makabu Buanga. Wißmann brought out a few more pieces of this kind with him; for example a female protective fetish of the fields, a woman who carries a manioc stomper and a bowl for manioc flour. These statues are probably ancestral images and belong to the class of Mikisi Mihasi, that is, they are portraits, executed in memory of the dead, whose names they bear. One also calls these portraits bimsekelo, that is, external appearance; certain sculptors, whom one calls Bwana Mutumbo, make them. Throughout Africa there are official sculptors of fetishes. Such artworks are often called ndozi, which roughly translates as “astral body,” and it’s said that these ancestral images preserve the shadow of the

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deceased. The dead remain preserved somewhere in their person by means of the artwork. Before the statue the survivor utters the lament: “Misery, misery upon my head; I lost my loved one, my joy; he, whose words gave me pleasure, whose looks comforted me, is no more. Misfortune over me. What will become of me? Cruel spirits, who tore him from me, you make me die. Guardian spirits of the beloved, my guardian spirits, give him back to me; for I am dying, I am already dead.” The lonely dead man laments, “Lord, I am dismayed and without friend in the land of the dead. I wish to have my beloved friend at my side, deign to send him to me, that he may grant me company and console me in this cold, damp earth.” The survivor and the dead man are united at the statue; it preserves the shade of the deceased just as his name is preserved by its transfer to a newborn child. The survivor continues to live with the figure; if the Baluba salves himself with oil he also salves the statue, this doppelgänger of the deceased. He dances before the statue or with the totemic animal in his hand and speaks to it: “We dance with the ancestors, o Mother, they dance for themselves.” At a new moon the fetishes are placed under the beneficent light of the moon and painted white, the color of the spirits, even as one paints one’s own body with the same color. The statues bear the name of the deceased. Figure 5.23 shows the Makabu Buanga, a rare ancient piece. Inevitably these statues of chiefs remind one of equestrian depictions from Benin. In the first place they are close to them thematically; this motif was taken up frequently in Benin. The standing helmeted warrior with sword in hand, the shield in the left, a leopard-skin loincloth, an amulet on the breast, is a type that we know from Benin. Perhaps the Baluba took it from a tribe that had migrated from the north, but it’s just as possible that the West African art region reached as far as Sambesi. In any case we find motifs among both the western and eastern Baluba that are found in Yoruba, Benin, and Cameroon. At times one might think that the Bakuba brought this art from the north; in any case they do not belong to the ancient populations of the Congo basin. Figures 5.24 and 5.25 show two old drums of the Baluba for which we’re also indebted to the Wißmann expedition. Both drums show a general feature of African art; there the artwork serves a specific practical purpose. It’s difficult to decide when the Negro believes that it is he who is using a sculpture or that the fetish is exercising a function virtually on its own. These feelings may often commingle. The inhabitant of Kasai distinguishes between two kinds of statuettes, the already discussed Mikisi Mihasi and the purely magical Mikisi Mihake, that is, statuettes that are filled with magic substances and objects. In the latter less emphasis is placed on the image in the depiction— which, as a

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5.23. “Fetish figure of the Bashilenge, named Makabu Buanga, 62 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 3246.”

recollection of something individual, is supposed to summon the ancestor— rather these statuettes are an instrument of Nganga, the magician. Holes are drilled into them for the insertion of medicines, mirrors are embedded in their bodies, for example, so that during the incantation by the fetishist it will be possible to see the enemy in the mirror, or one leaves offerings in the opened head. Such a statue may be asked for oracles and it answers,

5.24. “Drum of the Baluba, 120 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 2672.”

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5.25. “Drum of the Baluba, 100 cm high. Berlin Museum for Ethnology, III C 1962.”

whistling softly through its teeth like a child. The sculptural intention is suppressed by the magical purpose. This belief in magic seems to be a degeneration of the ancestor cult, and in looking at these magical sculptures we must conclude that ancestral figures are mostly treated in an old style and present a stronger unity than the magic statues. It is nevertheless possible that the capricious Negro quickly throws away or destroys his fetish if it does not

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achieve its magic purpose. Moreover these magic statuettes are more often hacked to pieces and thrown into boiling water; they represent an enemy whom one kills by this procedure. It’s risky to attempt to classify these fluctuating, buried African things schematically. One meets with a plethora of transitions and unclear intermediate forms. I report on these magic figures merely to show how much is left untouched by our work. An old Baluba legend seeks to explain the origins of the Mikisi Mihake:55 one day Ngoy, a spirit, sought out Nkulu; spoke to him: “Great spirit, don’t you see how miserable human beings are! Sickness, wars, starvation torment the helpless. Give me a remedy against such suffering!” Nkulu answered his prayer. From the bottom of Lake Kisala, where he lived, he took a thumblength statue that was intended to serve as a model (canon). “Ngoy,” he said, “here I give you the infallible remedy against such suffering. Go to people and tell them that they should prepare fetishes like this one. Then bring these to me.” Ngoy carried out the command. He summoned Bwana Kilumba the magician and taught him to make similar images. The magician executed these in various imitations and gave them to Ngoy, who brought them to Nkulu. Nkulu shared this knowledge, the magic formulas for placing substances in the fetishes; he determined the power of the spirits and ordered the dead, whose bones and ingredients are mixed together, to be companions of the spirits. The drums of figures 5.24 and 5.25 were certainly insignias of chiefly dignity, parts of the bufumu; they recall Benin drums, like those illustrated by Ling Roth, and also a Bakuba drum displayed in the Hamburg Museum for Ethnology. The link between human figure and functional object permeates all of Africa, and especially striking is the relationship of these pieces to the skull cups of the Bakuba, on which they liked to reshape and foreshorten entire human figures and recast them as cups. We know an old Bakuba legend about the origins of these drums. The lascivious wife of a king committed adultery with a man of lower station and was caught in the act by her husband. He became enraged, stuck the feathers of the Kamm eagle in the corners of his mouth, sprang onto the adulterer and killed him with his knife. Since the people wanted to know what had happened to the man, the king responded: Koy na bula, the leopard of the village (i.e., the rubbing drum) swallowed him. Since then human sacrifices are offered to the sound of these drums. On the drum in figure 5.25 it’s striking that the ears that also serve as handles are depicted in the form of Katanga crosses. We know these from Abyssinian and Coptic art. In figures 5.27–5.34 we show works of the eastern Baluba, who live in the Manjema District near Tanganyika.56 Encountering these statues we must confess how little we know. It might be extremely difficult ever to

5.26. “Figure of a girl, from Urua, Belgian Congo. H. 48 cm. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

5.27. “Female figure, Urua, Tanganyika Region, 38 cm high. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III E 1363.”

5.28. “Ax handle, Urua. Head size 4 cm. Collection Dr. Brinkmann, Berlin.”

5.29. “Figure of a girl, Urua, 53 cm high, wood. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III E 1879.”

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5.30. Left: “Bow holder, Urua, 60 cm high, III C 14966.” Right: “Bow holder, Urua 50 cm high, III E 4882, both Berlin, Museum for Ethnology.”

say something truly precise about their meaning. The old African religions, to the extent that they achieved a relatively durable form, have dissolved into a chaos of magical beliefs, and arbitrary disconnected interpretations obscured the old core. Perhaps the remains of the old tradition carried over into the ceremonies of the secret societies, whose members make use of an archaic language, where totemistic systems still have a durable form, and every fetish has a special identity that is linked to a specific meaning. We

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5.31. “Stool, Urua, 57 cm high, wood. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III C 14966.”

know a considerable number of statuary names, of totemic customs, secret societies, et cetera from the Urua region. Here Pater Colle probably offers the most reliable account. Yet if we compare the names used for fetishes in the secret societies with the older statues, we recognize that new names say hardly anything about the older artworks. I found only one motif among the names of the fetishes and the secret sects, namely the figure in figure 5.33, the crouching woman, whom one calls Kabila, the beggar woman or the daughter of the spirit. It seems that the works reproduced here date from a time when the Baluba kingdom was administered more or less centrally, and accordingly, a central tribal religion, a court cult, was practiced. In general we see that with the collapse of the kingdoms there began a breakdown of artistic canons and religious forms, the secret societies were institutions

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5.32. “Stool, Urua, 43 cm high, wood. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III E 6699.”

opposed to the state, since they were outside of control. In Cameroon influential chiefs energetically fought the formation of secret societies. It’s likely that the religious ideas that apply to our statues have gone out of fashion in Manjema. The oldest of the Urua pieces appear to be figures 5.27 and 5.28, the most recent, figures 5.31 and 5.33; both belong together stylistically

5.33. “Crouching woman with bowl of Moreosee (?). H. 55 cm. Brussels, Congo Museum.”

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5.34. “Mask, Urua, 37 cm high, wood. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III E 2453.”

and the identity of the theme in 5.33 is recognized even today in Urua. The two bow holders (fig. 5.30) come from Urua. One piece of evidence for that is the hair style. The tattoos on the left-hand figure, but above all the ornamental filling of the bow holder, recall sculptures of the Bena Lulua. Perhaps in such works we can glimpse transitional links of the two Baluba styles; this kinship permits the supposition that the older Baluba style originated as the tribes that are separated today were still living alongside one another and

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5.35. “Cup, Bakongo, Belgian Congo, 20 cm high, wood. Frankfurt, Fuld Collection.”

brought their art from the north to the Sambesi and from there introduced their culture into the Kasia and Tanganyika regions. Thus the West African art domain seems to have reached as far as Sambesi. Figures 5.35 to 5.39 show examples of Bakuba art. The first researcher to visit this people was Dr. Wolff, a member of the Wißmann expedition. He relates that until his visit this tribe lived in complete isolation and sharply distinguished itself from the neighboring peoples. The Bakuba are said to display strong Ethiopian characteristics. According to their own tradition they came from the north; they are said to have crossed four rivers, Ubangi, Congo, Busira, and Lukenie. Supporting this tradition is the fact that their ornament is close to that of the Yoruba, indeed more so than the art of geographically closer Cameroon. So we may perhaps conclude that they wandered from the north and in any case did not touch the Cameroon Grasslands. It’s peculiar that Bakuba art has more features in common with Yoruba art than with that of the Benin. Perhaps for that reason we can estimate the time of the Bakuba migration as earlier than the Benin art that is

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5.36. “Cup, Bakongo, ivory with wood base, 15.5 cm high.”

known to us. It’s odd that where we find a strong African art we encounter some tradition that indicates a northern origin of this art. If we look at the Urua stools in figures 5.31 and 5.32, we immediately recall similar bowls and stools that we know from Yorubaland, or as motifs from Cameroon. The similarity of the motifs can only be explained by the fact that these

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5.37. “Cup, Bakuba. 27 cm high, wood. Frankfurt, Fuld Collection.”

peoples were once settled in closer proximity, which the rather similar direction of migration also demonstrates. One may ask whether the art of the Baluba and especially that of the Bakuba is an art of the hinterlands and directly dependent on an older coastal art of Loango and Angola. The extant examples of Congo art speak against this assumption. But the strongest evidence is that the Bakuba display strong Ethiopian features and brusquely secluded themselves from their neighbors. It’s precisely the older coastal works that have the least similarity to the Bakuba works. It seems that the Bakuba, who pushed forward from the northeast, brought their art with them and that the art of the west coast was also somehow brought from the north. Torday later

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reported extensively on the Bakuba. I will not presume to rely on the work of this researcher, since a reliable ethnologist who lived among this tribe has informed me that, for example, the entire chronology of the dynasty, as given by Torday, is unfamiliar to the current Lukengo and his councils. The cups in figures 5.35, 5.36, and 5.37 are undoubtedly derived from a skull cult. These head cups were probably receptacles for offerings. Quite often they depict complete human figures in which the legs are foreshortened and the arms are pressed tightly against the vessel. Often the heads sit immediately on an ornamentally decorated stand. Just as we often encounter double masks in Cameroon we frequently find cups with two heads, probably representing man and woman, among the Bakuba. There are countless transitions that lead from the head cup to ornamentally decorated cups. In the Brussels Congo Museum there is a colorfully painted wooden statue, 139 cm high, that is doubtlessly also a Bakuba work. It’s stylistically quite close to the cup in figure 5.37, is more crudely executed, and the body is completely covered with ornamental tattoos. This statue shows that besides the skull cups freestanding sculptures were also executed in the same style. Figures 5.38 and 5.39 show one of the famous statues of a chief. To the best of my knowledge there are two examples of this in European collections. Torday reports that the work illustrated here represents the Bakuba chief Misa Pelenge Che, who ruled around 1780. In both sculptures of chiefs, in Brussels as in London, one is struck by the small scale of the legs in contrast to the massive trunk, which recalls Urua sculptures like those in figures 5.27 and 5.29. The detailed treatment of the face brings the statue close to the mother figures that we know from the Chokwe area. Nonetheless in the more severe bearing the Bakuba statues appear to be older than those from Chokwe. We have already pointed out that this Chokwe work is close to several Benin sculptures and we wish here tentatively to propose the possibility of a bridge between Bakuba and Benin art. Figures 5.42, 5.43, and 5.47 show examples of ivory carving from the Belgian Congo. The statuette of a crouching woman in figure 5.43 is a typical theme of the Bahuana. The ornamental treatment of the limbs leads to the small Benin fragment “Crouching Man.” We find the foreshortened summation of the legs, for example, in the statue of the Bakuba chief as well as in the female figures from Urua. The African often represents women, particularly since the ancestry on the mother’s side guarantees him purity of blood. The Bahuana have quite complicated notions about their statues that are rather unclear to us. These statuettes undoubtedly have to do with the ancestor cult; for the Bahuana say, “Fetishes have doshi,” that is, fetishes are doubles of the deceased ancestors. The doshi— so Torday reports— resides in the air, visits his friends and afflicts his enemies; he pursues his

5.38. “Statue of Misa Pelenga, chief of the Bushoong around 1780, 54.5 cm high, wood. Brussels, Congo Museum.”

5.39. “Statue of Misa Pelenga, chief of the Bushoong around 1780, 54.5 cm high, wood. Brussels, Congo Museum.”

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5.40. “Scepter of the Bahuana, Belgian Congo, size of figure, 23 cm. Wood.”

relatives if his corpse hasn’t received a proper burial. It’s in this context that the following short prayer can be understood. “My fathers, my mothers, leave your child alone that he may do well.” The small works in figure 5.42 along with the small female statuette are ivory carvings of the Warega, a tribe that lives in the vicinity of Tanganyika. In addition to small ivory face masks they also make larger, similar ones in wood. The female statuettes in figure 5.47 belong to the crafts of eastern Baluba. One can easily see their common origin with the previously illustrated wood statues from the Mamye region. It would be worthwhile to

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5.41. “Knife, Bakongo, handle 10 cm long. Berlin, Collection Dr. Brinkmann.”

publish the rich and wonderful minor arts from the southeastern Congo to the Tanganyika region. In figures 5.44, 5.45, and 5.46 we reproduce dance masks. The mask is an old African theme; already in 1352 the Arabian traveler Ibn Bat tu¯tah ˙˙ ˙ saw masks and masked dances in southern Sudan. This theme was treated with untiring variation by the African farmers. Figure 5.46 is a mask from the Kasai region. Often a totemic animal replaces a statuette on the mask.

5.42. Top left: “Small face mask, 5 cm high, ivory, Warega people, near Tanganyika.” Middle left: “Statuette of kneeling woman with padauk (red wood dust), colored ivory, Bahuana people, Belgian Congo, 5 cm. Berlin, Collection Dr. Brinkmann.” Bottom left: “Face mask, ivory, Warega people, Belgian Congo, 4 cm high. Berlin, Collection Dr. Brinkmann.” Right: “Spoon, Warega, ivory, 16 cm high. Berlin, Collection Dr. Brinkmann.”

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5.43. “Crouching woman, statuette, Bahuana people, Kasai, lightly tinted with padauk, 9 cm high. Collection C[arl] E[instein].”

Apropos figure 5.46 I offer as commentary two legends from Sankuru on the origins of the masks:57 Some time after Samba Mikepe had married Kashashi she had a child. One day as she left the village in search of water the child ran after her. She said to him, “Go into the village and stay with your father while I search for water.” But the child did not wish to obey, and despite punishment he insisted on following her. Since Kashashi had to watch over the child she lost most of the water on the trail, and was forced to return to the river and once more the child insisted on accompanying her. Threats, punishments, even from the father were of no help. The child cried, howled incessantly, until one allowed him to go with his mother. Kashashi was a clever woman and throughout the night she weighed whether she could prevent the child from disturbing her at her work. Finally she found a solution. In the bowl of her calabash she drew an ugly face with color. When the child ran after her she held up the calabash in front of her face and quickly turned around. The child was terrified. “That is not my mother, that is a horrible ghost,” he cried and rushed back into the village. That was Kashashi, the inventor of masks.

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5.44. Left: “Yoruba mask, wood.” Right: “Mask, French Congo, both in Hagen, Folkwang Museum.”

In the waters there once lived a spirit with the name of Mashamboy, who afflicted the population with a disease called goji. Those who were stricken with this disease lost the light of their eyes, collapsed as if drunk and died. When Bo Kona was chief a man with the name of Bokoboko went into the forest and suddenly saw this spirit. Filled with fright he ran back into the village and related to the chief what he had seen. Bo Kona exhorted him to describe the spirit. But Bokoboko said, “It is so dreadful that I cannot describe it with words. But give me time and the means and I will depict him for you.” Bo Kona approved, Bokoboko built a hut far from the village and went to work. He required bast, bird feathers, and the hide of a large bat. Bo Kona gave him the first two things, and commanded the people of the village to search for a bat and sent it to him as soon as they had found one. Thus did Bokoboko carve a mask that represented Mashamboy, in making it he made use of two different trees, took two colors, one yellow and the other black, and with these colors and the white earth he painted the mask that he had made. From the bast he made an entire garment with which he covered his body. This garment fit very closely and clung to his clothing. It consisted of little triangles of fabric, which were white and black and were sewn together. When he had finished he showed it to the king. “Ah,” said the king, “that is just what I need.” As the sun went to sleep a curious thing appeared in the village; no one had ever seen anything like it before. It was the king, covered with the mask of Masham-

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5.45. “Mask, Belgian Congo, Bapende, height of face 30 cm. Berlin, Ganz Collection.”

boy, but no one recognized him. He entered dancing and caused great terror among the women and children and finally he disappeared. In the bushes he removed the garment and mask and hid them carefully. Then he entered his village, dressed in his customary clothing, where he was received with great joy. Women and children told him of the terrifying specter that they had seen the previous day. “I know what it was. That was Mashamboy, who gives us goji. He came to see whether there were any carping women and bad children in the village. If he had found them he would have sent in his horrible disease.” And so the women and children were terrified and promised to be quiet and obedient.

In figure 5.48 we show a so-called Zimbabwe sculpture, a fragment, that is in the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. Peculiar stone buildings have been found in Southern Rhodesia, elliptical citadels with conical towers. The Dutchman Dappert reports that the imperial palace Simbaboe lay five miles to the west of Sofala. The ruler of this land, in which gold mining was the major activity, had been named Monomotapa, which means lord of the hills or lord of labor. Reports on this country were a strong stimulus to fantasy. It was believed that the gold country Ophir or Punt had been discovered.

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5.46. “Mask, Belgian Congo, Bayaka. Hagen, Folkwang Museum.”

At first one assumed that the fortifications had been erected by Egyptians, Phoenicians, or Arabs. Now one is more inclined to believe that a Bantu people had lived there, which, in order to defend itself from the Bushmen and peoples pressing in from the north, built this citadel. In any case one found among these ruins two skulls and several bones and established that the skulls resembled Bantu skulls. In the same ruins one also found, besides

5.47. “Above: three female statuettes of ivory, colored with padauk, Manyema District, Urua. Below left: ivory badge, Djuma District, Belgian Congo. Below center: ivory statuette, Manyema. Below right: small face mask, Warega. Von Garvens Collection, Hannover.”

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5.48. “Fragment of a representation of a bird, Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, 47 cm high, red stone. Berlin, Museum for Ethnology, III D 3170.”

other pieces like pottery shards, decorative objects, a number of curious sculptures out of steatite that represent vultures, which sat on long stone posts. The objects found in the vicinity of these sculptures should point to a period no earlier than the fourteenth century. This sculpture in particular, which we place at the end of our book, shows with glaring clarity the abundance of problems that confront us in the investigation of African art. Before such Zimbabwe pieces one thinks of an equally puzzling piece of the Berlin Museum, an old stone sculptural post from Cross River. That the Zimbabwe work is a stone sculpture is no basis for an objection to the assumption that that it is a work of African origin. One should note above

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all the elk that adorns the base of the vulture sculpture. The great bird seems to hold the elk with its claws and this explains the elk’s position. One thing appears important here. We clearly know this elk from Bushman painting; compare the Bushman paintings from the Molteno District, namely the cover illustrations of the Tongue publication, with the stone relief. But above all the kinship of this sample of relief with quite similar rock reliefs of the Bushmen is surprising. Stow estimated the age of Bushman art at five hundred years and some attribute a similar age to the Zimbabwe sculptures. The directional contrast between vulture and elk is thoroughly African, as is the combination between free sculpture and relief. The relief portion of this sculpture displays, despite a different technique, a close relationship to Bushman art and the concentration of simple forms perhaps permits the supposition that we have in this Zimbabwe sculpture an African work.

LITERATURE

58

Bernhard Ankermann: Totenkult und Seelenglaube bei afrikanischen Völkern. ———. “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Ethnographie der Südhälfte Afrikas.” ———. “Bericht über eine ethnographische Forschungsreise ins Grasland von Kamerun.” Dr. Schachtzabel: Oral communications. von Luschan: Die Altertümer von Benin. H. Ling Roth: Great Benin. Pitt Rivers: Antique Works of Art. Hagen: Altertümer von Benin. 2 vols. Paul Germann: Das plastisch-figürliche Kunstgewerbe im Grasland von Kamerun. Wolff: “Bericht uber seine Reise in das Land der Bakuba.” British Museum—Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections. Torday- Joyce: Les Boushonge. Torday and Joyce: “Notes on the Ethnography of the Ba- Huana.” Delhaise: Les Warega. Colle: Les Baluba. Schmitz: Les Baholoholo. Trilles: Le Totemisme chez les Fan. Ellis: The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. Bent, J. Theodore: The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland. R. N. Hall and W. G. Neal: The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia. R. N. Hall: The Great Zimbabwe. R. Pöch: Zur Simbabye-Frage. Helen Tongue: Bushman Paintings.

CH. 6

DRAFT OF A LETTER TO DANIEL-HENRY KAHNWEILER 1923

Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler is a pivotal figure in the history of early twentieth-century modernism. Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1884, he had a brief apprenticeship as a stockbroker before settling in Paris in February 1907, where, with a loan from his family, he opened a small art gallery in the rue Vignon, near the Church of the Madeleine. Young Kahnweiler did not play it safe: from the beginning he bought canvases

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by a handful of his most radical contemporaries who, like him, were still in their twenties. In November 1908 he showed Georges Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes, a milestone in the development of early cubism— they were the paintings that led to that misleading appellation.1 By early 1913, after several years of showing and promoting their art, Kahnweiler had signed Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and André Derain to contracts that provided them with a monthly stipend in return for exclusive rights to sell their works.2 We do not know exactly when Einstein met Kahnweiler— their earliest surviving correspondence dates from 1921, yet they almost certainly met in Paris before the war.3 Since Einstein had become aware of Picasso as early as 1912 (see text 1), he must have visited Kahnweiler’s gallery by that year, when he made at least two visits to Paris.4 Their friendship endured until the end of Einstein’s life, and fifty- eight letters survive from their correspondence. The bond between Einstein and Kahnweiler was certainly reinforced by their shared judgments about modern art. The heroes of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century were the core members of Kahnweiler’s prewar “stable”— Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris. Einstein shared Kahnweiler’s disdain for the “salon cubists”— Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and company— as well as for the futurists, most of German expressionism, and nonrepresentational art.5 Later Einstein would write favorably on André Masson, the only major surrealist represented by Kahnweiler, and Paul Klee, whom Kahnweiler would represent after Klee’s Berlin dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, was forced into exile by the Nazis. When Germany declared war on France in August 1914, Kahnweiler and his companion, Lucie Godon, were on holiday in Italy.6 As a German national he was barred from returning to France, and he opted to sit out the war in Berne, Switzerland.7 During his Swiss exile, having suspended his activities as a dealer, Kahnweiler dedicated himself to reading philosophy, psychology, and art history in an effort to “explain to myself and to others what had happened, what cubism was.”8 In 1915 he wrote a long theoretical essay, “Der Gegenstand der Ästhetik” (The object of aesthetics).9 In this text, which remained unpublished for more than half a century, Kahnweiler treated cubism in the broadest historical trajectory as a decisive shift in the practice of plastic representation and viewer response. His short book on cubism, Der Weg zum Kubismus (The rise of cubism), he developed from the last four chapters of this manuscript.10 It was destined to become the classic early critical text on the movement. In his own first effort at writing on cubism, Einstein praised Kahnweiler as “the only one in Germany [sic] who described and explained cubism correctly.”11 In this draft for a long letter to Kahnweiler, Einstein put down his

137 LETTER TO DANIEL-HENRY KAHNWEILER

most extensive remarks on cubism up to that time. It is the first text in which he articulated what he saw as the larger stakes of this art. For him, cubism is not a “merely optical specialty”; it “goes far beyond painting” and “is tenable only if one creates equivalents in the mind.” His focus here is not primarily cubist painting, but his struggle in his own literary efforts to represent the complexity of visual and temporal experience that cubism had achieved with regard to space. In his remarks on time, he returns to issues he had addressed nearly a decade earlier in his “Totality” essay. He shares his plan to do a “theoretical book on qualitative time and the sensation of space,” space and time as “pure qualities,” which would address a “perhaps not unimportant change in the way we regard objects and sensations.” In cubism Einstein sees the potential for a “refiguring of seeing and therefore of the effect of movement,” and for this he seeks to find a linguistic equivalent. Einstein’s thinking about these issues was influenced, as he relates here, by his reading of the physicist Ernst Mach. For Mach, subject and object are ever-shifting functions. The Ich, the I or ego, is not a stable, defined, discrete entity, but only a name we give to a changing “complex of memories, moods, feelings” bound to a particular body.12 “The subject,” he declared, “is constructed out of sensations, and then . . . reacts in turn to sensations.”13 Adapting Mach, Einstein writes to Kahnweiler of how cubism conveys an experience of how “the person waxes and wanes . . . in the sensation of oneself or one’s feeling for objects, in the harnessing of time,” so that what is represented is “the very history of the sensations, experiences brought close up, whose symptoms are at best so-called things.”14 He was seeking to convey such experiences in a narrative, “namely how things, mental images [Vorstellungen], etc. are altered in a person,” to achieve a “complex feeling for time,” a “refiguring of temporal sensation.” He would call this story “the shattered word” (das zerschlagene Wort). “Precisely because things start with language,” he explained, “I wanted to write the story of a man, specifically not an ‘intellectual,’ who feels dead language to be something that actually deadened his experiences.” It is not clear whether this is one of the two “stories” he mentions elsewhere in the letter. These he wanted to illustrate with “little scraps of lithos,” works by Gris (“who seems to me the best mind”) that would “stand like signals among my stuff.” This plan was never realized. What Einstein proposes here, in this rambling and redundant letter, was ambitious, radical, and certainly unprecedented in its claims for what was ultimately at stake in cubism. He presents a drastically more expansive conception of cubism than Kahnweiler had in his book, one that, as we shall see in the next chapter, stands opposed to it in fundamental respects, although Einstein never acknowledges as much.

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Kahnweiler evidently never responded to the letter— we can easily imagine that Einstein’s conception of cubism must have struck him as alien to his own. The surviving correspondence suggests that it was Einstein who renewed it the following spring. Yet more than two decades later, Kahnweiler paid explicit homage to the ideas Einstein presented in his 1923 letter. “Carl Einstein said to me one day, some thirty years ago: ‘We know that we would never have been so excited about cubism if it had not been something more than just an optical experience.’ This is absolutely true.” “Within the field of the arts,” he continued, “the ‘cubist revolution’ wasn’t confined to painting.”15 ■

I

was thinking of something that I am reluctant to explain in writing when it’s still in a preliminary stage. After all, I don’t know what you think of my work. This is what I wanted to write about: the refiguring of spatial sensations; but not in a theoretical way, so that we’re not always having theory thrown at our feet, but to show it through narrative, namely how things, mental images [Vorstellungen], etc. are altered in a person. To show precisely that the kind of seeing that we are after is not a theoretical affair but an experience of what I would like to call mental sensation [geistige Empfindung], and how things that appear so theoretical actually constitute something like a destiny or a passion. I have long known that the thing one calls “cubism” goes far beyond painting. Cubism is tenable only if one creates equivalents in the mind. The literati, with their lyric poems and their little cinematic effects, are so pathetic, limping along in the rear behind painting and science. I have long known that not only is a refiguring of seeing and therefore of the effect of movement possible, but also a refiguring of the linguistic equivalent and of our sensations. Literati think themselves very modern if in place of violets they choose automobiles or airplanes. Even before the war, in anticipation of such things I began by developing a theory of qualitative time, purely for the sake of my métier, then turned to certain views concerning the I,16 the person, not as a metaphysical substance but as a functional one, which grows, disappears, and can become just as complex as a cubist space etc. Then I moved away from description, which meant refiguring the content of experiences, of objects, etc. I said to myself that through my scribbling on art I might at last set about writing such things. Moreover I now wanted to publish a theoretical book, on time and space as pure qualities, so as to begin by establishing a foundation as it were. But then I thought it must be possible to accompany this refiguring of temporal sensation, with which I wish to experiment, with drawings that render a comprehensive image. Words, shall we say, slip away from someone as one feels or one’s sense of

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space grows. For it is not the present but dimensions of memory and of the future that are expressed, not futuristically, but the person waxes and wanes in volume, in the sensation of oneself or one’s feeling for objects, in the harnessing of time, etc., what one renders then is not the history of one or more accidents, which under the pretext that they concern the same person are thought to be ordered, but the very history of the sensations, experiences brought close up, whose symptoms are at best so-called things. Since the war I have had to set all this aside. I have not been able to speak with anyone about it. Besides I couldn’t formulate these things clearly enough, especially since I am not seeking a program or a direction, but simply wish to take pains to express experiences of time in a more unbiased way, not to paint them as do most literati, but I wanted to express this fluctuation of intensity, which always encompasses a complex feeling for time, one that is not simplified as the present. Limiting metaphors as much as possible, since they are the opposite of poetry, remaining always focused on the sensations, which actually constitute experience and not a flattening or accident of it, and then the typification of the experience. Hence stories such as loss of language, the dissolving of the person, and fragmentation of the feeling of temporal continuity. Therefore simple themes at first (I can name such at your pleasure). I had begun such things, timidly and hesitantly, in 1906 in Bebuquin. The works of the “cubists” were for me a confirmation that a renuancing of sensation is possible, which, in spite of all the talk, is probably the only thing that is interesting. Now I thought I would produce two shorter such “stories” that demonstrate how, with the altered, transposed feeling for time, the other sensations break up, and I thought: this thing must succeed. As I said, I wanted to discuss all of this with you in person. Then I thought, for that one needs a representation of some kind. At least this would be good for finally showing that this cubic experience is not a matter of theory but the gradual modification of sensations. For example: America has probably always existed simultaneously with Europe. One could have somehow constructed it theoretically, that is, one could assume that there was some kind of land between Europe and Asia. Starting from a theory, and this is the important point, starting from the imagination, one discovered America. One cannot deny that in order to discover it an inner experience was necessary and that on the other hand, once it had been found, this America, initially existing in the imagination, actually changed the world and its people. It seems to me exactly the same with cubism. And in just this way a bending of the feeling for time, which finds expression in language, must be possible, and actually takes place. You see how functionally scientists now think, even as the words and the metaphors rigidly persist without anyone daring to use these words in a more functional way. The only ones who had such courage were the painters. Perhaps I am overestimating these cubic sensations, but I don’t believe so. Perhaps, too, you’re laughing at me and

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thinking I am trying to talk my way out of a stupid situation with twaddle.17 This is not so. It was a malheur for me that I could never speak with you, since it seems to me that there was little point in speaking with most others about such things. You see, the experience of Riemann’s geometry will one day become an entirely practical matter. Today this geometry is already indispensable in physics. Just as cubism will one day become an entirely practical matter; that is, de facto it has already been so for a long time, look at America, for in our memory we translate spatial experiences quite differently. But now we must finally deal with the toughest thing, language. You see: everyone senses how within himself the feeling for time varies, waxes and wanes in strength, in range, in interpretation in terms of the directionality of time, etc. And the combination of words and events proceeds in novels as though one event slides behind another in the same tempo, in the same interpretation of time, etc. In place of the feeling for time one puts sentiment, someone wistfully recalls his beloved, or makes observations. Yet in fact if we look closely one experiences differently; but in order to preserve linguistic expression, out of fear of language, one does not tackle the experience directly, but sets the words, the objects more as the expression of sensations, as though everything passed on a psychic écran, on a film screen; as with Bergson or the futurists [whereas objects are functional symptoms of a function— it grows and wanes until it approaches 0 (and) flaccid numbness etc.].18 That’s why I wanted to write this story, the shattered word, that is, to show how a simple man struggles against this conventional language. For I don’t believe that the conventions always remain the most pressing19 because they are simple (as with Poincaré. One would have to first be clear about what exactly simple is). But it seems to me possible that just the necessary means of expression can be found. Consider this: You most certainly have particular feelings of space— here the word intuition [Anschauung] is inadequate— that you hardly feel to be correctly translated into language. Or try dissecting a sensation that does not grow from that same sensation. For a certain span of time this sensation makes your I disappear. Then it reacts against it etc. You will say that’s old hat; perhaps, but unfortunately we have neglected representing such things, and if we did, they were represented as metaphors, as something imaginary, as a thing fantastic or grotesque. Try examining how one experiences; the depth of experience, that is the temporal complex that is encompassed all at once, then is dissected and described. By this I don’t mean the Bergsonian dynamic, the dissection and so forth, rather that in representation we probably unnecessarily exclude important things in experience. Hence the inadequacy of language. One always assumes that language has only the task of explaining a given thing; thus that something immutable that exchanges only its entourage, a given person in one piece, must be explained. Hence naturalism

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vis-à-vis our mental images. Roughly like Matisse captures the impression of an image instead of translating a visual experience. Is then the kind of experience, by which I mean not a psychological analysis but the experience, whose symptom is precisely a group of things or conditions, not more important than the description of serially arranged conditions, and must one not try to adapt this language to the form of the experiences, just as in cubism one translated a certain strong feeling for space? I am speaking unsystematically; simply because I can scarcely afford the luxury of thinking about such things, and in the midst of all this the daily catastrophe of the mark or of food prices and other such things.20 So. One talks so much about religion or, if you will, about myth. Immediate sensations were bound up with such things; take for example the miracle; thus two points in time that, to our modern minds, cannot be reconciled. One had the courage for an observation that goes beyond the usual psychological method. No one will deny these people have experienced miracles. But such powers must have ended up somewhere. Now I have absolutely no disposition to mysticism or such religious stuff; but I think one would have to see whether we are analyzing inner events correctly. Anyone could have been partly justified in saying to the cubists,21 the third [dimension] is a haptic experience or one of movement, I don’t see that. And now ones sees it and knows that one should carry the integration as far as one possibly can. Literature is roughly at the stage of Matissean allegories of color. Can we not represent the “objects” and “conditions” of our sensations in such a way that they are what they are, namely sensations and functions? Instead of contenting ourselves with leaving the linkage of things and conditions up to the reader, who to some extent links these fragments together and in effect turns them back into forms. One has to choose, whether poetry is an expression of language or expression of a “reality” (naturally in an artistic sense). Or whether this language, in order to be art at all, is to be subordinated to what is immediately happening. In which case what happens does not occur in the sense of Bergsonian time, which is itself conceived in such a childlike positive way, so that it may consume the “morally inferior furnished space” of Bergson. I am speaking not at all of time, but of sensations and mental occurrences that are always qualitative, that is not metaphysical time (an untime) as in Bergson, but one which is sensed as time insofar as it is simultaneously felt in different dimensions, that is its contents exceed the linguistic image in crucial areas. Not because the contents are dynamically grasped, but because they are in fact sensed as having richer properties than those heretofore represented. For that reason, too, the poets race after the epitheton and the metaphor, not because it would be poetic— quite the opposite— but because they feel that these objects are lacking something crucial that, in their embarrassed desperation, they wish to make up for. Of course they achieve the opposite. Just as it is the wit of cubist pictures that

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they have made possible a richer complex. You see, I just can’t yet express myself properly; simply because one has first to try such things. I have come close a few times. But now I would like finally to have a go at it, without any regard for narrative. And I said to myself, it could be nice if one presented a kind of ensemble. I was, God knows, not thinking of lithos that, shall we say, would be thought of as objects for the market, rather of little scraps of lithos, that stand like signals among my stuff, and then: never believe that I would ask a man like Gris to work for nothing. No. I would be just as happy giving to him whatever is to be earned from such an undertaking. And now I believe your letter had such a profound effect on me that I am quite unsure of myself; besides, because I am so invested in these theories I half forget many things; I believed that I had already written you or at least to Gris about this matter. The whole matter is really important to me. Not for business reasons. That would be too stupid and also you don’t think me stupid. But in reality, and perhaps you have some idea of what I think of you, I thought we should once try to come to an understanding about such matters. For that reason I also want to give the Querschnitt Verlag this theoretical book on qualitative time and the sensation of space; for even in the best case one misformulates such things in a dilettantishly scientific way. It concerns nothing less than a perhaps not unimportant change in the way we regard objects and sensations. I am perhaps theoretically closest to [Ernst] Mach, who nonetheless sadly fails when it goes beyond physiology, and does not take language into consideration at all. And precisely because things start with language I wanted to write the story of a man, specifically not an “intellectual,” who feels dead language to be something that actually deadened his experiences. It’s terrible that we can’t come to an understanding in person; that would clarify a lot for me and perhaps I would gain a little more courage. I know that cubism is not merely a matter of painting; the issue is too fundamental for that. Whether it will prevail in all areas to which it has a claim I don’t know. I know only that hardly any attempt has been made. In Bebuquin, you see, ordinary things become ridiculous and grotesque as a result of quite elementary experiences. Just as with a cubist experience the ordinary image became inadequate, perhaps even incorrect in a certain sense. Here I believe we really must keep at it. And then I thought that a collaboration with Gris, who seems to me the best mind, would give the matter a certain impact, a solidity. But not for practical reasons. Perhaps I didn’t write, but I believe I did because I still know I am unclear and simply wanted first to have the manuscript ready. Or something like that. You see I have been running around with these thoughts for years. I lost the first works in the war, then came all these miserable conditions, which daily undermine one’s every firm intention. Besides it is in fact so stupid to have always to calculate relying only on oneself, and the only people who see things as I do are you and a couple of painters in Paris. For us it’s

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either applied art or an imprecise pipe dream. Whereas what I am thinking of is a very lucid literature, “objectively and realistically” exact like cubist painting. This is how I happened onto the Gris affair. But maybe it’s all nonsense. However I don’t think so. It’s just that in language one doesn’t like to readapt oneself and is more conservative in literature than anywhere else, especially since most practice their craft in hit or miss fashion. For example, events are represented like this: such and such happens because; in which case an apparently unitary event is broken down into a multiplicity of reasons; whereas everyone experiences for himself that an experience is a simultaneously multiphased complex of sensation, and if it were not then a continuation of sensation wouldn’t be possible. Now one always acts as though one particular sensation emanated from another, breaking down, within a “deep dimension” of the soul, things that somehow occur simultaneously as one 22 sensation into several, whose linkage with something one leaves up to the reader. One says therefore: this fact substantiates the other or follows from it. Consequently it’s already implicitly present, that is, what is properly productive in the soul becomes dismantled into a mechanical chain of a downright metaphysically inexplicable sequence. Or, in a novel: the affected hero does this and this; then they say: he remembered. While this remembering grows in such and such an action and, in order that the deed may have any meaning, must be expressed with it, and indeed not as a futuristic literary association but as I previously attempted in that I used the right verb for something, one which runs completely counter to the optical impression. For that reason of course they were not understood by those very colleagues who in their novels always have tableaux before their eyes; which they also kindly said to me. I attempted this nonoptical linkage of words in [19]16 and arrived at a mixture of the temporal dimension that allowed me to relate mental events to something that wasn’t optically similar or mentally concurrent, but through which, beyond the optical, one expressed the actual event in a single sentence. Or: you experience something; good. You express it, but you suppress the very thing that makes it an experience apprehensible by the senses, the complicated complexity, the intrinsically functional contrasts within sensation, that which unfolds simultaneously according to different “logics.” If this were not so, our mental life A would be without movement B would plunge unfettered like a cataract over every tempo of physis. Moreover, one depicts in such a manner, as if mental and physical experience always ran in parallel with roughly the same mutual intensity, whereas we continually sense much more complicated processes. Initially processes that don’t proceed at all in parallel but in conflict. And indeed in many respects. It’s not as if mental experience were the opposite of bodily experience, but we suppress the consciousness of the more complicated mixture and construct on

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a “mentally comprehensible plane” an overly unified thing that operates nonfunctionally like a straight line. Dostoevsky offers descriptions of the beginning of such upheavals; yet without divining the possibility of a linguistic integration. Now, one says that in the face of everything new— science, for example— naive human experience remains the same. The provisions do not change, only the use one makes of them. Whether or not the person changes morally or in some other way has nothing to do with my aims; every custom, every experience always pretends to be continually and perpetually valid. Yet we believe that things behave differently. Even if this is not the case an event rendered in literature is something quite different than an event in “reality.” In other words one can’t just act as if the literary event were practical, probable, or possible, but a literary totality is to be approximated that does not accept impressions passively but reworks them. The reality of poetry is the sequence of words [et son fond inconscient].23 But it just isn’t enough to ornament this naturalistic word sequence in a poetic manner or conceal it with metaphors [nonsense that contradicts the free character of the word. Here the naturalists identify word with thing].24 But just as the ancient Greeks or Swift had their self- contained world of literary images, one must finally dissociate the word from the naturalistic event, so that it’s not only an imitation of a so to speak already consummated event, hence a superfluous tautology, but one must work through events as they unfold in our inner representations [Réalisme spirituelle interieur (sic)].25 Therefore first ascertain the accidents of the events then actually represent the mental dimension through the combination of words. I don’t believe that cubism is a merely optical specialty; were that the case then it would be false, because without foundation. As a valid experience it encompasses very much more and I believe that understanding it is only a question of our energy. It will be done someday and people will not be continually expressing things falsely, that is, which do not match their mental images. Dear Kahnweiler, I had set this letter aside; partly because the thoughts it contains have not yet been clearly enough worked out, partly out of a certain embarrassment even to speak of such things. But with whom should I converse if not with you. But at the moment I am not finding the time to write to you further about this matter, since there is so much unpleasantness afoot. One must now take great care not to lose one’s nerve if one does not want to make concessions but continue to operate as before. What I wrote to you is a suggestion. But I will continue to work on the stories as well as the theoretical book and by the end of July I hope to have the first piece finished.

CH. 7

CUBISM From The Art of the 20th Century, 1926

Einstein’s book on twentieth-century art, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the 20th Century), published as the sixteenth volume in the series Propyläen- Kunstgeschichte (Propyläen history of art), is his major opus as an art historian and critic.1 It was the era’s major book on its subject; nothing else of comparable substance or ambition, with such a wealth of illustrations, existed. According to the contract, the title of the book was to be Die jüngste Kunst (Expressionismus) (The newest art [expressionism]).2 In the text, however, Einstein dismisses “expressionism” as a “cheap and empty word” (K1, 111) and is in general sharply critical of the German art associated with that term.3 Cubism was the art he championed, and the chapter dedicated to it is his first substantive published statement on this art and remained his most developed treatment of the subject, excepting the revised and expanded versions of the chapter in the book’s second and third editions (K2, 55– 100; K3, 91– 155). It had the distinction of being the most theoretically rigorous text on this art to have yet appeared in either French or German.4 Yet this account and the later one in his Georges Braque as well his numerous

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other shorter writings on cubism and cubist artists are rarely noted in the literature on this art.5 Einstein’s book, while passionately partisan in the matter of cubism, is trenchantly critical of almost everything else. One reviewer aptly remarked that as a history of modern art it was “more destructive than reconstructive.”6 Einstein would not only have agreed; he seemed to relish that image. He wrote Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler that this “art history will be embarrassing for some of the greats”; it would, he predicted, “be a wicked thing for all kinds of people.”7 In the book he registered the limitations and failings in the work of almost everyone he wrote about, from the impressionists to the Russian avant-garde. In his longest chapter, on the Germans, he was especially brutal. This wasn’t gratuitous nastiness on Einstein’s part, nor were his judgments based on purely aesthetic criteria. He had passionate convictions about the function of art and, accordingly, about the primary task of contemporary art. He judged everyone— or almost everyone— according to the degree to which they satisfied that criterion. That criterion is identified with Einstein’s theory of totality. The dense, hermetic 1914 essay (text 2), which mentions neither artists’ names nor artworks, becomes more comprehensible as Einstein applies it to concrete historical cases in The Art of the 20th Century, especially in the first three chapters, “The Preconditions,” “Beginning,” and “Cubism.” Together they offer a critical account of painting in France from impressionism to cubism. Stated simply, the narrative of modern painting that Einstein presents here is a narrative about stagnation, renewal, and the difficult quest for, and ultimate achievement of, totality in painting. The painter or sculptor had to present the viewer with a selfcomplete, formally autonomous whole, foreclosing any participatory role of the viewer— it is the principle Einstein had claimed to be realized in African sculpture (text 3). Essential to totality was the figuration (Gestaltung) of space, and in The Art of the 20th Century Einstein stresses this point repeatedly. Traditional painting had presented the beholder with complete spatially defined forms. Yet in time this practice degenerated into a stale, eclectic academicism. The revolt began with impressionism: “Rediscovery of light! Through light one finds a new interpretation of seeing. Seeing is not something fixed and static, a contour, a body, a tone— seeing originates in light, it is stimulated by parts and fragments; physiological optics becomes the basis of the art of painting. Seeing is traced back to its cause, almost in the manner of science; the factor of time shatters formulaic fixity” (K1, 10). The impressionists “simplified the palette and purged the picture surface of conventionalism”; they rediscovered seeing as a physiological function and as a subjective process. Yet their focus on the contingencies of light came at

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a price— the disintegration of form and pictorial space. They were content with the mere “sensual epidermis, which manifestly lacked a constructive dimension” (K1, 11). Failing to achieve a completely realized formal totality, impressionism deferred to the beholder, reconceived as a “receiver of stimuli,” to complete the image and provide the “missing totality” by consolidating these optical fragments into a whole (K1, 11, 14).8 With Cézanne and the later work of Renoir a reaction occurred. Cézanne strove for restoration of “stable form,” of the monumental “total picture.” His pictorial means, grounded as they were in impressionist sensation, failed to achieve that goal. “The Bathers remained unfinished— the technique was too refined, the atomistic construction too intricate” (K1, 21). In the second chapter, “Beginning,” Einstein focused primarily on Henri Matisse and André Derain, who in their respective ways sought to achieve what Cézanne had failed to do, to restore “das große Bild,” the monumental composition. They purged the nuanced divisionism of the impressionist palette in favor of large color surfaces built on contrasts of complementary colors (K1, 25). Yet for Einstein this intensification of color wasn’t enough, for it was “the task of painting to push beyond color as a goal to the shaping of space” (K1, 31). As had the impressionists before him, Matisse ultimately left it up to the viewer to draw, through association, upon his own store of mental images to endow the ornamental color surfaces with space and volume. In the end he remained the “charming technician of the facile, elegant solution” (K1, 31). Einstein was more sympathetic toward Derain, which may surprise, given that this painter quickly took a conservative turn shortly after abandoning fauvism.9 Commercially successful at the time the book appeared,10 Derain appears as a somewhat tragic figure in Einstein’s account. Building on Cézanne, committed to achieving pictorial totality with modern means, he took some wrong turns, made some bad judgments. Derain’s failure grew above all out of his deep identification with tradition. Rather than offering a pictorial realization of direct visual experience, his “paintings remain derivations from a world of pictures, a corroboration of results already found” (K1, 45). Einstein returns to Derain at the opening of his cubism chapter: he had typified the choice facing contemporary painting, “Repetition or invention”; whether to reproduce the given, viewing history as a “continuum of repetitions,” or to create a “free pictorial object.” If Derain chose the former option, cubism unequivocally embraced the latter. The four major cubist painters overcame the burden of tradition, creating a form of painting that was, Einstein argued, true to immediate visual experience. The cubism chapter is broken down into two parts: a thirteen-page

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theoretical discussion, followed by four short sections, totaling eighteen pages, devoted respectively to Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris. As was the case with Kahnweiler’s Der Weg zum Kubismus, Einstein’s theorization of cubism is modeled on the work of Picasso and Braque, the only two artists he names in the introductory section of his chapter.11 His interpretation of cubism might at first strike the reader as all too familiar, a rehashing of what by 1926 had become the clichés of early cubist criticism, largely discredited today: the simultaneity of multiple viewpoints, the condensation of time into space, the primacy of the mental image over the optical one, the “realist” nature of cubist art. All of these elements are present in the prewar commentary of the French critics, and they also appear in Einstein’s cubism chapter but, as we shall see, with a unique, radically different twist.12 The explanatory accounts of cubism by these early French critics were later conveniently characterized under the notion of “conceptual realism.”13 That cubism was fundamentally a realist art, a more accurate representation of objects as known by the mind rather than by mere surface appearance, was a common claim in the early commentary on these painters. Most of the elements of this interpretation are present in Maurice Raynal’s article of 1912, “Conception and Vision,” one of the classic early accounts. “To approach the truth,” Raynal argued, the painter “must record only conceptions of the object, the only things created without the aid of the senses.” The cubist represented the object not as it appeared to the senses at a given moment, but as he “conceived it, that is, as a whole, in all its parts at once.” One showed the object from multiple viewpoints in order “to increase knowledge” of objects by painting forms as they are conceived in the mind.14 Other critics also stressed the temporal dimension: a cubist painting represented “the essential elements” of temporally discrete perceptions, “a synthesis located in time.”15 Such, it was claimed, was the true realism. Certain passages in Einstein’s cubism chapter may seem consistent with these accounts. The cubist painting, he writes here, offered “a summation of the elements that give us a more comprehensive view of objects as the crucial stations of our seeing are condensed into a picture.” It is a condensation of a process that unfolds in time into a spatial unity, a synchronic image of a diachronic process, adapted to the exigencies of the picture plane. These different viewpoints, these discrete moments of envisaging an object or objects, rather than being consolidated into a single motif as in previous painting, are synchronically represented as planes and juxtaposed on the two-dimensional picture surface. In all of this Einstein seems very much in accord with his French predecessors, yet his account of what is at stake in the cubist project is in fact profoundly antithetical to their interpretation. He turns their binary opposition between conception and vision on its head.

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The early cubist commentators argued that vision is deceptive, conception is its corrective; the mind corrects the fugitive, contingent impressions provided by the eye to get at the “essence” of the object. For Einstein, however, cubism is not about conceptions of the object, nor is it about cognition— he no longer speaks of that:16 it is about direct, unmediated seeing, seeing purged of visual habit, of visual memory, of “knowledge.” To be sure, like the French critics he also defines cubist art as realist— as “a subjective realism,” but it is a realism not of the object but of the act of seeing. As he writes, in the cubist works of 1910– 12 (he cites Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler as one example) the pictorial object is “unbreached by conventional reality and [has] nothing in common with the real.” The object “becomes dynamic, a symptom of seeing; space becomes the very task of subjective creation, that is, it is generated artistically through means specific to the picture, and the object is the result of this process.” What cubism represents, then, is not objects as independent entities, but objects as a product of the motile subject’s visual activity, free responses to the “genetic stimulus” of the motif, adapted to the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. This is the “free pictorial object,” a “pervasive construction” insulated from nature— it represents the “absolute dictatorship of isolated pictorial form.” A totality. If Einstein’s interpretation of cubism differs fundamentally from that of the French critics, it has more in common with the far more profound— and today still respected— account of his friend Kahnweiler. Yet there are fundamental differences as well.17 Although Kahnweiler’s interpretation has certain points in common with the French commentators, his account is driven by formal explanations; it has nothing to do with conceptual realism. He does make brief reference to the multiple viewpoints in cubist pictures, but explains this as motivated by an attempt to make the object more anschaulich, that is, to give it greater visual and spatial clarity, not in pursuit of some conceptual truth.18 For him the development of Braque’s and Picasso’s cubism grew from their efforts to resolve the conflicting demands of representation (Darstellung) and structure (Aufbau).19 As would Einstein, he stresses how cubism tackles the Urprobleme of painting, namely “to represent three dimensions and color on a flat surface and to combine them in the unity of that surface,” an issue that received astonishingly little attention in the French commentary.20 What Kahnweiler calls Aufbau approximates what Einstein calls das Tektonische, the tectonic— in fact Kahnweiler, too, uses the term “tectonic.” The geometrical elements, the Urformen or archetypal forms that are clearly visible in “architecture and tectonics” (Architektur und Tektonik) but which were concealed in illusionist painting now come to the fore in cubism, with its synthesis of representation and structure.21 Einstein gives this architectural dimension a novel twist: unlike the Renais-

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sance artist, for whom the “built tectonics” of Renaissance architecture served as a scaffolding for the composition, the contemporary artist has hardly any “accomplished piece of architecture” to paint, so he “develops the tectonic preconditions for himself,” on “the picture plane.” Einstein does not define what he means by “tectonic” here, but he offered a concise definition of what he meant by the term in the cubism chapter of the book’s second edition, “a formally durable unity in which the experience of volume is structured in accord with the nature of the picture. This unity is the reconciliation of opposing forces, above all of the contrast of volume and picture plane” (K2, 81). By “the nature of the picture” Einstein seems to have in mind a notion of the tectonic as described by Wölfflin, a pictorial structure dominated by verticals and horizontals.22 In other words, for him the tectonic essentially refers not to an inherent quality of forms but to formal and spatial relations that, in contrast to the spatial illusionism of naturalism, are radically adapted to the twodimensionality of the picture surface.23 It’s on the issue of visual memory, crucial for both Einstein and Kahnweiler in their respective theorizations of cubism, that their mutually antithetical positions become clear.24 The memory image (Erinnerungsbild) occupies a central place in Kahnweiler’s account. The geometric forms of cubism provide “the firm scaffold” (das feste Gerüst) that give structure to our sensory stimuli and memory images.25 “Without the cube,” he writes, “we would have no feeling of the three-dimensionality of objects, and without the sphere and cylinder, no feeling of the varieties of this three-dimensionality. Our a priori knowledge of these forms is the necessary condition, without which there would be no seeing, no world of objects.”26 In their early cubist paintings Braque and Picasso analyzed objects according to their “primary qualities,” that is, the forms of bodies and their position in space; the secondary qualities of color and texture were added in the mind of the viewer, who completed the object by drawing on memory images. But as their emphasis on pictorial structure led them to ever greater abstraction, Braque and Picasso, as well as viewers of their paintings, became disturbed by distortions of natural form that conflicted with the memory images of objects. In Kahnweiler’s account, a crucial turning point— he called it “the great step”— in cubism’s development came in 1910 at Cadaqués, when Picasso “pierced the closed form,” ridding the painting of the disturbing “deformation” of the object and giving it an “unprecedented freedom” in pursuit of autonomous structure.27 Having reached a critical point in 1910, the two artists resolved this conflict by abandoning deformation of the object in favor of an abstract geometric grid into which realistic details and sometimes words were inserted as clues. These realistic details, aided by the picture’s title (usually provided by Kahnweiler himself), triggered “mem-

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ory images” (Erinnerungsbilder) in the viewer, memories of the familiar object world: “the object once ‘recognized’ in the painting is now ‘seen’ with a perspicacity of which no illusionistic art is capable.”28 The picture, then, was ultimately consummated in the mind of the spectator, reconciled with his or her memory images. In this respect the cubist work, according to Einstein’s criteria, would also suffer from the “missing totality” that afflicted impressionist pictures. For Einstein it is precisely memory images that prevent us from seeing concretely. “Even in reality,” he writes, “one does not at first see purely, with optical directness, but quickly associates a cumulative memory image [Erinnerungsvorstellung] with some known optical stimulus that obscures the genetic stimulus [genetischen Reiz] with a supposedly stable and comprehensive image. We conceal from ourselves that this memory image is a reconciliation of temporally as well as optically (qualitatively) distinct actions, and this image seems to endure because as something latent, mechanized, and rather unspecific . . . it is only added to what is functional,” namely the present operation of seeing. Cubism disrupts these well-worn mnemonic circuits. “One discovers,” Einstein writes, “that the object is a nodal point of functions, the result also of subjective activity, and its fixedness is caused above all by linguistic habit and the desire to enable quite effortless— that is, conformist— actions; thus it is a matter of biological memory.” Cubism displaces and overwrites that memory by painting direct visual experience. Later, in his “Notes on Cubism,” Einstein would be even more emphatic on the issue of memory: the cubists’ “greatest achievement is their destruction of mnemonic images.”29 A major difference between Einstein’s and Kahnweiler’s texts is that the latter’s explanatory model of cubism is embedded within a developmental narrative of Braque’s and Picasso’s unfolding struggle with the problematic of reconciling representation with an increasingly autonomous pictorial structure. These two painters are clearly also the model for the theoretical account in the first part of Einstein’s cubism chapter, yet, oddly, he mentions each of them only once, and cites neither a single date nor a single artwork. Here it is as if cubism were a stable practice; it does not develop.30 It’s perhaps significant that in the brief chronology at the beginning of his Picasso section Einstein identifies the Blue Period, the period of Les Saltimbanques, the Rose Period, and the Negro Period in 1907, and then comes the “Beginning of cubism,” which is dated 1908–9, and then the chronology stops. Is it coincidence that the years 1908–9 are those for which his interpretation of cubism is most compelling? The cubism described in this opening section, which is defined by the creation of volume by planar means, could be plausibly applied to the cubism

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of Braque and Picasso of 1908–9, as with Picasso’s Woman with Pears (fig. 7.1) and Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque (fig. 7.5). But it is hard if not impossible to reconcile with the paintings that follow, such as Braque’s Woman with Mandolin (fig. 7.6) and Picasso’s Poet (fig. 7.2), both illustrated in the book, which are marked by what Leo Steinberg called a “withdrawal from tangibility” as the objects “become ever more evanescent.”31 Are we to assume that these striking differences in an evolving formal apparatus, in facture, and in the construction of pictorial space are all examples of those principles that Einstein describes at length and with some redundancy in his introduction? Yet he reserves his highest praise for precisely these works. Writing of The Poet, the portrait of Kahnweiler, and five other Picasso paintings of this phase, he praises them as “the most remarkable and characteristic figure compositions of our time.” To be sure, Einstein does acknowledge the dynamic development that marks the work of Braque and Picasso in these years: “the more consistent the tectonics of the surface, the further one moved from the familiar object, and the fainter became its traces.” Yet it is noteworthy that what Kahnweiler hailed as Picasso’s “great step” is never mentioned by Einstein. For him the cubist “pictorial object” was ontologically autonomous, a self-complete totality, hence there could be no conflict between representation and structure, and therefore no deformation—“[o]nly he who declares imitation to be the task of art . . . can speak of deformation.” In the section on Picasso, Einstein offers a fairly comprehensive list of cubist devices from the years after 1909: the deployment of a comb to create the texture of hair; both painters’ use of “the real” as a contrasting sign in the structural arrangement of forms; the reintroduction of color; the abandonment of modeling; the enrichment of the “calligraphy of their pictures with letters of the alphabet” (fig. 7.3); the pasting of “newspaper clippings and wallpaper patterns onto the pictures.” Einstein clearly saw these things and registers them in his biographical section, but he does not incorporate them into his theoretical explanation of cubism that opens the chapter. The inconsistencies in his account, I want to suggest, are the consequence of a conflict between his theory of cubism and his astute, concrete visual intuitions. His steadfast resistance to anything beyond terse description helped mask the problem. Einstein’s differences with the early French commentators on the one hand and Kahnweiler on the other follow from what he believed to be at stake in cubism. We recall his words to Kahnweiler (text 6): “the thing one calls ‘cubism’ goes far beyond painting.” What Einstein wanted was painting that conveyed the complexity of perceptual and mental experience, painting that unsettled lazy visual habit and destroyed the reified world. The cubist’s mode of seeing, he hoped, would become a model

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for our own perception of the visual world. Not that the world would appear to us as a cubist painting— he is clear about cubism’s artifice, that cubism is an adaptation of the artist’s visual experience to the twodimensional picture surface, to the exigencies of painting. Where cubism would serve as a model was in impressing upon us that our own seeing can be an open process, a creative act. Einstein’s interpretation of cubism may be flawed as an explanatory model, yet it is arguably the only early writing on this art that does justice to the radical implications of cubism as painting, painting that has the potential to alter not only our conception of art but our intuition of the visual world. As he wrote in his “Notes on Cubism,” the “tectonic forms” of cubism are “the most human, for they are the distinguishing sign of the visually active human being, constructing his own universe and refusing to be the slave of given forms.”32 There is no mention of politics in Einstein’s discussion of Braque and Picasso, but in the Léger section he revisits the issue of a collective art that he had addressed seven years earlier in “On Primitive Art” (text 4). Léger, he writes, has achieved a collective form through the stylization of “a collective experience of the object.” The geometry of Léger’s forms endows them with “collective significance”; in the pervasiveness of collective structures he sees a “sign of urban collectivity.” Yet this collective art is based merely on the commonality of visual experience in modern capitalist industrial society— it is a collective art without a collective politics. Einstein does not yet attribute to Picasso and Braque the achievement of a collective form, but he offers an alternative to Léger for how that form might be achieved. In individual subjective vision through which the “distinctively human . . . expresses itself, there is something so valid as to be a stimulus to collective formations, to the group.” Although Léger’s forms are deindividualized, there is no transformation of the seeing subject that occurs during the visual act; his pictures “are all too influenced by a world of external forms and purposes; the descriptive is not completely avoided.” For Einstein, however, the “sovereignty of the subjective act” is primary. “This act, the site of creativity, is the locus of what is crucial in the act of seeing, and one avoids whatever is predetermining in the given.” A final word should be said about Einstein’s cubism chapter as writing. The spiky pithiness of his inflected German is not easily captured in English translation. Also characteristic of his prose is its idiosyncratic punctuation: many a long sentence is broken up into short, punchy units by means of semicolons; sometimes he inserts only commas where a full stop would seem to be called for (with few exceptions I have adhered to this punctuation as a feature of Einstein’s style). There is also a notable variance in the prose style with which he treats the four artists, of which

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the contrast between the opening paragraphs of the Braque and Picasso sections is a vivid example. The former is conventional, befitting an artist Einstein describes as possessing a “classical equilibrium,” the latter is a montage of jagged, disjunctive fragments, linguistically evoking the protean artist who is its subject. Then, in the third paragraph, Einstein’s style shifts abruptly, as he presents a concise review of Picasso’s early work in clipped phrases and taut sentences. Yet as one moves through the chapter, one may wonder: how can Einstein craft such finely chiseled sentences and be so seemingly negligent in the discursive structure of his text? Judged by the norms of conventional expository prose, it can seem irritatingly, extravagantly redundant. Numerous variations on Einstein’s basic account of the fundamentals of cubist practice occur throughout the introductory section, with no apparent discursive logic; the same is true of other themes, here and in the previous two chapters of the book. Given that his text was nearly four times longer than was stipulated by his contract, it would surely be mistaken to see such extensive repetition of essentially the same points as padding— he wasn’t being paid by the word. Einstein’s redundancies, I want to suggest, are not a matter of authorial negligence but spring from his convictions about the limits of language. It is a condition of the artwork’s totality that, as Einstein writes at the beginning of the chapter, it is “fully effective in its singularity,” it is “concretely valid in itself” (my emphasis). Cubism creates new forms, never before seen, while the necessary condition of language as communication is as a system of iterative signs built on generalized concepts. This is why Einstein stringently avoids description of individual works— indeed, beyond generalities, he never even attempts to describe the character of the all-important cubist construction of space in any of its phases. Any description, he argued in an early fragment, cloaks the artwork with a web of concepts. “Seeing knows only its own works, language condenses all this heterogeneity into a concept.”33 How then to write about art without violating its very nature? Einstein’s redundancies, I propose, could be understood as attempts to undermine any inclination to accept a single description of cubism as adequate to its object. In effect the multiplicity of verbal formulations, the redundancy, serve to relativize language, to locate the intuitive visual experience of cubism beyond its reach.34 Reading this chapter we should also recall what Einstein had written three years earlier to Kahnweiler (text 6). There he extended cubism to a refiguring of the “linguistic equivalent” of seeing as a temporal process. He wrote of “refiguring the content of experiences, of objects, etc.,” and added “that through my scribbling on art I might at last set about writing such things.” Not that Einstein is trying in this chapter to create

I

n Derain’s art we encountered a pressing choice: whether objects were to be reproduced or a free pictorial object [Bildgegenstand]35 was to be invented; whether the history of form amounted to varied repetition, to which the artist is fatefully condemned, whether art is a hallowed conservatism and the creative factor limited from the very start. Doesn’t history, if conceived as a continuum of repetitions, call creation into question— is not the preciousness of tradition the very life preserver of the uncreative? Repetition or invention— one had to choose. Where did there exist a culture that could have compelled a self-evident consensus? Such conventions as we did have were of a technical kind, for specialists. And what was all this talk about depicting objects supposed to mean; for that there was no law on this but, upon closer examination, a thousand different possibilities. Laws of art were belated constructions and were hardly applicable to the next case; they were tailored to the blind monotony of their authors. Where did one find a basis for these vaunted laws?— Neither in Leonardo nor in Poussin. Artworks are conceived in a complex process, realized in protracted experimentation that swings to and fro between memory and innovation, the concealment of its method is indeed specific to the artwork, so that clear laws are scarcely discoverable, especially as it is proper to the artwork that it is

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the literary equivalent of a “cubist style.” What is at stake, rather, for both painting and prose is a mode of representation that is truer to the nature of experience as it unfolds in time, overcoming the fixity inherent in the linguistic sign. “Must one not try,” he had asked Kahnweiler, “to adapt . . . language to the form of the experiences, just as in cubism one translated a certain strong feeling for space?” Just as cubism, the object of Einstein’s writing in this chapter, is concerned with the temporal process of seeing, of envisaging objects as one moves around them in space, Einstein’s text can be read, I believe, as an attempt to evoke the process of thinking, in this case his thinking- through of cubism as process in which ever more of its aspects are grasped in the mind, augmenting and refining previous insights and conceptualizations, even as it eludes any definitive formulation in words. Einstein writes of Picasso, “a thinking looking [denkendes Schauen] insulates itself from a received conception of the picture.” In a later text fragment he criticized classical philosophy for dealing only with the “results of thinking, thus a congealed order, but not the process of thinking” (my emphasis). Cognition (Erkenntnis) was the “fatal end phase” of thinking, “a functional end point, just like the fixed subject or object” (BA 4, 198). As he writes here of cubist painting, Einstein’s text proves “its fecundity by its success in forming ever richer images of the object.” ■

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fully effective in its singularity and no higher principle overrides its greatest value as something concretely valid in itself. The whole of aesthetics was perhaps a desperate attempt to provide meager nourishment to a failed species. If the tradition of art means repetition, then simultaneously it begets the stupidity of imitation. Is art so sacred that it’s to be perpetually preserved in its canonical state? Nobody flinched when millions were killed, so why an outcry if art is called into question! Every porter knows that Corot, Renoir, or Cézanne painted good pictures— or is capable of knowing it with the necessary income and sufficient leisure. But what if these things should one day become unimportant? One considers such ideas criminal, idiotic, and a sin against the holy spirit of all journalists. Art is idolized by those who, adrift and helpless, are victims of dubious authority; anyone moderately unbiased who concerns himself more seriously with it knows of its often downright childish ineffectuality, so it’s astonishing that a number of strong, not exorbitantly stupid individuals even to this day try to produce art. In general one values art because doing so carries no obligations. After an excess of Alexandrianism one has grown tired of history as constancy and embarrassing repetition. History and tradition live from abrupt intervals, in which certain groups position themselves against others; tradition does not live from embarrassing imitation, from similarity, but from tensions of difference, which become reconciled into unity only with increasing distance. Visual intuition is not merely stable material received from higher powers and realms that it serves unchangingly, it is not merely memory of the given, supposedly serving reflection as something willingly constant, 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. Admittedly— for the painter or sculptor visual intuition and form exhaust themselves more quickly, since it is in them that the artist manifests himself and that his creative activity flows. So painting or sculpture become necessary to a critique of visual intuition [Kritik an Anschauung], and this constitutes a form of reflection in which concepts as such need not come into play.36 For the sensory is not some fixed, finite material that is reassessed only if interpreted through concepts; visual intuition and seeing change and exhaust themselves, and optical dissatisfaction forces such change; it is immaterial whether traditional intuition is ignored here; for what is at stake is not replicating [Abbilden] but forming [Bilden]. Against such pictures fearful souls erect as a barricade the stable, ostensibly always-the-same object, sanctified by a metaphysics of stasis. Whatever in the object conforms to memory, whatever is vitally useful, is to be preserved, and all too swiftly one warns about “deformation” [Deforma-

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tion], alarmed, since as one apprehends the picture the utilitarian elements evaporate. The awkward half solution of the naturalizing picture always points to a more complex object, of which the representation becomes an impoverished fragment. One overlooks the necessary discrepancy between gestalt and object, mitigated only where pictorial values are found in the object itself and pictorial form has once again united with the general visual intuition. The available forms of the object, because they serve in everyday life as signals for stimuli, action, and purpose, and are thus used by all, are held to be sacred and indispensable, even as any resolutely different way of shaping things, however consistent and necessary it may be, is rejected as alien and ominous. Experience of form is precisely a critique of the object, which can lead to its destruction. One disintegrates with the object, the girder of convention, the suggestive nodal point of forms that have become historical. For the new to emerge, more is needed than gradual steps. We know that consciously or directly the majority blithely affirms or denies the question of the new. Any complex of things can be generalized as concepts, until we gradually arrive at something approaching the regularity of a law, of simple, general elements. The question is only whether what is singular has been preserved; on the other hand impossible rebels struggle convulsively by the hour for a shift of nuance or of interpretation that by tomorrow, integrated or forgotten, is disregarded. Revolt— and often deliberate revolt— is the basic feature of today’s art, yet at the same time it’s permeated by academicism, which now evinces the fanaticism of the new feeling, now a reaction against the narrow complex of one’s own invention. Since impressionism an almost surprisingly logical modification of the conception of the picture can be observed. From the motif and the sensation, it moves by way of a combination of tectonics and object to a freely conceived gestalt and the elimination of the motif. A logical course of events that easily deluded one into believing it to be governed by historical laws. From the sensation, the passive impression, which contents itself with a technique that is, to be sure, replete with artistic arbitrariness and an optics alien to reality, one arrives at the free act of figuration [ freien Gestaltungsakt]. In this very drive we can sense a revolt against the conception that has come down from antiquity, which dominated the Renaissance. One seeks a new connection to nature, and because of the desire to arrive quickly at an authoritative form, the sophisticated or the desperate return to the old again and again. Nature has become almost a specialized phenomenon, in which an ever denser degree of regularity, ever more pervasive repetition is found. And yet, surrounded by a constructed urban culture, by things invented and built, one resists. In comparison with this, nature stands as a conservative element, and landscape edges toward an idyllic, easygoing sentimentality. One discovers that the object is a nodal point of functions, the result also of subjective activity, and its fixedness is caused above all by linguistic habit

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and the desire to enable quite effortless— that is, conformist— actions; thus it is a matter of biological memory. Yet the artist does not to wish to express himself through the given, he requires gestalt, severed from the manifold interpretations of the traditional object. So he erects, within a closed circuit, the pictorial body [Bildkörper],37 isolated from any object that is in some way susceptible to interpretation; he counters perceiving [Wahrnehmen] with subjective vision [Schau]. Form is no longer a matter of balancing or omitting mutually antagonistic parts of the recorded motif or temporally distinct fragments of perception, it grows from the sovereignty of the subjective act. This act, the site of creativity, is the locus of what is crucial in the act of seeing, and one avoids whatever is predetermining in the given. One should not conflate such subjectivity with anarchic individualism; for it is precisely the subjective that is the source of lawlike regularity [Gesetzmäßigkeit], even if the subject seems initially to overturn it in the achievement that results from his discovery. Since one proceeds from a subjective position, a multiplicity of formal expressions is possible, depending on the elements with which one begins. This subjective looking is at first scarcely breached by the object; for it is a matter of allowing the act of seeing to unfold in a unified manner within the conception and therefore totally to run its course. Comparison with the highly mutable object of reality is omitted, the isolation and thus the totality of the picture are preserved, since comparison with the motif is impossible; for one is attempting more than a colorful interpretation and other such things as a reconciliation with or a standardization of the given. Hence the effect on the beholder is purely formal. Whether such seeing is gradually adapted to the object or to this subjective form is another matter. Some characterized this attitude as a search for a mystical absolute, while others rebuked it as a passion for abstract calculation. The visual experience rendered here is replete with the precision of subjective forming, which is often experienced unchecked. The path from the subject to the gestalt has become more direct, for a conception of an object [Konzeptionsgegenstand] is found that is hardly breached by the motif. One remains solely within the formal conditions dictated by the picture plane; the individual object is sacrificed to the pictorial body; yet the process does not stop with the destruction of the object, with escape from the mnemotechnics of civilization or from practical necessity, rather this so often utterly obscured mode of seeing becomes clarified, as subject and picture, conception and realization are not split apart by comparison with a determining motif. The picture space and the pictorial body inserted into it are treated as a phenomenon in and of itself. The planar pictorial body is defined against the conventional hybrid object. Here we may speak neither of an absolute nor of a mystical void, for the very subjective-functional process of seeing is emphasized, and thus faith in the fixed universality of seeing is thereby denied and the distinctive

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reality character of subjective form is emphasized. The path therefore runs from the perception of the motif and its technical interpretation, through overgrown stylization (van Gogh, Gauguin) via the balancing between tectonics and the self-complete object (Cézanne, Derain) to the absolute dictatorship of isolated pictorial form. The precondition for this is a visual intuition that is fully derived from seeing— not from its objects— that conveys a normal self- complete conception of space that is solely conditioned by the pictorial means and thus presupposes an envisaging seeing [das vorstellende Sehen] and the twodimensional character of the surface.38 One does not assume a traditional notion of being, especially since any reconstruction is futile, and deformation is conditioned by naturalistic seeing. One abandons reconstruction of the continually changeable, emphasizes giving form to subjective envisaging, interprets one’s own mental images resulting from one’s motion [Bewegungsvorstellungen];39 abandonment of the verification of the image begins, and through the picture’s effect the beholder becomes insulated from other experience. Recognition, or comparison with the known object, assumes another meaning. One sees before oneself only a table or person adapted to the picture. Notwithstanding their antinaturalistic two-dimensional dissections, the impressionists had strongly deferred to the motif in forming the object. Nowadays the painter distinguishes between gestalt and object, and seeks a pervasive construction by means of two-dimensional intuition, one in which experiences of depth are constructed as a juxtaposition of flat, fragmented signs of objects. The more the subjective vision of the picture is internally differentiated and developed, the more decisively a pictorial body comes into being that forecloses the legacy of heterogeneous seeing, and the more formal arbitrariness increases. The artist revolts against the usual fusion of pictorial body and object. Of course pictorial forms are vaguely suggested by the object, but they become independent, so that the motif resonates lightly in the picture; for not just any element, such as light or color articulation, is being attempted here but an all-encompassing experience of pictorial space, that is, the strict integration of a subjective envisaging of the object through one’s motion into a two-dimensional structure. It is not the excitement caused by the motion of things that is decisive, but the manifold directionality of one’s own kinesthetic seeing. Instead of showing a group of things in motion one presents the two- dimensional, simultaneous complex resulting from one’s own envisaging arising from motion, whereby the factor of the stereometric body in depth, the deception of the eye, is avoided. The picture tells us about objects only to the degree that they contain a two- dimensional gestalt, that is, energies generated by pictorial form. Perhaps this conception will prevail, so that subsequently object and gestalt appear to approximate one another. Let us be content that today’s human being, saturated with urban construction to the extent that one is

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conscious of it, begins by filtering out received forms and thereby destroys traditional means of representation. The dissociation of practical perceiving [Wahrnehmen] from looking in terms of form [formales Schauen] is the basic condition of art. In spite of their investment in descriptions, scientific formulations, by emphasizing recurring factors that satisfy our need for stability, stand opposed to the manifold experience of nature and of the object. The emphasis on forms generated by subjective seeing corresponds to this; after all, science does not limit itself to description either, but extracts subjectively important elements and alters our image of nature in adapting it to the human capacity for figuration. It is not nature that needs physics or geometry, rather we create for ourselves a comfortable schema so that the experience of it may be our own and we can act with expanded foresight by endowing that experience with structure in forms that suit us. On the one hand nature becomes a predetermined mechanism based on laws that scarcely allow for freedom, we become prisoners of the very laws we have discovered, on the other it becomes a subjective phenomenon whose continuity and consistency are conditioned by the laws’ technology. Set alongside this subjective convention is the artistic phenomenon of pictorial structure, which simultaneously wrests us away momentarily from the determinations of nature as we consciously experience the event of subjective creation. The cubist selects from experience the actual factors of subjective, two-dimensional experience, he eliminates memories or tactile suggestions and achieves a form that exists discretely alongside other phenomena of experience. If formerly nature had primacy over the image, here it is to the image that one returns. In contrast to the scientist, the artist first dispenses with verification, that is: the relation between the gestalt and the object; the individual image is valid in itself. Here art becomes merely a subjectively formal task, the recording of the artist’s own conception [Konzeption], an ascetic avowal. Existing being, nature, is divorced from the pictorial process, it resonates faintly at its beginning and end; what is emphasized, by contrast, is the subjective experience, the mental image of form that determines the picture. Does not such a process reveal a difference between nature and art, between the mental image in general and pictorial form? Yet in such subjective processes, in which the distinctively human— we would like to call it the lyrical— expresses itself, there is something so valid as to be a stimulus to collective formations, to the group. The path from conception to gestalt is scarcely breached by observation; depiction and resemblance, in which the artist dedicates himself to nature and to the intimate observation of it, cease to apply. An overall construction is attempted in which the parts are reconciled without regard for associations with the object, just as formerly one found an autonomous equilibrium of colors. Yet the painter

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is after something different from chromatic movement or a division of the picture surface: a complete figuration of three- dimensional experience in a tectonically two-dimensional conception that excludes the depiction of depth; for naturalism was a consequence of the construction of the experience of depth, which was alien to the picture; the ultimate consequence was the sculptural painting of the High Renaissance, which tried to reproduce what was almost corporeally palpable. The impressionist, with his technical abbreviations, revolted against this mimetic surrogate, and in the cubists we find tectonic articulation and dismantling of the object for the sake of a purer planarity. The formal construction distances itself completely from the object as something organic or useful; no doubt initially the customary needs, which any rupture of mimetic identicality impedes, are disappointed. Any shaping of space seems initially to disturb or somewhat imperil an orientation conditioned by life. The prospect of an identical tomorrow is threatened and one’s sense of security is at first diminished. This conveys the isolation of the artist and his picture, a consequence of any formal autism.40 One loves life as repetition, as tautology, and defends oneself against modest changes. New spatial orientations, even if expressed only two- dimensionally— comfortably within the compass of memory— are especially disturbing; one no longer knows one’s way on familiar terrain and at first believes to have wandered astray. The known object contains familiar properties, so one elevated it to primacy in art; one had worked hard to endow it with depth and with vital, amicable movement. With the cubists begins the insight that the object, which thanks to its practical utility contains inherent suggestions of form, had to be subordinated to a subjective vision and was to be completely adapted to the two- dimensional picture plane. The cubists’ break from tradition occurs gradually; the more consistent the tectonics of the surface, the further one moved from the familiar object, and the fainter became its traces. Here was proof of the boundary between stylization and style. Most artists made sentimental use of cubism, a felt form (expression) became cubically— almost paradoxically— more rigorous; one wanted to build scaffolds for a kitschified stupor; literature and the soul racket should be monumented in ashlar. The painting of Braque and Picasso is untouched by this literary intermixing and is incapable of being compromised by it. The meaning of cubism: re- forming [Verformung]41 of the experience of three dimensions as generated by our bodily motion [dreidimensionalen Bewegungserlebnisses] into two- dimensional form, yet without reproducing modeling or depth with illusionistic techniques, while the dimension of depth, that is, the mental images that we form in the act of motion [Bewegungsvorstellungen] and the whole of the mnemonic functions are perfectly represented; in place of an animated view of deep space, of a temporally

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compressed kinesthetic image, there is a juxtaposition of two-dimensional forms ordered in such a way that in retaining the ground plane the constructive components of the picture shape the different viewpoints of a body and its volume two-dimensionally. Consequently the mnemonic dimension, the very thing that registers the volume, is re-formed, without any illusionistic breach of the picture plane. Cubism is therefore directly opposed to decorative ornament; fauves or expressionists generalize or imitate twodimensional sensations of color by eliminating the elements that give form to spaces and bodies; they move from two-dimensional sensation to twodimensional representation, while the cubists directly re-form volume, yet not mimetically or by modeling, but by planar means. Fauves and expressionists eliminate the most vital experiences, they stylize or reproduce an excessively narrow sensation; the cubist confronts the most salient spatial experiences with a comprehensive formal conception. The slender direct sensation of the fauves refers back to the complete motif, while cubism gains completeness and independence as it eliminates experience by means of comprehensive equivalents; therein lies the freedom of its pictorial construction. One becomes independent of the motif because one begins by representing the defining factor, the spatial mnemonic dimension through which the object is constituted; from this point one then gives indications of the object without lapsing into naturalism, because— since construction in space is the precondition of the object— the object configures itself out of the spatial structure rather than dominating it. Depth, or the planar mnemonic dimension, is precisely a comprehensive experience, which we owe more decidedly to the experience of our own motion than to the suggestion of depth within the individual motif; this envisaging through motion, which gains its initial direction from our body, and whose signals and symptoms are objects, is constructed two-dimensionally in accord with our experience. Because one starts from an autonomous planar picture and its self-sufficient formal order and not from a dominant motif, one sets in place of reproduced things and their organic and utilitarian properties a juxtaposition conceived in planar terms that preserves the three-dimensional images we form kinesthetically; that is, the mental images that result from the temporally discrete movements around the object that are condensed into a juxtaposition that preserves the function, while this “simultané” processes these different contrasting views into a free two-dimensional sequence of forms. So one has thus progressed from the hegemony of light and the analysis of color, which defined impressionism, to the primacy of space; this experience of space is fundamental. Generally, tactile experience cumulatively forms a mental image of an object and this permits a wide and coherent range of actions; the latter are possible if one links the constant properties of the object, namely its most commonly encountered attributes, for it is they that will most often trigger experiences and actions. The attributes, so

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widely and frequently encountered and capable of being related to various sequences of actions and images, produce the mental image of an independent object that, especially since it is also an attribute of the actions of other persons, becomes independent of my own experiences. Thus does one come to believe that this object must be reproduced as something immutable. The impressionists already introduced a genetics of the object and quite arbitrarily selected light, a functional factor, as that which formed objects. The independence of the object was thereby destroyed and it became the attribute of a sensation. The cubists render concretely as objects the volumetric images we experience kinesthetically, thus the factors that structure space are used for the formation of objects. Seeing is thus activated for the benefit of the one who sees, as the object becomes dynamic, a symptom of seeing; space becomes the very task of subjective creation, that is, it is generated artistically through means specific to the picture, and the object is the result of this process, and is assessed only in the course of subjectively functional creation. This subjective experience of form is an unmediated event and for that reason more rarely controlled than the usual self- sufficient and nonfunctional object, which is perceived in naive isolation. By nature this subjective activity becomes ever richer, so that the resulting object subsequently appears to be more strongly interwoven; one constructs increasingly richer moments, so that a balance between the subjective inner image [Vorstellung] and the object seems to come about. Cubism is an example of a subjective realism, that is, the unmediated experiences of the human subject, his mental images of space, become individualized as objects; we would have stronger control over subjective experience if, through objects, we did not rush from ourselves into actions, that is, using objects summarily as signals for action, as both means and ends. Cubism shows the constructive spatial factors through which objects are generated in terms of the picture, that is, two-dimensionally. Here one might object that this is not how one sees; even in reality one does not at first see purely, with optical directness, but quickly associates a cumulative memory image with some known optical stimulus that obscures the genetic stimulus with a supposedly stable and comprehensive image. We conceal from ourselves that this memory image is a reconciliation of temporally as well as optically (qualitatively) different actions, and this image seems to endure because as something latent, mechanized, and rather unspecific— specification follows from the encounter of the memory image with the individual stimulus— it is only added to what is functional. One sees, oriented toward action, and in this process of seeing, images, sensations, memories are mingled; above all seeing is determined by practical factors. Yet it’s something else altogether if an object as something two-dimensional is imagined purely optically and the mnemonic elements of three-dimensional experience are incorporated into it; without the precondition of representation, the surface is breached

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for the sake of an imitation of a completely different kind of experience. Only he who declares imitation to be the task of art and at the same time proves that such imitation is attainable can speak of deformation. Such a person may contentedly indulge in panopticons while forbidding subjective invention. The difference between artistic seeing and the indistinct— in part practical, also scientific— convention that one calls nature is obvious; art is but a phenomenon, yet autonomous in relation to every other and therefore also in relation to all other conventions, which are altered by art precisely because of its autonomy. Consummate imitation always presupposes the same conditions. Imitation as a tendency, hence as reproduction, is undoubtedly achieved more successfully by a camera. Yet as soon as we designate representation as formal interpretation there seems to be no reason for rejecting cubism, since it represents crucial visual experiences. The cubist starts from the ur-phenomenon of the surface, and under the most rigorous possible preservation of its properties he seeks to reproduce volumes, that is, the different images envisaged through one’s motion as the bodily whole is formally broken down into different parts for that purpose. Envisaging the body as an entity first originates with the experience of one’s own body, and then by relating different optical experiences to a practical factor: namely, that these different views are in each case linked to the same or to similar actions, apart from the assistance of other sensory tools and of language with its unifying effect. The mental image of the bodily whole is therefore formed out of abruptly discrepant actions that are permeated by numerous optical factors. These discrepant actions contain contrasts of directions and of parts, and the object is formed out of the experience of different viewpoints or images experienced kinesthetically, which with the aid of memory are combined into a whole. The different images envisaged kinesthetically and the kinesthetic contrasts are preserved as planes, as the contrast-rich multiplicity of the kinesthetic images, broken down into planes, are placed alongside one another and are fused through the formal affinities of the means of representation. The early deployment of cubes, which afford a unity of form and at the same time an abundance of directional contrasts, may be interpreted in this light. Earlier means for interpreting volume were perspective, modeling, and variations within a group. With perspectival representation one is dependent on the ground plane; one wants to show how nature is replete with mathematics and every point in space stands in harmony with a law. The world, fully animated and brimming with activity, is conceived in relation to a stationary beholder, an ordered cosmos lies spread out before him. Landscape and figure are seen by this fixed beholder, who takes pleasure in the movement of things, which in spite of their bustling commotion do not escape perpetual laws. The painting surface is sacrificed to a heightened feeling for bodies and the world; a feeling for life that leads to a harmonious

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realism. One renders continuous depth in orthogonals on resting axes; one enriches the stationary viewer’s unified view of depth through a diversely animated group. Views change as a result of the different motions of objects and through variations in motion, contrasts of directions and masses, yielding a rounded whole in deep space. What the cubist presents, on the other hand, is not an intermingling group in motion but the forming of different mental images generated by the motion of the seeing subject, in other words a subjective group. In its beginnings the Renaissance studied a newly discovered nature and so, led by the object, it came to illusionistic perspective. Its world is static and replete with geometry. The cubist, consistent with his subjective interpretation, singles out the constant elements within the visual process and achieves an absolutely functional result. In the perspectival picture the motion of objects is rendered in a static stationary system with a rectilinear continuum in depth, in the cubist work the subjective images formed kinesthetically [Bewegungsvorstellungen] are rendered in planar juxtaposition that is determined by different axes circumscribing a volume. It is clear that with such a profound change the old doctrine of proportion was no longer applicable. Today’s artist is rarely presented with an accomplished piece of architecture; yet he continues to be constructive and develops the tectonic preconditions himself: the picture plane. The Renaissance artist supplements a built tectonics with a richly individualizing image, with an increasingly animated modeling. The cubist creates the constructive preconditions in the picture himself, one could almost say that he incorporates into the picture the movement that allows one to enjoy architecture, and in place of illusion, of the creation of imitated things that rival nature, a power emerges that is capable of vouching for the plenitude of the formal, as a descriptive amplitude gives way to a constructed and dynamic abundance. Renaissance art expressed the urge to conquer the whole of nature. Today one suppresses description in favor of formal invention; abbreviation of the object and the strengthening of a subjectively functional imagination characterize this tendency. Now one wishes to interpret a many-faceted volume in planar terms, and so one necessarily comes to a multiplicity of viewpoints and axes and simultaneously to a segmenting of the object. The different views, whose sum constitutes volume, are organized in juxtaposed planes that comprise those defining aspects of the object as experienced kinesthetically that can be represented two-dimensionally. Thus the dynamism of the movements that provide us with a comprehensive image is not eliminated. What is rendered of these views is what is translatable into planes, and these views are interwoven by means of the partial deployment of unified formal elements (as was formerly done with the impressionist color patch). The cube did not define cubism, although in the beginning it was a means that permitted a unified series of forms and, most important, com-

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prised the major axes. These components of the picture balanced themselves as complementary colors had earlier. What matters is that the functional richness of the images experienced kinesthetically is rendered as planes and that instead of a single rigidified moment we gain an equilibrium of the elements of this planar process. The connecting of the different views is constructive, that is, conditioned by a self-sufficient formal conception that is not tied to the formal characteristics of the mixed utilitarian object. What is crucial is that cubist figuration captures the objects’ three- dimensionality, which one could call the mnemonic dimension, yet nevertheless respects the plane; the multiplicity and axial contrasts of the observer in motion are exploited while avoiding modeling, as the series of images registered in that motion, that is, the image of a modeled object, is broken down into planar elements. In this breaking-up of the ordinary objects we observe once more the method of abbreviation that the impressionists successfully employ. But now, instead of chromatic difference, the differently nested spatial signs are represented as planes; one renders the juxtaposition of views apprehended in a temporal sequence. The cubist renders the elements that make possible three-dimensional experience, hence that which primarily gives form to objects, in contrast to the coloristic fauves. Those who see art as at best a means of mildly harmonizing beautification may be critical of this subjective linking of forms; one may clearly show the one- sidedness— even primitiveness— of subjective construction. Yet one should consider that such delimitation contains an assertion of the human subject in the face of the all-possible, that all pictures involve artificial isolation and personal creation and reshaping must counter the passive, easily learned compliancy of description, which anxiously and secretly incorporates the unavoidable and hidden and half-hearted reorientation. In cubism art is developed from a circumscribed mental image of form, which, once established, determines pictorial image and structure without these being significantly disrupted by the object. Cubism proved its fecundity by its success in forming ever richer images of the object. Cubism is not a doctrine but a visual intuition, one that may not prevail against optical convention at the first go, and whose first practitioners may perhaps grow weary, but that nevertheless, once the challenge is made, will appear again and again because it manifests anew genuine powers of seeing that were all too long neglected in overly simple and decorative formal schemas; there is no doubt that cubism has brought to an end such visual comfort or fatigue. Cubism has often been criticized for being little more than mathematical dilettantism; yet in mathematics the important thing is to determine quantity, in cubism the issue is making visible invented spatial forms. That the cubist picture gradually distanced itself from convention attests to this. The device of cubes marks only a transition in the development of this intuition; they comprised the major angles and

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loci; one could save oneself from stylization by an integrated vision, a more complete image of space. The cubists were not concerned with imitating the third dimension but with expressing it in a manner consistent with the picture; accordingly the object is negated when it approaches deceptive suggestion; the painter follows a mental image that is adapted to the plane rather than to the organic thing, he does not present an ensemble of useful forms but a free series appropriate to the picture. He negates the object in favor of a pictorial intuition, and articulates and abandons it if it is threatened by false plasticity or tactile memory. From the contrasts of simultaneous planes that integrate kinesthetically formed images there results a tension that generates volumes. This enriched spatial conception had to be balanced with severe forms and the unity of the picture had to be emphasized. The enhanced, more complete image of the object is effected by the use of local tones, which happily constrain the constructive aspect. The more functionally things are conceived, the more a greater precision of color is called for. In the cubist picture one structures the kinesthetic images that produce volume through their autonomous juxtaposition. This is, however, a purely formal operation and is fundamentally different from the simultané of Delaunay and the futurists. That of the former is a decorative, coloristic fusion of an anecdote, that of the latter literary psychologizing; both avail themselves of a kind of cinematographic technique. The cubists’ juxtaposition of forms is not anecdotal, not a fusion of object-related events, but a summation of the elements that give us a more comprehensive view of objects as the crucial stations of our seeing are condensed into a picture. One may reject this condensation of time as unconventional; yet one should consider that things and persons were dissolved and differentiated in time, and that therefore the sense of duration, the elimination of the temporally functional, had to be strengthened if images were not to be dispensed with altogether. Simultané is an intensification and enrichment of memory, so that we see and imagine a more nuanced function. Our accustomed indolence, the popular standard of minimal exertion, speaks against this simultané; on the other hand, its aforementioned comprehensive visibility and abbreviation of function speak in favor of its taking hold. One may say that in this case the intuition of reality and reality itself were enhanced by way of a formal construction. The complication of sight that cubism has given us seems to be compensated for by the pictorial construction, by simpler planes. Under the influence of Platonism, of the penchant for equating form with duration, the fluid elements of function, and they in particular, were eliminated from the constructed picture; the cubist, with the aid of his “simultané,” preserves valuable moments of mnemonic imagination; what

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is constructed become elastic and enriched. A timely refiguring of the formal image was offered here, one that, mentally conditioned, appeared independently of and prior to scientific endeavors. In simultané form is grasped as a unity of temporally discrete actions; from cubism the path does not lead to nonrepresentational art, and if such artists justify themselves through cubism, then because they misunderstand it. Cubist pictures stay within the realm of the representational conception and enrich it despite a subjective stance. If the impressionists interpreted the object as a sensation, then the cubists interpret it as a functional image of form that is treated with constructive freedom, since they select and make use of moments in the visual sequence. If formerly one dissolved the motif into a play of color spots in order to arrest a sensation, now one places the sequence of images that generate volumes in a constructively simultaneous relationship. The color spot is not less “abstract” than the parts of the “simultané.” The chromatic analysis of the impressionists also oversteps “naive” composite seeing, the result of multifaceted adaptation. Here as there the classical conception of the durational, finished object has been abandoned— the subjectively functional is represented. Standing before an impressionist picture the beholder completes the synthesis of the parts, in the cubist picture one is offered a synthesis, which one then dissects analytically until one understands the new conception. Such an enriching alteration of the mental image is permitted. What remains important is that the artist does not seek his image of motion in the gesture of the object, but in the planar binding of free forms. As the cubist picture appeared it was above all its structuring of space that was emphasized, and there was a conscious reaction against the coloristic one-sidedness of the fauves. There was a suggestion of local color. Light and color no longer dominated the picture but were subordinated to the conception of form; local color assisted in individuating this as an object; in a similar vein one made use of especially shaped motivic elements, writing, or the sound holes of violins, which were found as already adapted to the surface. Cubism offered an altered conception of form; one may ask whether this will one day be a convention, or whether the cubist picture will remain a special case. This probably depends on whether the viewers adapt themselves to the new mode of sight. A certain antagonism between ordinary seeing and cubist seeing still exists. The leading cubists understood how they could increasingly enrich the formal conception so that their form manifests an ever-fuller objecthood. But they lacked energetic successors and for now the young generation shows rather a tasteful weariness, a skepticism toward revolt, and an inclination to sink back into what has been. We cannot yet say whether the war has shattered modernism’s momentum, or when such an unrestrained boldness will again emerge.

PABLO RUIZ PICASSO

1892 Earliest pictures, among them two portraits of his parents 1900 Paris

1901–3 Blue Period. Themes: café, street, portraits 1903–5 “The Jugglers” 1906 Rose Period 1907 “Negroid” Period 1908/9 Beginning of cubism

A painter, not to be pinned down, who even now has eluded his critic; Proteus. Despite all the declarations of very zealous youths who, as the ultimate cliché, mouthed indifference to art— the philistine wasn’t in the least taken aback, since with his every gesture and gasping breath he proved their superfluousness—: an artist who understands the inadequacy of every form— it lives from constraint. In twenty years his phases may be no more than nuances— today we speak of change of style— that we seek to connect by rational explanation. Picasso is rich in humanity; he knows how to surprise himself. Calcified types shout here of sham and trickery; as though one were obliged to remain stuck to a collapsed chair. Moralistic types— sourpusses of consistency— see “character” at risk. One is a cross of this, that, and a few other things; whence should anyone today achieve a binding consensus? Surely not from the bottom line of those in the know? One appreciates the single tone; as the boy whistled so should the old man mumble; the same rhythm, yet riper, plumper. What one hails or berates as a catastrophe will later be considered smooth sailing and be linked to a thousand quite familiar things; perhaps also as an abnormality, forgotten, here and there provoking a smile. This depends not on strength of talent; an artist does not know what prospects he will have with these rebellious arts; whether they will continually be accommodated. Subjective art— that is, art filled with constructive arbitrariness— is in a certain sense a separate reality in itself. Picasso knows possibilities for multiple solutions; one might almost say that he repeatedly ironizes supposedly definitive forms; he was drawn to showing with ironic invention how limited every solution is and how, in spite of all totality, any solution itself points toward further creation— yes, toward its antithesis. Ironic drama, because forms, tested by the inventive spirit, own up to their fragmentary aspect and, finished off with painful rapidity, mock themselves. Constructive art in particular, due to its isolation, affords a significant measure of freedom. Picasso paints even as a child. At the age of twelve he does a portrait

CUBISM

OCTOBER 25, 1881 Born in Málaga. Comes as a child to Barcelona where his father, a painter, had become director of the academy.

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of his parents; it shows tempo and much skill. In Paris he begins to paint the poor; compact as paintings, sentimental in attitude; almost a tendentious art. One may invoke Lautrec, yet he appeared more distanced, superior. Contour becomes somewhat angular and flatter in Picasso’s Ironing Woman, in the Beer Drinker, in the undernourished Soup Eater. Division of planes begins; nothing betrays impressionist influence. There is a push toward composition; this is how he paints The Soup in 1903, in 1904 the Crouching Jugglers, in both cases mother and child. Blue dominates these pictures. One may be reminded of Picasso’s large figurative pictures after the war. Here he is still full of feeling, stressing gesture and living somewhat in the quiet allegories of the symbolists. Everything rides on the sentiment of the figure; soup bowl, absinthe glass are used symbolically. A touch of Spanish pathos. Nevertheless, his instinct for form surprises. From the tearjerker one comes to the quiet world of the harlequins. Not the foppish, blasé Pierrot of Beardsley, not the painted white mask of a weary snob between lacy frills, but poor devils, pale in thin blues, quiet in gray tones and emaciated in languid rose. In his Mardi-gras Cézanne painted Pierrot and Harlequin like an apple and a banana; human figures as still life. Picasso renders thin-planed bodies with quietly gliding contours; lyricism. Later he takes up these figures anew, unsentimentally, untendentiously. 1907: beginning of cubism. One has designated this time as the “negroid period” and with this wanted to suggest a geographical motivation for the attempt at planar representation of the cubic. Picasso rejects the link to Negro art: “J’en connais pas.”42 Farewell to symmetry; one renders gestalt, articulated in planes, their contrasts honed with chiaroscuro. Even more strictly does he avoid colorism, limits color to gray and brown. A sense for the plane is achieved only gradually. Picasso’s phases now follow with a remarkable logic. He attempts the large figure. What is given in nature is reduced to simple formal entities. Apollinaire called this “instinctive cubism”; it undoubtedly dominates most of today’s painting. A tectonic pathos that swept up all who had absorbed Cézanne. One constructs nudes out of simple parts of light and dark that abut one another at sharp angles. The years 1908 and 1909 bring nudes and heads of this kind (fig. 7.1). Cézannesque modeling has become a play of patches and bodies in relief; the painter unites shifting axes and viewpoints, yet the form of the nudes, of the head, achieve an integrated structure. Volume and contrasts of parts are reinforced. If one painted landscapes, there had to be architecture; hasty farewell to the sentimentality of the depicted motif. One should decide: mechanical imitation or free creation, repetition or invention; thus more was being asked than merely artistic questions, a very human matter was being decided. The precursors asserted— art is above all the solution of technical problems, one may limit oneself to these; yet no one determined where technique ends; whether with the virtuoso, the wax figure, or refigu-

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7.1. Pablo Picasso, Woman with Pears, 1909. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 70.8 cm. Florene May Schoenborn Bequest. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

ration. In 1909 Picasso creates a sculpture, the bronze head. Mass is set in motion, one begins to eliminate the surface as much as possible in favor of three-dimensional bodily segments. How, once again, everyone was influenced by this piece! We recall Boccioni, his Man in Motion, or Archipenko’s Plafond. In the same year Picasso makes his first attempt at sculptopainting. Archipenko, his lissome shadow, later makes use of this stimulus

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after Picasso, in 1913, had shown a painted relief: Guitar and Bottle. In the same year in Spanish Horta he paints houses and factory.43 The villas of Cézanne climb upward, the sequence of cubes from Gardanne. In Picasso’s Horta pictures there is a farewell to landscape, to the given. Light serves to play geometrical forms— cubes, rectangles— off against one other. Threedimensionality begins to be constructed out of planes; light is a tectonic medium. Braque had probably begun with this conception when he painted his House [sic] at l’Estaque (1908) (fig. 7.5). The question of priority is meaningless, what’s important are the results: farewell to landscape and its likeness; subjectivity squeezes through, aiming more directly at spatial expression than at the motif; the distance from nature increases in favor of what has human immediacy. The period of figures, of still lifes begins. Braque introduces musical instruments. This art of the prewar period advances with a tempo that it will never achieve later. In the years 1908– 14 the entire repertoire is being prepared; it is the quiet time of intense concentrated invention, as one rejects history, previous painting, forms of space and technique, resolving to sacrifice them for the sake of the new. In 1911–12 comes Head of the Poet, in which the comb of the house painter is used for the waves in the hair (Braque adopted this technique from decorative painting, Severini and the futurists pushed it to the use of the things themselves— hair, etc.). Picasso and Braque bring to an end what one hitherto called the portrait. For them figure and portrait are a spatially expressive calligram, the spatial picture triumphs over the sentimentality of the individual motif, as handwriting had previously over the organic. This is not the human person becoming space, rather a visual intuition is humanized, individualized. The futurists, with their noisy banalities, drew the practical conclusion, the placarded aphorism: combat eroticism, the nude; these people saw the practical content, the popular manifesto. Of the figure paintings I single out Man with Clarinet, Woman with Lute, The Poet (fig. 7.2), Portrait of Kahnweiler, The Head (belongs to Flemming), Buffalo Bill, Man with Mandolin, The Torero. A visual-intellectual passion counters the cozy convention that we brazenly call “nature”; a thinking looking insulates itself from a received conception of the picture. These pictures should be seen on their own terms as internally consistent constructions; gestalt as a tectonic surface calligram, multifariously shaped. The representation of a pictorial object unbreached by conventional reality and having nothing in common with the real, the expression of a formal condition is more highly valued than its verification with reference to a living person. If the real is utilized, then it’s as a contrasting sign in the structured formal fabric. I believe these works are the most remarkable and characteristic figure compositions of our time. At this time— up to 1913— Picasso limited his palette to brown and gray; the planes are played off against one another through contrasting chiaroscuro, to heighten the play of forms.

7.2. Pablo Picasso, The Poet, 1911. Oil on canvas, 131.2 × 89.5 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY.

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Many still lifes date from the years 1910–12; like Braque, Picasso often paints musical instruments. The forms are broken down into planes; the bright hue of the violin wood heralds a turn to color. One loves violins and mandolins, things that are already human creations, which are analyzed with virtuosity and adapted to the surface, as though invented anew. In 1914 drawings and watercolors are especially important. One ceases modeling the planes; one wants to show the ultimate structure as purely planar. As early as 1912 Braque and Picasso had enriched the calligraphy of their pictures with letters of the alphabet (fig. 7.3). Now they begin to paste newspaper clippings and wallpaper samples onto the pictures. Imitators misunderstand this as literary or as a joke; they meggendorfed,44 instead of decor they offer commentary or witticisms. In incorporating imitated or actual things, which perhaps counter the works’ constructive character, the beginnings of verism are perhaps to be seen. Onto the drawings, one pastes newspapers, wallpaper, colored papers as preformed planes that work as color; the letters animate the surface like brushwork or grain. One has begun to do more with color. From 1914 there is the painted bronze, Glass of Absinthe. Then come the years of coloristic cubism, as Picasso defines the parts with color, enlivens the planes with color patches and hatchings, et cetera, and clarifies the displacement of volumes with color contrasts. On the one hand there are the still lifes, which culminate in the series of tables with still life, tables before the window, and tables before the balcony; on the other the figural compositions, among which Card Player (1914), Woman (1914), and the Pierrots from 1918 are extraordinary achievements. In the still lifes the cubist means have become so elastic that Picasso uses them to render the “real,” the object, in complete translation. The Bather (1915), by the nimble Archipenko, is probably derived from Card Player and Woman down to its color. Alongside the figurative pictures are opulent still lifes, mostly instruments, tobacco pouches with pipe; colorfully geometrical calligrams. Picasso tirelessly varies his themes technically and formally, until he achieves pieces of real mastery. In 1917/18 Picasso paints the unfinished portrait of his wife (fig. 7.4) and that of Madame R. Following these works are the large figurative pictures, preceded by a copy after Corot. Picasso, the clever one, grasps the limits of every style; he wants to show that he depends on no manner, he masters each of them. Here some have spoken of Ingrism, then again of the influence of the baroque. Undoubtedly with these works Picasso initiated the reaction against cubism and the return to classicism. Perhaps he wished to show that for him any one method was too constricting, that it must be complemented by its opposite; daimonie— permit us this abused word— and play are often difficult to distinguish. Picasso also knew how to lead the company on this path. Those who split with him at the time: the strong ones. The classical had been demolished, and now, full of curiosity, Picasso

7.3. Pablo Picasso, The Fruit Dish, 1912. Oil on canvas, 55.2 × 38.1 cm. Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

7.4. Pablo Picasso, Olga in an Armchair, 1918. Oil on canvas, 130 × 88.8 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © RMN- Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

GEORGES BRAQUE One used to say, as the two were inventing and developing cubism: Picasso and Braque. For many, Picasso was thereby pushed into the first position. Today one somewhat ignores the collaboration of these onetime friends, and the one is often set against the other. Picasso is Spanish, Braque French; this fact already separates the painting of the two. It’s absurd to take sides; both men are indissolubly linked with the creation of cubism; questions of conflict and priority are an amusement for the unobjective. It’s precisely a mark of cubism that it transcends individuality, that it expanded the realm of possible representations even as it revealed what is homogeneous in human beings. Braque came from the neo-impressionists and van Gogh, then passed through the fauves. At the time his path was closer to Derain than to his later colleague; marine and garden motifs allow him to make pictures in which the experience of the neos, the painting of light, is generalized with regard to color. In 1907 Picasso paints the figures that one associates with African sculpture; then in 1908 landscapes of similar structure, done in La Ville au Bois.45 At this same time Braque is working in L’Estaque, near Marseille, on his radical landscapes, which are shown as the first cubist pictures at the Indépendants, after most had been rejected by the jury of the Salon d’automne.46 It was then that Matisse and Vauxcelles coined the term “cubism.” During these years Braque and Picasso present us with a surprising series of formal and technical discoveries; there is a commonality of two different sensibilities, who, overwhelmed by the same questions, create a new way of seeing. In Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes, as in those by Picasso at

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sought to test his virtuosity in classicism, its antithesis, the other academy. In portraiture he investigates a primitively figural realism and deploys local color with virtuosity. He wanted to show his mastery of the entire course of the French pictorial tradition; one could also be an admired classicist. Yet Picasso always continued with his cubist painting, which was never interrupted. The cubes disappear, now the emphatic plane simplifies the juxtaposition of abrupt parts in favor of a unified closed formal structure. The rupture of form is mitigated by relations of color or emphasized by contrasts. For the dramatically agitated Picasso forms die in the work process, and the discovery of a new gestalt is for him a condition of life. He exhausts one solution to counter it with another, to prove once more the confining nature of any picture; it’s against his nature to concede, as does the wise Braque, the restrictions inherent in every artistic practice, to bear the limits of craft and, resigned, to know all too well how much must be sacrificed and omitted so as to achieve a self-contained work.

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Horta, the painter draws strength from architectonic motifs, which present simple planes (fig. 7.5). From that point cubism is then developed logically by both painters. One has often stressed how much Braque owes to the craft of the decorative painter: his lucid technique, his sense for the articulation of the surface and similar things. Yet certainly the important qualities, the multifaceted planar partitioning of the motif and a tectonically autonomous execution, are not attributable to his craft; here visual intuition is decisive. From the time when Picasso was painting “Negroes” we know a Bather by Braque that retains a baroque character in a strong, scalloped contour.47 With this nude and the landscapes from L’Estaque Braque had found Cézanne. Yet he did not represent volume with color or modeling, rather he captured the planar character of contrasting viewpoints by means of a dissected simultané. Braque becomes the impassioned painter of instruments. He introduces letters and the simulation of small details of the object that function as guideposts; he limits the picture with a solid background divided into simple planes. Examples are his figurative pictures: Torso of a Woman of 1910, Head of a Girl, Man with Mandolin, Woman with Mandolin from 1912 [sic] (fig. 7.6), alongside which he makes a small sculpture, Female Nude.48 The front of the figure is articulated in rhythmical planes embedded in the voluminous body. This sketch may have stimulated Laurens. Archipenko may also have received an impetus from this work for his ornamental treatment of negative shapes in his statuettes of women. In 1913 and 1914 Braque paints brightly hued still lifes in extremely simplified planes; a bright light, rich in contrasts, shimmers over them. Often he renders form with a slight contour and collaged planes. Ultimate freedom vis-à- vis the motif is achieved. One selects the most salient stimuli in the motif, a theme that he varies freely or treats rhythmically. The background is divided into formal fields that are to be viewed as fields of energy for the delineation of the theme. This dynamic development of the theme had a tremendous impact. The futurists and Chagall deployed this dynamic form of representation anecdotally, the futurists calling them lines of force. This was the starting point for the constructivists, just as the verists found their formal means in the undeformed parts of Braque’s and Picasso’s pictures. Now another destruction of objects begins: the war. In 1917 Braque resumes painting; he produces two important figurative pictures and the series “Still Life with the Ace.” He renders serenely balanced color planes. Constructive form and actual form are fused; details take on more texture, more nuance. In 1919 Braque begins the series of elongated horizontal still lifes; they are the best of the new painting (fig. 7.7). The quietly contrasting parts correspond to the distribution of planes; light and shadow remain separate, even as they are increasingly adapted to the structure of the object. The juxtaposition of different viewpoints is refined and veiled, contrapuntal variations and dismantlings of the motif are reduced. The chronically

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7.5. Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Kunstmuseum Bern, Hermann and Margit Rupf Foundation. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of Bridgeman- Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

fatigued, those old before their time, declare that cubism has finally gone to ruin; for even dependable Braque has abandoned it, Braque is modeling like the painters of old, the cubes have disappeared. Yet cubism wasn’t defined by cubes, and whoever thinks so confuses a trademark with a visual intuition. In any case the geometry has become more relaxed, the elements formally more nuanced. Whoever looks seriously at Braque’s Girl with Fruit

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7.6. Georges Braque, Woman with Mandolin, 1910. Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Sammlung Moderne Kunst, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of bpk Bildagentur/ Pinakothek der Moderne/Art Resource, NY.

Basket sees how the figure has been formed out of completely invented parts, the body distended across the surface, so that volumes are suggested by means of planar forms (fig. 7.8).49 Picasso probably had something similar in mind with his own large figurative pictures; Braque’s solution is purer and more unified in style and as painting than is Picasso’s, who— due to a surfeit of inner productivity— daily negates himself; Braque’s overall attitude is admittedly more circumscribed.

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7.7. Georges Braque, Guitar and Pipe (Polka), 1920–21. Oil and sand on canvas, 43.2 × 92.4 cm. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

Braque’s production is distinguished by the pure development of his art. With an approach that is classical yet unclassicistic, he understood how to prepare cubism for a new way of seeing figurative form; he is far from Derain, whose irascible sense of responsibility is troubled by a notable concept of the ancients, and Braque’s mode of working differs from Picasso’s in that he does not conjure solutions by leaps but, with steady patience, augments and expands his task. For him refinement of craft and a concentrated plenitude of the formal tissue come together as one. With Picasso the explosive impulse sometimes wins out; the force of his multifarious spirit sweeps it along. Braque’s pictures exist in a state of balance that betrays nothing of strained, deliberate effort— like Renoir’s pictures, these lack any sentimental gap in which pathos should substitute for form. Braque has consciously created his own formal canon, and it attests to his greatness that the viewer hardly notices it. He created for himself a stock of forms whose successful realization depends on two factors, the planar arrangement— that is, the tiered composition— and individualization of color. No one could wrest cubism from its formal isolation as he could, without diminishing its imaginative structure. He achieves a planar order in enriched purity; yet color relations are modulated with increasing emphasis, all parts of the surface become chromatically connected, while it is the remote points that are perhaps most intimately fused, formally and chromatically. Even much earlier, as some were claiming: Braque is modeling and therefore abandoning cubism, he was creating basic planar forms for his motifs; he was not depicting objects of reality, but with subtle force he compelled

7.8. Georges Braque, Caryatid (Canéphore), 1922. Oil on canvas, 180.5 × 73.5 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN- Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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recognition of Braquean form as a defining reality. He does not model, rather plane sits against plane, yet their interplay is richer than that in any other contemporary painting. Picasso races past his interpretation of yesterday, presenting a new conception; the demonic power of his sudden inspiration is bewitching. Braque, the Frenchman, augments the grand national tradition without ever lapsing into classicism. A Frenchman should paint like a Frenchman, a German like a German; each may develop a classic art appropriate to oneself. Braque avoided having one picture ironize an earlier one, and accordingly the sequence of his pictures demonstrates a continuous progression; rarely a picture that negated another one; only the issue of purer quality, of more complete success emerges. He created for himself a grammar of invented forms, a canonical syntax; their deployment and combination are ever more richly interwoven. It was precisely by the greatness of his craft that he wrested cubism from the danger of perpetual formal isolation. The forms have grown more serene, he is varying his canon. Chardin and Renoir didn’t have more themes at their disposal; the qualitative enhancement of the formal solution is decisive here. Braque knows too well which things are impossible for his medium today, and he consciously forgoes the engagingly heroic, the seductive terrain that remains unfinished like Cézanne’s Bathers. His character forbids him to pursue any inspiration that does not yet appear to have a formal solution, yet year by year he tenaciously extends the range of his challenges. Braque avoids the tragic fragment, which despite everything remains a bloated study; despite all the stimulation that the unfinished work may afford; he does not wait until he stands before the canvas to abandon an idea, learning all too late of its limits, but imposes wise restraints on the sketch. In this way he succeeds as hardly anyone else today in finishing his pictures, and this early achievement of satisfaction allows his canvases to shine in the full strength of their craft. Figuration and craft are balanced in a classical equilibrium. His still lifes are the best of today’s painting, and the figurative pictures, still unknown, assure that here the cubist medium has acquired a classical solidity. Braque and Picasso worked for years in an almost parallel hammer-like rhythm, and it’s to this very circumstance that cubism owes its significant impact. The differences in their painting became more pronounced, for both it meant a parting of the ways. It’s to their credit that art was released from the narrowness of mere colorism and was, initially, limited to the creation of a freely invented space. Their image of space emerged out of doubts about a one-sided manner, which then expanded to a skepticism about the history of painting. With uncommon strength one left behind the familiar, even the taken-for-granted— space— was abandoned. One negated history in favor of subjective discovery, which was soon cliquishly adopted. Picasso above all finds himself in perpetual flight from any school, against which he wants to assert his own person, just as he had resisted classical tradi-

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tion. Personal discovery becomes objectified in schools, one recognizes what is generic in it, becomes traditional, and entangles oneself in the generic chain. Perhaps our time is burdened by the great fear that as a result of its barely inhibited subjectivism it will amount to no more than a preparatory episode; we have been disillusioned by loudly proclaimed revolution, which always hurled the same person onto the same shore; the skeptic of history became a doubter of a narrowly circumscribed present, of the short span. One bows; on the as yet tottering horizon fatefully perennial Greeks smile at the attempt, already lamented, at a clean break and occupy deserted peaks, there to receive admirers enfeebled by disillusionment and regret. One doesn’t know whether by affirming history one is denying oneself or whether the new is a slight nothing that, even if it portends an imminent, significant acquisition, sinks slowly, almost unnoticed, into the past. Perhaps experimentation is more vital, which must be mitigated so as to be preserved in a balanced historical consensus. The history denied by the young is integrated by the “more mature,” and in the new one must take responsibility for the past of others.

FERNAND LÉGER 1881 Born in Argentan (Normandy). Begins as a draughtsman in an architectural office. Then retoucheur. Académie des Beaux- Arts. Passes through neo-impressionism and fauvism. 1909/10 Nudes in a Landscape 1911 Smoke in the City 1912 Woman in Blue

1913 Form Variations and Sitting Woman 1917 Card Game 1917 The Smoker 1918 Steamship 1920 [sic] The City 1921 The Breakfast 1923 Two Nudes

The cubism of Braque and Picasso, which those echoes mired in the past were fond of assessing as a mere technical exercise, presents motifs of today. The stronger presence of volumes may be related to the increased speed of automobiles, et cetera; we perceive bodies more quickly, even as they are flattened by speed, by the growing contraction of time. The city dweller lives amid constructed entities, simple bodies; figure and portrait are tectonically deindividualized in conformity with the tectonics of society (factory clan, military horde, etc.); the individual is not depicted, rather whatever usable power he can provide for a preconceived pictorial organization is exploited; his motifs are deployed like the specific products of the factory worker, whose private life is of no concern to the company. With this elimination of

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what remains of the personal, the social entity “factory worker” or the tectonic “portrait” comes into being. The person is not replicated, but invented for a specific task. This describes an aspect of Léger. He consciously produces a relation between form and contemporary life. Insofar as recent art wasn’t ironing the rolled-out cliché or, with the impudence of mischievous schoolboys, confusing the senses of the little man, it was born of distance and isolation. The isolated subjective artist felt himself to be the standard. Rarely encountering resistance, he behaved like an absolute. One offered something direct, not so much the object as the imaginative version of it; a constructed poetry. Only gradually do subject and form find their mutual limits; one finds a connection to history and to society. Rarely has an art tottered forth that has been such a mixture of self-assuredness and doubt; these are characteristic conditions of one who works subjectively, who must dispense with any common standard. Léger asked— how to render contemporary things without becoming an illustrator? Certainly, visual intuitions are of the present; yet for Léger it was important to remove them from a specialized aesthetic domain and place them in the midst of the present. In this there was a danger that art might be reduced to decorating the given— applied art; to avoid this, the challenge is to invent a form that competes with contemporary forms— street, machine, steamship, et cetera. Léger’s art is the conscious exploitation of present-day élan. He wants to show that the merely artistic can be surpassed, that art and daily experience are not in conflict. The end, therefore, of asceticism and formal and technical isolation. A picture by Léger is bound up with contemporary technology. Léger’s works present decorative syntheses of contemporary life. The first picture we saw by Léger was Nudes in a Landscape (1910 at the Indépendants).50 Men amid trees. Wags spoke of the picture as Tubisme— tube art. Nudes, bulked up from simple bodies, rather like machine people. The painter’s peculiar light already plays across the picture, sharply dividing highlights and shadows; the bodies polished; precision lighting. Léger’s colors, here still a delicate gray, later become more robust; they clang and resound off each other, bringing the bodies to a high gloss like finely worked steel. At this time one still paints streets with vaporous colors, houses, from which smoke rises, condensed into solid bodies. The simultané is manifest in the dense concentration of different viewpoints. It is the time when the old perspective of the academies is slipping. Picasso and Braque found a new optics; Delaunay and the hurried futurists dynamized the motif, but were threatened by literariness, the cosmic, and Weltanschauung; speed and associative connections overwhelmed, bent, and skewed houses and persons and told of tottering souls who pursued the demolition of the motif. Later these things were transfigured into prophecy— a preview of war and of destruction; at that time artists preferred to render the cheerful move-

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ment of color and light through whose fluid currents things flowed; motif as expression, subjective realism. Such lyricism we find in the poets; Cendrars and Apollinaire rendered this simultané. The expressive use of things, the totally subjective linkage of imagistic words that completely trace the inner event were initiated by Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Jarry, from Walt Whitman there streamed a lyrical-cosmic catalog— things followed as feeling demanded, signals of inner activity; arranged in accord with the poet’s willful conception. Léger has avoided literature, which Delaunay, Chagall, and the futurists, whose forms demand literary interpretation, failed to do. What in their work was praised as the strengthening of vitality was enfeeblement of form; associative description had diminished their form, literary or psychological commentary piled up, hopelessly congested. Delaunay’s expansion of the motif was cubism softened by literariness, just as was the futurist dissipation of energy. Not so Léger: he repeats no anecdote, avoids graphic journalism. I have my doubts whether one becomes topical by drawing a motor as though it were a garden cottage; Léger built human bodies like machines [MaschinenMenschenkorper], not because he believed in the dynamo but because it contains forms that suit Léger’s own subjective seeing. The motor wasn’t a cause— that would give rise to anecdote— it was a symptom of an existing visuality;51 the precise tectonics were Léger’s invention. Through simplification and variation of form he arrived at the “élément mécanique.” A basic, unindividualistic human conception was joined to a constructively dynamic pictorial form. In 1912 Léger painted Woman in Blue. Color and form are invented; the human being: a matter of tectonics. Work on free variations of form begins; simple bodies are combined. With The Balcony (1914) Léger casts a glance at futurist simultané, giving us human form in sequential movements, structuring the course of commotion epically, in discrete moments. In the war year 1917 Léger’s figures become more precise. The Wounded Man, The Smoker, The Card Game are examples. Color is not employed descriptively; Léger uses not local color but pure colors; to heighten the agitation in the picture he sets geometrized bodies, created from a simple play of surfaces, against planes. He proclaims the sovereignty of the precise, of the constructed as opposed to the individualized; color is set down precisely, is clearly marked off by white or a neutral tone. The Card Game (fig. 7.9): motor people; not sentimental matters of the self, but human buildings. In place of individuals— contrasting form dramas. Man as motor is under construction; an objection leveled against man, that he does not match the pristine structure of the machines he has made. This power is to be created in the play of plastic forces freely constructed; in the process the new forms are deployed that factory, street, steamship,

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7.9. Fernand Léger, The Card Game (Soldiers Playing Cards), 1917. Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 194.5 cm. Collection Kröller- Müller Museum, Otterlo. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

et cetera, these centers of energy, grant to us. It’s as if a plastic quasi-myth of the present day— of technology— is being attempted, its forms deployed for pictorial construction. These figures are metaphors of the machine, like the Poèmes élastiques of Cendrars; they are all too influenced by a world of external forms and purposes; the descriptive is not completely avoided, it’s merely applied to a preconstructed configuration instead of an organic one; Léger is contemporary in the way that the suprematists will later become utopian. He knows that his forms have their source in the present, the suprematists believe that the present or what is to come is a consequence of pictorial construction. Where the human figure is represented— it is not rendered as a type, it is a component within a formal construction; the content of the soul— of the individual— is not captured by this art; if it were, this preconceived imagined world would be destroyed, it would turn into a study of the object and a belated analysis. Objects are being constructed that correspond to the subjective imagination; the artist acts autistically, and what is psychologically motivated, expressible only in isolation and therefore requiring dedication to a highly valued enhanced object, is dispensed with here. One loves to render things dynamically, yet values a fixed result all the more. After having long been accustomed to a descriptive art one is now, in

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disappointment, seeking things created as forms, things that correspond only to our own visual intuition. Reduced to formal deductions, these pictures remain isolated monologues; admittedly it appears that this very lyrical isolation has collective roots; for some it took the form of a retrograde academy; the isolation that comes from subjective vision drives some to seek what is historically secure; one no longer wants to stand outside of the array, nor anonymously to succumb to an abnormal episode; in classicism one becomes normal. One again seeks the self-evident motif, a reversion to a more descriptively oriented sensitivity, where art is more a means of effecting an ordering harmony; the classically beautiful returns; maybe one does not yet dare this openly, or maybe, after such a lengthy estrangement, one does not yet come to grips with the object; the arbitrary still agitates furiously. The rapid trajectory of this generation is evident in that the reaction is being led by the same revolutionary group, reacting directly against itself; one escapes to proximity to the motif and its customary interpretation. Perhaps this generation is forced to master the challenge of two eras; for behind it gapes the chasm of a shattered youth; perhaps one aged prematurely through war and revolution, saw the earth become unhinged and, now skeptical, fled into old familiar experiences, which in the face of destruction had survived by sheer persistence; as though duration and abundance constituted proof. For a subjective art a credulous looking is needed, which is isolating; but in the end it’s precisely this subject that is doubted, and one escapes to its polar opposite, to universal forms as presented by history. The révolteur has become an Alexandrian, the lyricist now describes. A visual intuition [Anschauung] that inspired belief in its absolute validity becomes relativized by history, and the self-glorifying imaginative process proves its limitations in a resigned subsumption into history; one grows weary, senesces into an heir. Skepticism toward history has evolved into doubt about the arbitrariness of the isolated self. Léger did not submit so easily to old rules; he is held by the present; he works on his éléments mécaniques, making technology and motorized energy pictorial. One wants to show that the technological structures that influence our life also contain other sources of vitality beyond what is directly useful, and that these new forms correspond to a new kind of seeing; a gleaming myth of the machine. Farewell to organisms with a life of their own (plant, tree), one values what is created by human beings. Niagara rates only insofar as it’s part of a technological construction. From the éléments mécaniques and the series of images combining human figure, machine, and architecture, Léger moved on to a condensation of the city. In 1918 he attempted this in his July 14 in Vernon. At the end of 1919 comes the synthesis of The City (fig. 7.10), a summation of the most striking things and views. Iron pillars, walls of buildings, a house splayed open, stairway, studio, billows of smoke, reminiscences of railroad and metro, signals. In

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7.10. Fernand Léger, The City, 1919. Oil on canvas, 231.1 × 298.4 cm. A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

between, tectonic people, mannequins of the city. He paints the tectonic city dweller, permeated by the traits of constructivist thinking, of calculus; the person who thinks and acts in terms of machines, housing blocks, signals, and motors— the übermotor— is at the center of the picture; for the city is human expression and product, just as humans were once an embedded part of landscape; nothing is more human than urban constructedness and the brusqueness of calculus; in his anxiety man seeks out what is continually repeatable, which is possible only by the commitment to a volatile calculus. Here the limits of intellectual power jeer. Thus do city and machine reflect man, his calculus, his optimism, his need for the concentration of energy and proliferation of the life force through the machine. In this anthropocentric block he asserts himself against the dissolving cosmos, against nature; for his domain he creates ever stronger powers and effects; he erects a fortress against death. Just as he dynamized his intellectuality, so, too, is the city, whose commotion is intensified mechanically through light and color. From multifaceted vision Léger selected what was crucial and collected constructive elements. The picture does not replicate, it operates with color

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according to different principles than those of utilitarian construction by connecting whatever has aesthetic merit. From mechanical structures Léger takes whatever is formally stimulating; creative arbitrariness of the picture; not a panorama, but a collecting of decisions. Here something other than style is attempted: a collective experience of the object is fused with stylistic form. The picture is replete with geometry, which endows things with measure and collective significance, for through number they are displaced from their individual existence; what things share optically is their geometry. Cézanne had rediscovered this insight and therein lies part of his power to form a school. A sign of urban collectivity is number (factory, army, mass production, political party), isolation is overcome, the communal becomes manifest. Léger presents a geometrical simultané of the mental image, he dismantles and displaces, so as to structure the functionally most effective parts of visual memory. The parts of this picture stand together just as the free signs of feeling follow upon one another in a poem, held together by a basic idea. This picture avoids allegory because it renders motific stimuli autonomous, in order that they do not refer to anything real. One is far removed from the tendentious symbols of a Meunier; there allegory is a product of realism, which wants conceptually to universalize the copied motif. In his éléments mécaniques Léger had created for himself a repertory of forms full of present-day geometry. With the achievement of this imaginative foundation came the task of applying it to a given motif, of refiguring the real. In 1920 the figure again becomes dominant; free formal articulation is now adapted to the organism; an architecture of man, out of simple modeled bodies, is cultivated, so that from the contrast of planes and bodies motion begins to stir. The year 1921 brings the paysages animés, a geometrizing of landscape. One may be reminded of Picasso’s later Landscape with the Pines; for him it still meant the unresolved balance between a vegetative motif and subjective form, which, in resignation, he had disowned. With Léger geometry drowns out all else; the works of this and the following year show this: The Breakfast, the pictures of women and still lifes. Forms grew more and more simple and colossal; one is pressing for a mural for today, full of precision; to represent people of our time, to dispense with every human aspect other than a law of form that can compete with the precision of the machine. One counters the classicism of the skeptics, who no longer believe in their own epoch, with a constructed gestalt for today. Here the robustly primitive comes clearly to the fore. Léger wants to present collective man; what is individual gives way to the construction; figures heave in large shapes. The individual can only be described, depicted. All vanity of the individual person has vanished from Léger’s formal types; he has revealed the élément mécanique as a component of human experience, accordingly the constructor human is mechanized. Léger’s figures possess the precision of constructed fabrications. Patterns for the manufacture of

JUAN GRIS MARCH 23, 1887 Born in Madrid. Attends no academy. In 1906 comes to Paris. In 1912 exhibits in the Indépendants and the Section d’Or, rue la Boétie. With Galanis makes drawings for L’Assiette au beurre. In 1910, Portrait of Picasso. In 1911, Portrait of Raynal. 1912 The Guitar 1912 Gentleman in a Café

1919 Man in an Armchair 1919 Pierrot 1919 Harlequin 1922 The Two Pierrots 1922 The Nun 1923 Seated Harlequin 1923 Portrait of Man (The still lifes are not included.)

1916 Portrait of Madame Gris

The work of Juan Gris is not powered by the multicycled engines of Picasso, not driven by a restlessness that betrays or refutes the work of yesterday, so that often less is to be said of development than of revolt against art and himself.52 Gris’s art is borne by quiet observation, by a will that seeks safeguards against the accidents of the object, by perceptions and reflections

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serial humans. The subjective willfulness with which Léger imperiously shaped the motifs in his early works already displayed a tendency to work according to laws, accompanied by a striving for collective effect. The old guard called it academic. The academy has perhaps a fatiguing effect among those who doubt the present, who have become archaists. Léger’s pictures declaim simply, primitively. Looking at some of his later figure groups one may recall artists of the dugento; the human figure has been rendered precisely in a geometrical gestalt. From a complicated manner of seeing, in which subjective dynamism and the motif were in conflict, Léger arrived at a kind of primitivism. The dynamic character of the subjective stance, which assesses primarily imaginative action and movement, is stabilized in elementary types in order to stop or limit any slippage; the artist expresses himself apodictically, since what is at stake is not the interpretation of a motif but a more direct kind of creation; from this emerges the character of these artists, given to avowals and theses, who do not dissect impressions but arrest visions; if they did not proceed apodictically in this endeavor they would become skeptical of themselves, rendering creation nearly impossible. The fluidity of subjective dynamics often compels simplification. Besides, there is no complication due to the motif, which because of its perpetual “selfsufficient” variety complicates the subjective attitude of the artist, fragmenting his vision until free form and motif fuse in the vision, in the gestalt.

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that persuaded the young painter that a stable regularity of seeing can never be derived from objects. The young have extended seeing beyond the accidental opticality of the motif, beginning with a constructively defined imaginative process. Some assert: this way one runs into academic rules— others say: with such reflexivity painting is at an end; the optical: a good motif and deft technique; meditation: a defect that may diminish or destroy painting. The guiding principle of this new painting is: the picture is a self- sufficient domain with its own means and its own mode of seeing; a picture is not depiction, therefore the descriptive means that once incorporated into the picture came to dominate it, are to be restricted or eliminated. There can be no doubt that these painters have expanded seeing and restored to it powers it possessed in the great ages of painting. Form— which is something other than arrangement— never comes from the object, it’s not presented in the motif, but, emerging subtly or bursting out forcibly and taking control, occurs within the subject; a nuanced mental process from which we acquire the freedom to select, adapt, or reject things; the breadth of this process surpasses the act of “judgment,” which consists of adapting or rejecting decisions already made. Lying at the periphery of visual intuition are things that one either integrates or excludes. For practical, inherently necessary reasons one reifies what occurs in the imagination and thereby visibly differentiates it, making it generally graspable; the motif becomes a link between the solipsistic subject and general circumstances; the imaginative process, that which generates form, is not, however, identical with reification or completely bound to it, yet the motif does serve to complicate the imaginative process. At the same time the motif releases the isolated subjective process from its solitude, moving it into the domain of the universal visibility of things; it’s a means of making self-evident. Thus the motif may circumscribe the limits of the imaginative, just as the emphatically motific is found on the outer edge of many mental processes; yet it’s a signal that should not be confused with the whole of mental activity. The motif is a rendezvous of artist and beholder, because it can be accommodated within much of our imagination and at the same time, on account of its multifaceted practical meaning, it’s suited to be a conduit into the formal-imaginative domain. It is from this point that today’s artist arrives at the thing, the motif; how far it will be adapted, dissolved, or completely destroyed, however, depends not on it but on the formal-imaginative disposition of the artist. The wholeness of a picture never comes from the motif, which merely collaborates in the surrogate of the arrangement— it comes from the wholeness of the imaginative act. If the effort too quickly becomes fatiguing, the beholder will then swiftly rationalize and assert control over it as it unfolds. Herein lies the mystery of plenitude or of concealment in the composition. It’s to the credit of these young artists that they have extended the artis-

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tic nuance of the picture, which the impressionists had begun on a technical level, onto the level of imaginative form. Certainly the customary way of visual conceptualizing will emphasize primarily the particularities of a motif, since they are more or less embedded in practical experience and thus represent a weakened role for the imagination. Visual imagining is a process through which the artist extracts formal results that comprise the most common subjectively visual types.53 The object is perhaps the terminal point of the imaginative process. One will in most cases have to succeed in forming the object, since art as a subjective discipline is much too limited; these things function as universally understandable border posts of envisaging.54 Classical art, which brings order to things and events, is possible if these are integrated into a comprehensive intellectual process, a culture. Today subjectivity is the starting point, which allows for a short span of freedom that is gained by diminishing the reality of the motifs. The price of this isolation is a tremendous need for a collectively valid form, and for many this evolved into neoclassicism. Further: this subjectively limited imaginative process is more easily given fixed form; to contain this dynamic process and not lose one’s way, one will first record what is typical and repeatable, especially since the need for lawlike regularity clings to the subject and protects him. One will enter into the motif in order to measure the strength of one’s imagination vis-à-vis the given so as to prevail over it. When we speak of subject and isolation what we understand by this are the strivings and tensions of contrasting tendencies, the reconciliation of which seldom succeeds, but usually leads to the temporary victory of one tendency, whose one-sidedness is unsatisfying and therefore effects a new reaction: this is the contrasting dialectic that is the history of art. No cubist has exploited the tension between the imaginative process and the object with as much moderation as Gris. He seldom wandered as far from the motif as did the others, and so he was also spared the all too severe relapse into convention. Gris has, to be sure, treated things as comprehensible signs of subjectivity, as the common platform of artist and viewer. If subjectivity does not penetrate the motif, then the viewer’s response hasn’t been sufficiently directed, and the imagination is left too much to its own devices; as the inadequate development of the format proves. Thus are the works of Juan Gris distinguished by their moderation. In the beginning, Gris imposed cubism onto his pictures by means of linear geometry. The motif hasn’t yet been consumed by imaginative form; then he becomes the passionately quiet painter who adapts the motif to the formal image in his mind. The serenely broad color, detached from description of light and dark, indicates the strong, serene mind of a man who, forgoing brilliance and its adventures, educates a wisely defined humanity to ever more beautiful expressions.

CH. 8

THE BERLIN MUSEUM FOR ETHNOLOGY 1926

During the 1920s, as part of a general reorganization of Berlin’s state art collections, the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum for Ethnology) undertook a major renovation of its galleries and a complete reinstallation of its holdings.1 Since 1886 it had been housed in its own building in the Königgrätzerstraße (now Stresemannstraße) at the intersection of Prinz- Albrecht- Straße (now Niederkirchnerstraße). It stood adjacent to what is today called the Martin- Gropius- Bau, which then housed the Königliches Kunstgewerbemuseum (Royal Museum of Applied Arts).2 The new ethnological museum was the first museum structure

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anywhere built specifically for that purpose. Its collections encompassed prehistoric artifacts from Europe, the material culture of the “socalled Naturvölker” (natural peoples), as the native inhabitants of subSaharan Africa, Oceania, and Aboriginal Australia were called, and the arts of the Kulturvölker (cultural peoples) of India, East Asia, and the Americas.3 From the beginning the Museum for Ethnology proved to be the “problem child” among Berlin’s museums.4 Even at its opening, its galleries were inadequate for the display of its collection of 40,000 objects, which grew exponentially in the following years as the directors of its ten curatorial departments (there was no single head of the institution) feverishly strove to amass enough material to achieve a comprehensive view of their respective cultures.5 Contributing to the problem was the design of the galleries, since for installation purposes the building was almost literally, to borrow André Malraux’s famous phrase, a “museum without walls.” In an age in which electric illumination was still a rarity in museums, the galleries were designed to maximize the amount of natural lighting over their three floors, with large windows that began at shoulder height, opening on one side to the street and on the other to a large outdoor court at the building’s center.6 Since this left no wall surface suitable for exhibits, the displays were contained in cabinets and vitrines placed in a fishbone pattern in the center of the floor.7 The Berlin critic Karl Scheffler vividly described the museum as a “building that actually consists only of corridors, which has hardly any walls and in which one feels quite confused, for these wall-less corridors are densely packed with vitrines and cabinets, and the museum is crammed full from top to bottom with objects” (fig. 8.1).8 Despite the depth and quality of its remarkable collections, unrivaled of their kind in Germany and most everywhere else, Scheffler complained that the museum “does not come alive, rather it spreads the odor of dust. . . . One can see nothing in isolation, there is such a crush of material that only specialized scholars can stay focused here. Many types of object are here by the hundreds. Grotesque figures of gods stand juxtaposed in long rows. . . . As a collection it’s as good as dead and the public is scarcely aware of it. Amid these crammed vitrines the visitor feels ill.”9 There was a reason for this almost impenetrable thicket of artifacts. The directors regarded the museum first and foremost as a research collection and were generally contemptuous of the needs and desires of the public.10 This changed with a thorough reorganization of the state museums during the 1920s, which also brought a fundamental change in policy under the vigorous leadership of the Prussian Cultural Ministry,

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8.1. Exhibition room for Cameroon, Ethnological Collection, Berlin, before 1926. Archive, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image courtesy of bpk Bildagentur/Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.

one that emphasized aesthetic values and the education of the public.11 At the reopening of the museum on June 26, 1926, cultural minister Carl Heinrich Becker declared that its mission was “to serve the general public— truly all who enter its space, not only a few specialists.”12 The transfer in 1921 of the collections of the Museum of Applied Arts to a newly available space in the Stadtschloß (city palace), vacant since the abdication of the kaiser, created conditions that allowed for a reorganization of the ethnological collections. The interiors of both museum buildings were thoroughly renovated and reconfigured, with walls now installed in the Museum for Ethnology. The reorganization involved a twofold split. First, the bulk of the collections of East Asian art was separated from the ethnological collections and moved next door. The renovated Museum for Ethnology presented objects from the Americas on the first floor, those from Africa and Oceania on the second. Archaeological and ethnographic objects from Asia were exhibited on the ground floor. Second, in order to achieve a more intelligible presentation for the public, the collections were now split between a Schausamm-

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lung, a display collection, and a Studiensammlung, a study or research collection, which was located miles away in the southwestern suburb of Dahlem in a building, not yet fully finished, that had been originally intended as a new Asian art museum.13 Five- sixths of the objects formerly on view were now relegated to this study facility in Dahlem. What remained in the museum was presented in sparer, viewer-friendly installations that at last allowed objects to be seen individually, maximizing their aesthetic qualities. In Das Kunstblatt, Paul Westheim remarked that it “has almost become an art museum. For many, too much of an art museum.”14 Scheffler was one of those. Although praising the result, he now worried whether the artistic aspect was being too strongly emphasized for an ethnological museum.15 Rarely considered in the literature, Einstein’s review of the museum’s reorganization stands out among the published responses for its probing critical assessment of the new installation and of museums in general.16 He frankly acknowledges the circumstances of colonial plunder, the hoarding, musealization, and cultural estrangement of artifacts, a process that had, after all, made possible his own growing expertise— he had never before written so explicitly, or with such eloquence and passion, about the colonialist foundation of ethnography. The museum he describes as a depository of objects ripped from the “existential conditions” that gave them life and agency; “signs of the defeat of conquered, colonized peoples, trophies of European . . . greed.” “Entry into the museum confirms the natural death of the artwork”; there it has achieved “a shadowy, very limited . . . aesthetic immortality.” And this was done to satisfy “the white man’s craving for knowledge.” Here was “a museum of European imperialism, of a scholarly as well as an economic kind.” The opening paragraphs, recalling a time when art was integrated with systems of collective belief, are a lamentation for art’s lost functionality. The triumph of aesthetic values is the cause: “The entire character of all art changed once it became valued for itself,” as it was “torn from the transcendence of a living faith and investigated for its formal qualities.” This isolation of the aesthetic dimension, Einstein argues, falsified the object and diminished its power. Einstein’s article stands alongside Paul Valéry’s slightly earlier essay as a thoughtful, yet fundamentally different critique of the very foundations of museum culture.17 Valéry’s essay is the complaint of an aesthete, decrying this “domain of incoherence,” the visual cacophony that arises from the “juxtaposition of dead visions,” with “mutually incompatible” artworks from diverse cultures clashing with one another in a single space. He compares the experience to “the sound of ten orchestras

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playing at once,” which contravenes the “taste for pleasure.”18 Einstein writes not as an aesthete but now primarily as a scholar of African art— the previous year he had begun his collaboration with British ethnologist Thomas Athol Joyce on a book on African art, unfortunately never completed.19 He is uneasy with the aestheticization of ethnographic artifacts in the new installation, not because he questions their status as art, but because he worries about the consequences of the physical and intellectual separation of the display collection from the study collection. He concedes that the earlier installation was opaque to all but the specialist (the “cluttered, slumbering storage rooms” to which he refers had in fact been the museum’s galleries). He is clearly happy that the new installation allows objects in the collection to be seen as never before, yet he worries about the risk of loss of context.20 Einstein had come a long way since Negro Sculpture, in which he had declared artistic form as “more reliable . . . than any possible ethnographic or other knowledge,” dismissing the significance of “subject matter and its related contextual associations” (see text 3).21 Now he argued in a companion essay that “even judgments based on formal criteria need the support of further research encompassing the wealth of ethnological factors; otherwise one creates nothing but an annex of a dead expressionism.”22 This remark is consistent with Einstein’s desire, already manifest in African Sculpture (text 5), to dissociate the arts of native peoples from a fashionable “primitivism.” In that second essay he offered an explanation of the “heightened currency” of the collections of the Museum for Ethnology: this can’t be due to aesthetic factors alone, he surmised. Rather, in the reaction against the positivism of the nineteenth century “there was a search for the primordial conditions of humankind, the mythically irrational forces, the bewitching trance, and the techniques of ecstasy” (BA 2, 452). Einstein soon came to believe he had found these things in contemporary art. ■

A

n art object or artifact that lands in a museum is stripped of its existential conditions, deprived of its biological milieu and thus of its proper agency. Entry into the museum confirms the natural death of the artwork, it marks the attainment of a shadowy, very limited, let us call it an aesthetic immortality. An altar panel or a portrait is executed for a specific purpose, for a specific environment; especially without the latter the work is but a dead fragment, ripped from the soil; just as if one had broken a mullion out of a window or a capital from a column; probably the building had already col-

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lapsed. And yet one thing is now isolated: the aesthetic phenomenon— from that very moment the effect of the art object becomes falsified and limited. An altar panel without prayer is dead; feeble natures attempt, in their suave aestheticism, to conjure from it some kind of vague religiosity: a poetic mood is to supplant the grand, specific, and vital condition of the work’s origins. Rapt devotion is supplanted by scholarly art-historical method, by discussions of style and authorship, things that were completely insignificant in the realm of prayer.23 The beauty of an altar panel lay in its being surrounded by fears, desires, and anxious cries to God, in having functioned as a modest part of an action, that the shadow of God dwelled within it and it was served by priests rather than by museum officials. Woven into the portrait were the last traces of the cult of ancestors and of the dead; lifedefining events were captured for those who were affected and transformed by them. The entire character of all art changed once it became valued for itself. It was torn from the transcendence of a living faith and investigated for its formal qualities. Various divisions of the ethnological collection have been reorganized as art collections with varied success, depending on whether art was available that could be removed from its milieu and general functional context. An immense complex of different cultural stages and ways of life had to be merged. Circumstances demanded brutal pruning. Doubtless: for decades this museum lay about with an embarrassed yawn, with its cluttered, slumbering storage rooms; in these chambers distant, moribund peoples had forgotten their goods like superfluous ballast; defunct cultures sank into cluttered cabinets; cult figures, bereft of their powers, lay between nets, bows, fronds, and gourds. Oars hung above bowls, boatless, snatched from hands and the play of rivers. Weapons rusted in peace, alongside things of the most diverse activities, divorced from context. Earlier, if one spoke of these things as art, it provoked dubious smiles. They were more likely to be measured against Thumann or Grützner24 than the Sistine Chapel. Signs of the defeat of conquered, colonized peoples, trophies of European and American greed and curiosity lay crumpled in cabinets and bore witness to the decline of distant arts in the wake of technical imports of the white man, who had attained such a state of perfection that his own soil no longer had the capacity to support his throng. This, then, was a museum of European imperialism, of a scholarly as well as an economic kind. In death, the booty lay in the cold storage rooms of the white man’s craving for knowledge. The museum languished, virtually forgotten. A few art types entered it in search of new pastures, since the grass had grown hopelessly thin on the old ones. Soon demons and textiles, dances and processions moved into

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belated workshops of the stage, anonymously innervating overpaid thighs of kitschy dancing girls and nourishing artsy-craftsy hustlers. Thus did market value and contemporary impact break forth from dusty somnolence. These forgotten idols now exerted a formative influence and so objects of aesthetic interest were rudely severed from the ethnological context. In keeping with this approach, whose narrow limitations have at least facilitated a visually presentable selection, a part of the collection was extracted from the whole and put on display. Cultures of the most diverse character became aesthetically standardized; this offers the chance for a unified effect, assuming that the selection is made by competent professionals, at the same time the exceedingly narrow limits of the installation concept become evident. The danger is that the museum, isolated from scholarly research, might stagnate completely into a narrow aestheticism if it fails to nurture the closest ties and continuing exchange with the planned research institute, into which an art-historical division must be incorporated so that the selection of objects may increase in quality, and not for that reason alone. Precisely for the sake of the permanent display. Upon entering the museum one still encounters the deadly yawning atrium; the blinding light of the absurdly positioned windows has been blocked out; the tiles on the staircase walls should now be donated to public lavatories. This two- story atrium must be renovated so that the most important things can be shown there; a comparative collection that reveals the formation of the basic cultures, supplemented by photographs— otherwise the value of everything that has been accomplished is diminished. This collection should be changed and regularly renewed by drawing on the research collection, so that visitors may gain an adequate image of the elements of culture and ethnic regions, just as the whole permanent display must be brought to life by teachers. This is the point at which the living link between museum and research institute is to be activated if the museum is not, through a specious popularity, to offer merely a show rather than a learning experience. And the latter is precisely what the lay visitor needs. The most significant formal inventions of humankind are house construction and utensils. It is here that we find the simple formal signs of design. With the invention of the wheel, the hammer, or the simplest dwellings a major part of formal design was already established.25 This aesthetic selection can and must be more broadly integrated into the mainly biologically important ethnic complexes; the distinctive conditions and milieus should be shown. The museum has overreacted to the excessive mishmash of its old installation by embracing its aesthetically defined opposite, which lacks a vital foundation. Here the great formal inventions are shown to be

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in architecture and utensils, and we would like to see the collection move beyond an applied arts approach. We do not want to be negative, only to encourage the museum to achieve its potential. In some rooms, on the other hand, one might have wished for a greater emphasis on the formal variants in order to bring out the archaeological aspect. These arts are often marked by pronounced figural types, whose power becomes evident in the rich gradations of formal variants. If the research collection is installed there must be a lot of work done on the details. The formation of styles and the development of motifs must be brought out more. The South American section presents an especially successful result in its interplay of the ethnic and archaeologically aesthetic. But the role of religious cults, out of which these arts largely grew, needs to be presented with greater clarity. Necessity and the comparative collection compel us to introduce an issue for discussion: that of a single directorship, entrusted to one man, in order that areas of competence and unsettling rivalries can finally be adjudicated and resolved. We would like to propose one more thing: from the five-sixths of the holdings that are not on view the museum should make a selection from among the all too numerous duplications and attempt to trade them for unrepresented variants or pieces from as yet neglected areas. Such an exchange also requires a single director. We concede that due to financial constraints there are museal fragments everywhere; here circumstances are to blame. It’s bad enough that the research institute couldn’t be architecturally linked to the museum. But from the very first day the museum will be deader than a museum has to be if it does not enter into a close exchange with the planned institute. One section of the museum seems to us a complete failure: the Asian. We’re not speaking here of the collections of Gandhara Kutscha and Turfan, but of the junk shop that is pretending to be a Japan and China collection. Here the ethnic was turned into a teahouse display, and the copies are a mockery of art. In general plaster casts should disappear, they can be satisfactorily replaced by photographs. The copy is the saddest forgery, a bluff, which cannot be excused by any desire for completeness. One should avoid exhibiting the props of one’s pipe dreams. The photo suffices, let the casts and papier-mâché move out quickly into the research institute. Then space will be gained and it is needed, because the tremendous play of peoples that is Asia, the installation of which has just begun, needs the room. May we ask who stripped the lovely Kava dish of the Oceanic collection of its value by rubbing off the precious patina, who crudely plastered over the Maori carvings with color? The African section seems to suffer under the monotony of the architectural scheme. These subtle, quiet things should not be drowned in light-

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absorbent dark wall colors. The passionately cubic character of these severe sculptures should not be neutralized in flat vitrines. Here the undoubtedly careful architect made a mistake. Design killed art. Regarding this ethnological museum: what is ethnic and vital can be intensified everywhere; here we would like to see a talent for compositional emulation that links the elements of these ways of life, arranging them into a unified work. Let the institute be integrated as tightly as possible with the collection, so that the former may enjoy the alternating cycle of error and belief, and grant it a more organic, ethnic foundation. Five-sixths of the collection still needs to be activated. Be that as it may, this much has been achieved: the things in this museum can now be looked at.

CH. 9

ANDRÉ MASSON: ETHNOLOGICAL STUDY 1929

After relocating from Berlin to Paris in May 1928, Einstein helped launch the short-lived monthly journal Documents, which began publication in April of the following year. His exact role in the magazine has been a matter of dispute.1 Denis Hollier, in his preface to the facsimile edition of Documents, credits Georges Bataille, Pierre d’Espezel, and the magazine’s publisher, the art dealer Georges Wildenstein, as its “founders”; Einstein receives scant mention.2 Michel Leiris, who had befriended Bataille in 1924 and became a regular contributor and integral part of the Documents editorial team, claimed that it was Einstein, Bataille, and the ethnographer Georges Henri Rivière who were “the moving spirits” behind the magazine.3 We do know that Bataille proposed the mag-

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azine’s title, and he was listed as the secrétaire général, or managing editor, throughout the fifteen issues of its life.4 Years later, he recalled boastfully that in this role he had been the real editor of Documents, “in agreement with Georges Henri Rivière . . . and against the titular editor [directeur en titre], the German poet Carl Einstein.”5 Yet Einstein was never identified as the “titular editor,” he was listed merely as a member of the comité de rédaction in the first five issues— the only ones in which this information appeared.6 As the archives for the magazine have not survived, we can only guess at the politics involved, yet Bataille’s statement backhandedly corroborates the compelling evidence that the idea for the magazine originated with Einstein.7 The orientation of Documents was conveyed by its subtitle, Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie, Variétés.8 In this mix it represented the kind of collaboration— or, at least, association— of art history with ethnography that Einstein had advocated eight years earlier in his African Sculpture (text 5). In Documents’ articles and reviews, which covered a wide historical and geographical range, it did not privilege art over archaeology and ethnography; rather the attitudes expressed in many of its articles are consonant with those of Einstein in his critique of the aestheticization of Berlin’s Museum for Ethnology (text 8).9 In the beginning the magazine had a strong connection to the world of German art scholarship— Einstein initiated contact with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, proposing a kind of partnership; further, the art historians Richard Hamann, Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Pinder, and Fritz Saxl were included in the list of collaborateurs in early issues, although none of them would ever publish in the magazine.10 As it evolved, however, Documents increasingly bore the transgressive stamp of Bataille. “The contributors,” Leiris recalled, represented the most varied outlooks, since alongside some extremist writers— most of them defectors from surrealism who had rallied around Bataille— were representatives of widely different disciplines. . . . A truly “impossible” mixture, less because of the diversity of the disciplines— and lack of disciplines— than because of the disparity among the men themselves, some being frankly conservative or at the very least inclined (like Einstein) to speak as art historians or critics and nothing more, whereas others (like Bataille, whom Rivière supported and whom I assisted for some months as managing editor . . .) did their best to use the magazine as a war machine to fight established ideas.11

Leiris’s categorization of Einstein’s place at Documents evidently refers to the genre of most of his contributions, which overwhelmingly fall in the “beaux-arts” category, rather than to the substance of his writing.12

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We can gain a vivid sense of the “‘impossible’ mixture” of Documents, and of Einstein’s relatively conservative position within it, in the sixth issue. It begins with his article “Tableaux récents de Georges Braque” (Recent pictures by Georges Braque), with six half-tone illustrations of his paintings, immediately followed by Bataille’s most radical contribution to date, “Le gros orteil” (The big toe), with three full-page photographs of close-up images of its subject by Jacques- André Boiffard.13 No need to read the texts— the sequence of images alone suffices to convey the gulf between Einstein and Bataille.14 André Masson was the first artist associated with surrealism for whom Einstein manifested an interest.15 Although he published nothing on the painter before the present article, three years earlier, shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century, he wrote to the gallerist Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, who represented Masson, requesting photographs and expressing his wish to publish something substantial on “our dear Masson,” even perhaps to curate an exhibition of his work.16 The following year, he wrote Kahnweiler of his desire to include Masson in the second edition of his book, but for some reason he did not follow through.17 Einstein’s Masson essay is a milestone in what Klaus H. Kiefer has called the “ethnologization” of Einstein’s art criticism.18 Here he connects contemporary European art with themes he had first broached in Negro Sculpture: the loss of self through ecstasy and metamorphosis.19 Further, the text represents an early instance of three major interrelated themes in his writing of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The first is a theorization of visual representation as a product of unconscious psychic forces expressed in dreams and hallucinations; the second is linkage of the tapping of the unconscious with sexuality, giving this art a “collective ground”; and, finally, the claim that this art is a harbinger of what Einstein calls “a return to mythological creation.” The first thesis is stated in his “Methodological Aphorisms,” which had appeared in the previous issue of Documents: “The pictorial image is a condensation, an arresting of psychic processes, a defense against fugitive time and thus against death. One could call it a distillation of dreams.”20 The idea of representation as a bulwark against death had appeared in African Sculpture, but with regard to modern art he had previously limited it to his treatment of the Germans, which was overwhelmingly negative.21 “Distillation of dreams” strikes a decidedly surrealist note, previously sounded only in his chapter on Klee in the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century (K1, 140–43).22 Now, undoubtedly under the spell of surrealist ideas, as well as of Sigmund Freud and, most probably, Carl Gustav Jung, Einstein affirms representation as a process shaped by unconscious psychic forces.23

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The change in Einstein’s thinking is particularly striking when one compares his account of pictorial objects in his cubism chapter from the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century with this essay on Masson. The art that Einstein now champions— and this will extend even to a revised take on cubism— is shaped by psychic rather than perceptual processes. Writing of cubism, he had described objects as “dynamic, a symptom of seeing”; now they are “symptoms or parts of psychic processes,” the artist’s attempt “to create an equivalent of the rapidity of psychic processes.” Fundamental to this emphasis on the psychic is the notion of hallucination, which Einstein embraces as a positive force. This link between artistic creation and hallucination had emerged the previous year in his complete rewriting of the Picasso section in the second edition of his Art of the 20th Century, in which he now claimed that cubism had a basis in hallucination (K2, 68–87).24 Einstein is anxious to dissociate hallucination from bourgeois notions of subjectivity, from which, he insists, it differs in that it represents a form of possession, a momentary extinction of the ego and identification with an other, such as Einstein had described it in his treatment of masking and tattooing in Negro Sculpture and had linked with cubism in his letter to Kahnweiler. Now, however, this loss of self is triggered by hallucination.25 This signals the return to “mythological creation” and “psychic archaism,” a “reawakening of strata of myth.” The painter forgets his ego and the known world in a state of formal ecstasy akin to that experienced by the religious mystic. In a passage recalling Negro Sculpture, Einstein writes of Masson’s art as an “ecstatic training” in which the “eclipsed self, escaping from the body in a state of ecstasy, enters into an animal, a rock, a plant.” This process of “metamorphosis is the classic drama of totemism and probably one of the most ancient dramatic motifs. . . . It is in these dramas that one celebrates the acquisition of new magic powers.”26 The term “metamorphosis,” which Einstein introduces here for the first time in his writing on modern art, will become a fundamental concept in his subsequent writing on it, notably in his text on Klee (text 12) and in Georges Braque (text 13). ■

I

n this generation it is the literati who hobble along behind the painters. The painters have dared to change the accepted grammar. Meanwhile with supreme confidence the paper scratchers have floundered in the swamps of syntax: they found tremendous daring in mutations of nuances, imagining they could transform things by poeticizing jaded commonplaces. Perhaps they treated a few not yet sanctioned subjects with an elegant academic syntax. Yet strictly speaking they went no further than

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changing the adjectives. Who among them thought of questioning the hierarchy of values or even logic itself? These writers are prisoners of words. This literature has developed around veritable pawnshops. The writers have slipped back behind the painters. We need only mention the name Picasso. Instead of risking their heads, writers put their faith in the tongue.27 We believe that now is the moment, not to consolidate what is already becoming stable, but to acknowledge the crisis, seeing that we’re surrounded by idle investors who calmly exploit bygone, now innocuous revolts; surrounded by those who would like to live without being dead. One thing is important: to disturb so-called reality by means of untamed hallucinations so as to change the value hierarchies of the real. Hallucinatory energies open a breach in the order of mechanical processes; they introduce blocs of “acausality” into this reality that, absurdly, was believed to be the sole possible one. The smooth tissue of this reality is torn and one lives in the tension of dualisms. When religion was still a living force imagination ruled over everything like an autonomous power. Not to subordinate the given facts to this mythic imperative would have been the most scandalous act of revolt. The real found its justification as a miserable counterpart, as a failed imitation of the supernatural. Today we can observe opposing values in a radically different sense. If in the past hallucinatory forces were an expression of a collectivity and its dogmatism, today they exert their influence only in the subjective realm, by breaking with conventions. Formerly imaginative elements belonged to the same realm as the absolute, and they determined knowledge and consciousness. An alogical affirmation prevailed and was never questioned in the conflict between antinomies. That was the “Archimedean point.” Only later did one challenge and revile as illusory unordered imaginative powers that did not conform to logical laws. With great timidity we’re now beginning to appreciate the imaginative as a dominant force. No longer the point of departure for laws and miracles, neither is it the sign of a finite eternity nor the center of a static system. It is now the most fluid, the most fugitive of things, yet we’re mistaken if we valorize it merely as a sign of an arbitrary subjectivity: indeed, the imaginative arises out of inevitable, barely controllable processes. The imaginative of which we are beginning to dream, not entirely without fear, differs from religious imagination. It is not moments of divine illumination that are imitated, rather what distinguishes the visions of today is that historical givens play no role in them. It’s no longer a matter of submission to a higher power. There is a lot of babbling about the destruction of the object. It would be preferable to speak of a dissociation of consciousness: in effect, there is no agreement between the stream of conscious impressions and the succes-

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sion of hallucinatory signs. We can observe a split between spontaneity and causality. The more nature is impregnated with causality, the less useful it is from a psychological viewpoint. We still value causality and consciousness as excellent instruments but we now see in them an obstacle to spontaneous processes. The rationalist finds disorder in all psychic processes. Yet it’s precisely in the incompatibility between the hallucinatory and the object world that there lies an ever so slight chance for freedom: a possibility to change the order of things. The mechanism, which had become a veritable object of adoration, is loosened and mnemotechnical repetitions are avoided. As much as possible, the sequence of direct psychic signs is preserved. There are two ways to help compensate for this renunciation of associative memory and protect one’s equilibrium. First of all we tend to identify the unconscious or hallucination with sexual activity: thus we’re assured of a collective ground. In other cases, compensation for the isolation that results from the split has been found in a collectivist attitude in politics. It was necessary to protect oneself from isolation. As regards the first case, we could just as well speak of an idealization of sexuality. Here we can see a continuation of philosophical idealism: in the same sense Nietzsche had already idealized the instincts. We shall later speak of another way of protecting oneself against hallucinatory forces by means of forms. We reject, however, the equation of the hallucinatory with the subjective that others have proposed. Only with reference to conventional bourgeois wisdom can one regard hallucinatory elements as subjective. Be that as it may, it’s necessary to see precisely in these hallucinatory forms the signs of fateful processes, during which all egocentric reactions disappear. Obsession represents a slight chance for freedom. We are witnessing a return to mythological creation, a return to a psychic archaism that is opposed to a purely imitative archaism of forms. Painting renounces the description of given forms or of structures found in objects. In other words the painter eliminates and forgets in the same way as the religious person when he concentrates so as to attain ecstasy, forgetting all reality. This forgetting, this anesthesia are characterized by a discovery and reawakening of the strata of myth. The regressive type goes on to produce infantile forms: he revisits certain conventional childhood experiences, reproducing them with technical refinement. We can observe, then, a splitting of the individual into two generations. Under these conditions a doubled child, so to speak, is created. Consciousness is suppressed as an obstacle and from this fact, seen from without, arises what is called the destruction of objects. Relations with reality and history are henceforth accentuated negatively. This occurs under the sign of revolt: historically this attitude has the value of a hallucinatory interval.

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There are two ways of achieving hallucinatory forms. We have already referred to the possible compensations of isolation. Another type of autistic compensation is possible, consisting in the use of tectonic forms. Hallucinatory processes are limited by the barriers of forms and typical signs are utilized that transform an isolated creation into a fact of general value. But it’s equally possible to flow with the current in the river of dynamisms: this is how one arrives at the psychogram (spontaneous writing28). And the artist attempts to create an equivalent of the rapidity of psychic processes. In the haste of formation one forgoes creating a complete spatial structure. There is no external order to the psychogram. The use of flat surfaces has facilitated the ecstatic process. One can draw objects either by observing them or by valorizing them as symptoms or parts of psychic processes. The distance between the subject and the object is then diminished. Man and his objects form a unity in which we see a totemic identification that can be signified as a magical and psychic archaism. The formation is no longer determined in the sense of biological effects, but conforms to the processes of hallucinatory effects. One achieves a dissociation of objects in favor of autonomous psychic analogies. One has tired of biological identity. Depicted birds and fishes were the objects of a totemic identification. The subject is no longer at the periphery of the construction: precisely by reason of this identification the motif has become an immediate part of the soul itself. The object is no longer regarded as an interruption of optical processes. It has become an immediate psychic function. A part of an object represents its totality and it is a mythic reaction that provokes these pictures of Masson, as though by a sort of infection (fig. 9.1) Given that at the moment of ecstasy the self disappears we can confirm a syntonic attitude. This recalls the importance of transmutations in primitive epochs and the exogamous need to expand one’s identity. It suffices to recall the costume masks that incited the identification with animals, with ancestors, et cetera. Another force, another figure supplants the extinguished self of the visionary. Meanwhile this eclipsed self, escaping from the body in a state of ecstasy, enters into an animal, a rock, a plant. Metamorphosis is the classic drama of totemism and probably one of the most ancient dramatic motifs (pantomimes of animals, masked dances). It’s in these dramas that one celebrates the acquisition of new magic powers and that the animal dies in place of man. It is thanks to the identification of man with the animal that the projection of self-sacrifice has become possible. And it’s in this identification that we find the origin of the figures of religious mediators and surrogates. This is how I would like to interpret the fish people, the dying birds, and the leafy animals in the paintings of Masson. These animals are identifications into which one projects the events of death so as not to be killed oneself. Elements that are heterogeneous from a rationalist point of view fuse

9.1. André Masson, The Wing (L’Aile), 1925. Oil on canvas, 55 × 38 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of bpk Bildagentur/Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Jorg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY.

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together in a hallucination: we know the classical results: harpies, centaurs, dryads, leopard men, crocodile men, all issued from a totemic identification of heterogeneous forms. We can also cite those remarkable identifications in which human beings have fused themselves with plants, stars, rocks. It is precisely this exercise, this ecstatic training that Masson has brought to perfection.29 The limits of objects have disappeared. Man no longer observes. He lives in the orbit of objects that have become psychic functions. Optical simultaneity is supplanted by analogies. One could speak of a mystical anatomy. We discern the dynamisms of Masson in this unfettered projection of an interior drama upon the structure of things by which one can link opposing forms in a single function. And it is above all this drama of metamorphosis that stays with us. Sometimes the speed of hallucinations is such that he deploys only lines. In other pictures the forms find a tectonic order, in order that the painter finds a defense against destruction by the force of his hallucinations. But an analysis of forms is not our goal. We want rather to define these pictures as psychic contractions in which the rapid force of hallucinations is compelled to persist.

CH. 10

PABLO PICASSO From The Art of the 20th Century, 1931

In the second edition of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century (1928) the only significant change was the section on Pablo Picasso (K2, 68–87). Still incorporating it within the chapter on cubism, Einstein substantially rewrote it, expanding the text to more than four times its original length. This new section marked a fundamental shift in his understanding of Picasso and of cubism generally. Although the account of cubism in the introductory section remained essentially unchanged from 1926 (text 7), the expanded Picasso section immediately following it told a different story. Now the cubist painting of Picasso and of Braque offered not merely a simultané, a “re-forming of the experience of three dimensions as generated by our bodily motion, into two-dimensional form,” as Einstein had interpreted it in 1926, but was in part intrasubjective, internally generated by “dreamlike visions,” by states of “formal ecstasy” with a “hallucinatory basis” (K2, 73, 75). Einstein’s encounter with surrealist ideas was the major catalyst for this reinterpretation. Picasso’s art enjoyed a special status within surrealism. He participated in many of the surrealists’ exhibitions and fraternized with surrealist poets, even if he was never officially a part

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of the movement and was fundamentally resistant to many of its cherished ideas.1 In a famous footnote to his first surrealist manifesto (1924), André Breton cited painters— Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson, Paul Klee, and others— whom he considered surrealists avant la lettre, hailing Picasso as “by far the most pure.”2 In the fourth issue of La révolution surréaliste (July 1925), four months before the first surrealist exhibition (in which Picasso participated), Breton reproduced five works by Picasso, declaring him “unhesitatingly as one of us. . . . If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.” It was cubism, he continued, that pointed the way to surrealism, as the painter “dared break openly” with “tangible entities . . . and the facile connotations of their everyday appearance.”3 Breton chose three cubist works by Picasso to illustrate the article.4 It seems likely that his “strategy of surrealising early Picasso,” as Sebastian Zeidler has put it, had an impact on Einstein.5 The radically revised Picasso section of the 1928 edition of The Art of the 20th Century marked the beginning of a general shift in Einstein’s theory of modern art that he elaborated and developed in the revised and expanded 1931 edition. The change in the latter is evident in the revised introductory section to the cubism chapter, an added chapter on the surrealist painters (text 11), and a completely rewritten section on Paul Klee (text 12). The Picasso text itself was now some 1,400 words longer than in the previous edition, but equally significant were the substantive additions and deletions in the plate section. The 1928 edition had reproduced no works after 1925; only The Three Dancers of that year gave any hint of Picasso’s moving beyond the alternation of late cubist works and massive neoclassical figures that had marked much of his work of the first half of the decade. Now in the third edition Einstein drastically reduced the space given to neoclassical works from nine to two, and added fourteen new works from 1927 to 1930. The added illustrations of recent paintings, although covering only four years of Picasso’s art, now accounted for almost a third of the forty-six works reproduced. In comparison with the previous edition, the plate section therefore gives a strikingly different sense of the artist’s oeuvre. It was clearly these recent paintings that Einstein had in mind when writing in his revised text of the “monsters” of Picasso’s “ominous dreams.”6 These newly illustrated works are matched by new elements in Einstein’s interpretation of the artist, most of them ideas that had been initially sketched in some of the intervening essays he had written for Documents.7 He expands his claims for the content of hallucinations, complicates his notion of how memory functions in the avant-garde artwork, introduces the unconscious as a factor in the artistic process, and

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finds new, “mythic” dimensions in the tectonic. All of these reveal affinities with surrealist ideas, although in the Picasso text Einstein mentions neither surrealism nor any surrealist artist by name. With surrealism inevitably comes Sigmund Freud. To be sure, Einstein’s occasional references to him often cite his disagreements with Freud’s theory.8 Yet as Christopher Green reminds us, in France of the midtwenties and thirties— and Einstein was living there by the middle of 1928— psychoanalysis “was the dominant mythology. . . . It formed a mentality in the broadest sense (a structure of belief and assumptions).”9 It left its mark on Einstein’s thought as much as it did on Picasso’s art. Einstein was initially resistant to psychological theory, in part because of what he characterized as his “mistrust of interpretation.”10 He never mentioned any specific text by Freud, but it seems probable that at the least he read The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.11 One surmises that what might have interested Einstein most in the first of these was Freud’s account of the dream as a preeminently visual domain. “Dreams . . . think mainly in visual images” (visuellen Bildern), declared Freud. “We can state that the dream hallucinates, that it replaces thoughts with hallucinations” (emphasis in the original).12 Freud’s characterization of dreams as hallucinations finds an echo in Einstein, who deploys “hallucination” and “dream” interchangeably throughout his text.13 One passage in particular has striking affinities with Einstein’s commentary on Picasso’s “hallucinatory” imagery and the “monsters” of his dreams. Glossing a previous author,14 Freud writes that in dreams the psyche reveals itself as not only reproductive but productive as well. . . . It shows a preference for what is immoderate, exaggerated, monstrous [ungeheuer]. At the same time, however, its liberation from the inhibiting categories of thought give it greater suppleness, agility, flexibility of shifting shape. . . . Straight away it gives the inner life the vividness of outwardly perceived forms. The dream-imagination lacks a conceptual speech [Begriffssprache]; what it has to say it has to paint visibly, and since it is not weakened by the presence of concepts, it paints it with all the richness and power of the thing seen.15

For Freud, these dreams are to be deciphered, interpreted in “conceptual language,” to be explained with the techniques of psychoanalysis in quest of a cure for the patient’s neurosis. Einstein has no such interest. For him, dreams and hallucinations were a means to a critique of seeing-as-usual: “The hallucinatory, or the unconscious, no longer acts as a rigidified constant (as in Freud), but as the very force for all change” (GB, 382). Einstein developed this point in Georges Braque, where he

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criticized Freud for defining the unconscious all too negatively as a “mass of repressions and as a constant,” where he himself saw it as in a state of continual transformation, a positive, progressive factor offering the promise of the new.16 In the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century Einstein had stressed the cubists’ dismantling of the object, its reduction to a mere symptom of visual function. In so doing he emphasized cubism’s potential for transforming how we see, above all how we perceive space (text 7). In the third edition, the question turns to what kind of forms are to fill this refigured space, and thus the object acquires a new importance. Einstein concisely sums up the situation in the book’s Klee section: once it was realized that “space could be a virtually free creation one gradually came to ask whether, if space is formed by human beings, it might also be possible to create new gestalten.” And this, he continues, raised “the question of the possibility of myth.” The word “myth” had appeared only once in the Picasso text for the second edition— with reference to the artist’s hulking neoclassical figures and their evocation of ancient Greece; now, in 1931, “myth” and its cognates occur nineteen times in the Picasso text alone. What does Einstein mean by “myth?”17 Here he does not mean it in an iconographic sense, referring to subjects such as Picasso’s minotaurs, or his thirty etchings for Ovid’s Metamorphoses.18 He doesn’t provide a definition of myth here, but other texts from these years are helpful in this regard. In Georges Braque he wrote that “everything mythic marks the difference between man and given being” (399); or as he put it more trenchantly in another text, myth is rooted in a “conflict between man and the . . . world, and . . . man, thus menaced, defends himself against the outside reality by creating a new mythical reality” (BA 3, 216). In the fragmented modern world, myth is no longer a collective expression; it is born in individual isolation, it is a “revolt” against existing reality.19 In art this revolt is effected by means of visual form.20 Creating “new objects” the artist creates “visual myths” (GB, 270), constituting a new visual reality inhabited by “creatures of a formal mythology,” a “mythology of forms.”21 “Visions and myth are not fictions,” Einstein insisted, “but an early phase and beginning of the real” (BA 3, 220). In the chronological overview of Picasso’s art, Einstein now dubs the period from 1924 to 1930 “mythic realism.” Representative of the “mythic” paintings were the series of hideously malformed human heads and figures dating from 1927 to 1930, of which no fewer than eleven examples were reproduced in The Art of the 20th Century (figs. 10.1– 10.3). It’s as if Picasso had created a species of aberrant humanoid creatures that are marked by the presence of common features— randomly placed eyes, a few coarse strands of hair, a toothy mouth cum vagina

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dentata, and, often, a pair of eyelets denoting noseless nostrils.22 Yet in each figure these shared features are uniquely aligned— or rather, misaligned, for these creatures have no common, normative morphology. Where the full body is represented, the same nightmarish asymmetry and malformation applies. It’s a radical assault on what Einstein called “tautological repetition” in the pictorial figuration of the human body, a “dissociation of mental images and a transvaluation of the hierarchy of the real.” Here “the formal, not the biological, canon is in force.” These visual myths came into being, according to Einstein, in a temporary state of possession, of erasure of the ego, the “anesthesia of the dreamer.” He described this most pointedly as a halluzinatives Intervall, a hallucinatory interval.23 Again, it is in Georges Braque that we find the clearest explanation of this term: the interval is a transient spell, a temporary state of possession by visions and hallucinations; it occurs within what Einstein describes as a “highly active zone” between “the labile strata of the unconscious and the conscious.”24 It is there that “what we call gestalt is born, and it stands in deep contrast to objects” (GB, 387). The source of these “mythic gestalten” is not, as in cubism, the external world of optical sensation, but an inner world—“the new gestalten grow from the invisible” (GB, 336). The hallucinatory interval generates “psychograms”— these are synonymous with the pictorial emanations of Breton’s “psychic automatism,” spontaneous images flowing freely from the unconscious. Yet Picasso always reasserts control, developing “his psychograms to the point of consciously tectonic form,” into a gestalt. These tectonic forms Einstein characterizes as a “dense formal shield,” a defense against the potentially destructive power of the hallucinations. “The more violently a stream of visions courses through a person,” he explains, “the more strenuously will he defend himself against them by a protective shield of tectonic forms [tektonischen Formschutz], to prevent being fatally blown to pieces.”25 Yet these tectonic forms, too, originate in the hallucinatory interval, and it is they that transform private vision into collective myth. The expanding meaning of “the tectonic” is an index of the evolution of Einstein’s art theory over a period of a mere five years. He had used it from his earliest art criticism, but it became a major factor only in the 1926 Propyläen volume (see text 7). There it was an organizing principle found in pictures. Now, five years later, he has endowed the tectonic with a psychoanthropological dimension; it encompasses all human seeing. “By the tectonic,” he explains, “we understand the elements, or general forms, of spatial experience considered apart from objects.” It is in such “structural dispositions” that “our fateful norms and types of seeing are to be found.” The tectonic, then, is here no longer merely a quality of any given form or composition but a kind of template

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10.1. Pablo Picasso, Woman in an Armchair (Femme dans un Fauteuil), 1927. Oil on canvas, 128 × 97.8 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

that structures visual experience, “a significant and effective tool for mastering and adapting to nature.” It is a means of defense against the contingency of organic life and, ultimately, death.26 It has moreover now become sexualized, identified with “ancient symbols of procreation and birth, of life and death,” symbols with universal resonance across time

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10.2. Pablo Picasso, The Painter and His Model, 1927. Oil on canvas, 214 × 200 cm. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

and culture. Thus there is a “psychic dialectic” in Picasso’s recent work: “subjective invention and tectonic collective signs, hallucinatory creation and conscious clarification of the image” (K3, 106). Einstein’s position on memory also evolved during these five years. In the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century he declared that cubism overrode visual memory of the object by representing the short- term cumulative memory of a single unmediated phenomenological optical experience— objects, rather than being given, were now seen as a byproduct of the function of seeing (text 7). Three years later, in his “Notes on Cubism,” he gave even greater weight to this fact, declaring that

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cubism’s greatest merit was its destruction of “mnemonic images.”27 But now, with the artist in the grip of hallucination, another kind of memory kicks in: “for in visions one is cut off from memory and history and moves beyond inherited forms, forging ahead into the future or plunging into archaic memory.” Einstein now makes a distinction between conscious personal and cultural memory and unconscious collective memory, what he here calls “the archaically collective substratum of the unconscious.” For Freud the unconscious memories surfacing in dreams and hallucination are always personal; for Einstein they are collective. Here his thinking is almost certainly indebted to Carl Gustav Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, which he had elaborated in a series of publications over the previous decade. Jung distinguishes between “three psychic levels: (1) consciousness, (2) the personal unconscious, and (3) the collective unconscious.” “The collective unconscious,” he writes, “appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.”28 The constellation of concepts— myth, the collective unconscious, archaic memory— that defines Einstein’s interpretation of Picasso and his later art theory are also found in Jung’s theory of the archetype.29 Borrowing a term from Jacob Burckhardt, Jung defined the archetype as a “primordial image” (urtümliches Bild) that has its source in the “unconscious structure of the psyche.”30 This image is based on “unconscious fantasy,” appearing to consciousness abruptly “in the manner of a vision or hallucination.” Such primordial images are “archaic,” “ancient images, restored to life by the primitive analogical mode of thinking peculiar to dreams.” These are not “inherited ideas” but “inherited thought patterns.”31 As noted above, Einstein now treats tectonic forms as having a source in the unconscious: they “flow from hallucination, because it is there that gestalt types (humanity’s means of power) originate.” These tectonic gestalt types (Gestalttypen) thus function in a way analogous to Jung’s archetypes (Archetypen). Einstein never uses the word surrealism in this or any other text published in his lifetime, yet the centrality of dreams, hallucinations, the unconscious, and the “psychogram” in his account leaves no doubt that his is a surrealized Picasso. Compelling as his reading may be, it must be acknowledged that by this time Picasso was at pains to distance himself from surrealism. He mockingly dismissed automatism (the “psychogram”) as a joke.32 To Kahnweiler Picasso complained that the surrealists hadn’t understood what he had meant by “surrealism” back in

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1917, namely “something that is more real than reality.”33 In an article in Documents Michel Leiris, Picasso’s intimate friend and Einstein’s colleague at the magazine, vigorously asserted this point, perhaps at the behest of the artist. In Picasso’s art “the real is now illuminated in all its pores, one penetrates it, it becomes now for the first time and really a REALITY.” Picasso’s subjects were “almost always quite down to earth [terre à terre], in any case never borrowed from the nebulous world of dreams . . . in other words not in the least ‘surrealist.’” To overlook “the fundamentally realist character” of Picasso’s oeuvre and place it in “a sphere of fantastic hallucinations” was a “complete misinterpretation” (all emphases in the original).34 Although Leiris’s interpretation shares certain qualities with Einstein’s, including describing Picasso’s figures as créations mythologiques, it’s hard to resist the idea that his article was not at least in part a deliberate rebuttal of Einstein, who had, in the first issue of Documents, hailed the hallucinatory origins of Picasso’s art: the objects of the world represented an “obstacle to hallucinatory figuration,” Picasso did not accept “given things,” his newest pictures were based on “tectonic hallucination.”35 One can only guess what conversations occurred between Leiris and Einstein, but Einstein’s text for the third edition shows that he didn’t change his views. If one reads the Picasso section in the context of the surrealism and Klee essays that Einstein wrote for the book, as well as Georges Braque, all of which treat the art in terms of hallucination, the unconscious, and myth, it is clear what was at stake for him. Einstein’s liberal mix of Freud and Jung yielded an ostensible solution to an acute problem: how a new art, shattering aesthetic norms and visual conventions, might achieve collective resonance. The price of the modern artist’s subjective isolation, he had argued in the cubism chapter of the book’s first edition, was “a tremendous need for a collectively valid form” (text 7). Tectonic forms, forms with universal sexual connotations, “gestalt types” that “lie within human beings themselves” (K2, 75), could serve as a bridge from the private subjectivity of the socially insulated contemporary artist to the collective. Einstein would soon come to the painful realization that he had been deluding himself. In his j’accuse against the avant- garde, The Fabrication of Fictions (text 14), he admitted that the intense desire to renounce the given world had misled him into believing in the possibility of inventing an absolutely new one: “modern intellectuals were mythomaniacs” (FF, 38). Of that Einstein’s Picasso text is a prime example. His “mythology of forms” was just that, a mythology, albeit not in the affirmative sense that he had intended.36 A feature of Einstein’s Picasso text in all three editions of The Art of

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the 20th Century is his enthusiastic embrace of Picasso’s stylistic pluralism— a constant feature of his practice since 1915 that had mostly provoked dismay, skepticism, or ridicule.37 As early as 1923 Einstein had praised Picasso, “our most intelligent contemporary painter,” for demonstrating “that a single style no longer suits our chaotic complexity; he feeds off contradictory means and formulas, denying with each picture the value of another. Not that he lacks character, he is simply eminently modern.”38 The notion that stylistic pluralism was to be positively assessed as “eminently modern” was a radical one at the time.39 By 1928 Einstein began to emphasize this practice as fundamental to Picasso’s art, for “to him every style seems too constricting, he senses the fragmentary inadequacy of human totalities, which through constraining decisiveness often exclude more than they contain” (K2, 68). And with the surrealist turn in his Picasso interpretation, he now sees this pluralism not merely as a symptom of the times— though it was still that— but as a manifestation of the complexity of psychic processes, refuting “the assumption that the forces of the psyche are directed toward invariable, stable entities and not a manifold of figurations” (K2, 76–77). Picasso’s stylistic pluralism was flagrantly dramatized in the largest exhibition yet devoted to his art, the retrospective held at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris in June and July 1932. Consisting of 236 works from 1901 to 1932, including around 200 paintings, the show was notable for its unconventional hanging: in a departure from the usual chronological installation, works from different periods, in markedly contrasting styles, were sometimes juxtaposed.40 This hanging was long assumed to have been the work of Picasso alone; yet two letters have come to light revealing that Einstein collaborated with the artist on the installation.41 It seems reasonable to conclude that Picasso chose him for this task, and that such a collaboration indicates his high esteem for Einstein. Certainly the installation illustrated Einstein’s point that “a considerable part of the significance of Picasso’s work lies precisely in its unfixity, its mutability.” His involvement in the exhibition may explain why he did not write a review of it. He did, however, publish a short, trenchant, fiercely brilliant essay on the occasion of the opening, hailing Picasso for his “gratifying propensity for perversion,” for his “ironic brutality toward himself so as to change metamorphotically. He forgets himself like an old umbrella and is not always cravenly reaching for his carte d’identité.”42 Einstein’s Picasso text for the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century was the longest he had yet written on a single artist, to be surpassed only by his Georges Braque. Although this long Picasso section— by far the largest single textual component of the entire book— is rich in insights and offers many trenchant formulations, it can at times

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seem shapeless, riddled with non sequiturs, and maddeningly redundant. In this respect it’s similar to how Picasso himself later described his art to Françoise Gilot. He wasn’t “promoting the idea of a rational line of thought, one which goes from deduction to deduction, from one principle to its inevitable consequences. My own thought in doing a painting is often a continuous non sequitur, a series of jumps from one mountain peak to another. It’s what you might call a somnambulist’s thought.”43 Picasso’s words would serve as an apt characterization of Einstein’s text on him. There is perhaps yet another factor at work in Einstein’s writing. In this 1931 text, with its revised account of Picasso’s creative process and the “hallucinatory interval,” Einstein puts much less emphasis on the sequential unfolding of perception than he did in his cubism chapter from 1926. Yet here, too, there seems to be a relationship between the content of Einstein’s text and the writing of it. In this case it might be construed as consistent with the critique of fixity that is threaded through the text. A recurrent topos in Einstein’s writing is the claim that fixity is a product of the rigidity of linguistic signs, a distortion of direct visual experience. A passage in “Methodological Aphorisms” goes straight to the point: “One identified seeing with the immutable objects that are most often its content. Signified by fixed, unchanging words, these objects had been rendered non-functional.”44 Perhaps Einstein wished to avoid any single, definitive formulation that could become a substitute for Picasso’s paintings. Such an interpretation finds some support if one compares the 1928 and 1931 versions of the Picasso text. While the latter introduces new themes, in most of its substance it is identical, yet rarely is any sentence identical to the wording in the earlier version. Rather than a tactically structured exposition, the text is a tissue of ideas in a continual state of metamorphosis. ■

S

wift, ever changing in invention, Picasso eludes the commentaries of his biographers and admirers, which strain to keep up with him. There is less risk of succumbing to ecstasies if one counters their power by brisk retreat and reflection, and is able to clarify them as form. Picasso’s strength lies in his mistrust of history, in his courage to work without assumptions. He is seldom superstitious about his creations, he is able to disengage, to distance himself from them and attempt new visions. So his life seems to assume the form of a chain of several generations, and therefore his work casts its shadow over several generations. Artworks function mostly as limits and constraints of man, one lingers all too fondly among past achievements. Like any restless person, Picasso

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had to realize that a style is ultimately a prejudice, a limitation, and every artwork a fragment, one may not succumb to the style of a single work, the challenge is always to seek the new, not to idolize fetishes. Otherwise art becomes cowardice, a prison, rather than a path to revolt and to freedom. It was wrong to see Picasso as an isolated phenomenon rather than as a logical part of a significant broader movement. One cannot simply judge and exploit these paintings as aesthetic objects, in isolation, treating them as an utterly singular case— this betrays only the embarrassing limitations of the writer; one only diminishes the intellectual significance of Picasso’s oeuvre. Let us not fail to recognize that art, thanks to our idiotic reverence for it, has become a virtual impediment, a force for reaction. We must see these things within the movement of the whole. Pictures are not bibelots, but tools for the mind, a considerable part of the significance of Picasso’s work lies precisely in its unfixity, its mutability. Fortunately he fully senses the fragmentary, temporary nature of human forms and totalities, which serve mainly to limit and constrain. If we now regard the chain of our experiences of nature as only a narrow, specialized phenomenon, this is no less true of the various formal circuits that, through the baseless admiration of aesthetes, have been distorted into ineffectual petrifacts. Assessing Picasso’s work has proved difficult because the typical historian praises monotony in an oeuvre as a special virtue and usually considers only the development of technical skills. Yet painting and technique are only means for serving superior powers, and their virtuosic perfection has often been an impediment to that. One is fond of reprimanding the versatile by holding up the craven bourgeois idea of a stable, self- contained I, when it is precisely the continual defeat and destruction of the unified person that makes multiplicity of visions possible. Because we superstitiously believe in a stable self we try to conceal these frequent defeats and disruptions. Yet this I is salvaged only after the fact; for the psyche lives in dialectical struggle, in the tension of oppositions and continual self- sublation. Even so, most people remain copyists of themselves and build their lives on two or three minor shocks. Identity is the cowardly vanity of the little man. If one sees without preconceptions, then one uses variable forms and flourishes in the conflict of opposites, which alone sustains life and allows us to feel it. The gifted person excels above all by his total lack of self-regard so that, ever changing, he can encompass several generational developments within himself. Lacking fantasy, the petit bourgeois will view such vitality as a mere costume change or a swapping of masks, since most people go through life revering their own sclerotic clichés. Picasso lives in cycles, he frequently discovers new, often mutually opposed solutions. This is necessary if, as a complete person, one feels that the single form, the single style are merely

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fragments, if one is not to remain timorously bound by them and be able to surrender to one’s visions. Admittedly such self- surrender presupposes considerable discipline and a nimble consciousness if one is not to be swept away. This seems to be our greatest chance to avoid being stuck in the same forms and psychic attachments. This is how we rebel against the determinacy of our bodies and cultivate psychic ambivalence without compromise. Picasso’s pictures lie between the poles of unconscious vision and conscious figuration and therefore these works comprise the major psychic oppositions, growing toward a richer totality. Picasso wears out forms and discoveries like clothes. This is how he could create a major share of the optical psychograms of his time, which have helped define the visual and psychic adventures of his epoch. Many painters live in his shadow, even those who try, with inadequate resources, to resist him. Picasso had understood that every form and every experience achieves wholeness only through its opposite, so he develops his psychograms to the point where they become consciously tectonic form; for the activation of consciousness means termination of a psychic process. We know all about those ingratiating, soothing talents who appear at the close of an epoch. Today there is no place for such types, for our time is pressing toward an exacerbation of crisis. Picasso has significantly expanded our visual dreams and our store of mythic gestalten. He created rapidly drawn psychograms of ominous dreams; yet simultaneously he created figures that evoke a serene knowledge, growing out of close historical continuity. Thus he drove young artists to ever more violent destruction of conventions even as he simultaneously initiated a kind of classical reaction for the more cautious among them. For Picasso these classical pictures may mean a refuge from isolation and the risks of the new. For in visions one is cut off from memory and history and moves beyond inherited forms, forging ahead into the future or plunging into archaic memory. With permanent forms we shield ourselves against visions, against errant myths. Picasso mostly succeeded in forcing his isolated subjectivity into effective tectonic forms and subduing the monsters of his dreams by normalizing them. To press forward into new, as yet untapped figurative circuits one must detach oneself from the environment and renounce it. We can transform our environment only by destroying current forms and imposing new visions onto it as the stuff and types of future existence. For pictures are not bibelots but practical forces, to be ruthlessly deployed and absorbed. We experience our world picture pluralistically, namely in the signs of changing types of forms and dreams; we stress the changing aspects of the person, the multifaceted partitions, rather than the unity. This is the justification for a protean human type. Where formerly believers anxiously and passionately traced their images back to a divine center, we, lacking such

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a constricting or stabilizing unity, are directed to flee from figuration to new formations. Yet let us not speak of eclecticism, but rather of the end of craven humility, of doubt regarding any finality. We take revenge against the power of dreams by quickly distancing ourselves from them through reflection. Picasso began as a sentimental, sometimes literary artist. The painfully reticent figures of his Blue or Rose Period linger silently in classical domains. Yet soon the forms become more angular and complex and the contrasts grow more violent; their cadence is charged to the bursting point. Later he stresses the underlying structure and works with tectonically as well as coloristically declaimed contrasts; planar areas intersect transparently; then he moves on into private mythology. Imaginative and dynamic aspects increase, even as the spare formal defenses are automatically strengthened. An intellectual interval begins, not just for painting but for everything. The pleasingly natural, this rendezvous of comfortable and worn-out consensus, was finished; optimistic realism had amounted mostly to laxity, a casual or submissive letting-oneself-go. For naturalistic painting is mostly either an affront to nature or an act of flattery; for the artwork is the rarest of exceptions. Picasso trusts his daydreams, which soar beyond quotidian rules, far from the usual figurations, shaking off the burden of timorous, historical constraints. One should distinguish between the boring dreams of the ungifted and that wakeful clairvoyance that drives man toward new figurations, even as it sometimes sends him into ancient forgotten strata. In the latter instance, one insulates oneself from the usual relations between objects, a stage marked by pessimism combined with stealthy humor. Aggressively, one will destroy objects, those bearers of conventions; gradually man will be overcome by a cruel indifference to his surroundings, until he dares finally to transgress the boundaries of inherited consciousness and lives in his own myth, indifferent to justifying it. The dreams of ordinary persons oscillate between fear and lust. The untalented dream conservatively, apishly, copyists of the banalities of the day. They glimmer faintly in the shadowy shrinkages of existence. The gifted, in their dreams, leap over their attachments to the real, this sum of our prejudices. Thus the dream again becomes an instrument of divination, be it in poems or pictures. One escapes from the fetishisms of a dead present and risks acts of figuration that subsequently rejuvenate and transform quotidian nature. The dreams of the gifted occur in states of perilous detachment and deep confusion, then to be captured in clear precision and frank impudence. Some drawings by Picasso reveal such sinking into the pits of foreboding; he strips away the barriers of constricting consciousness, of petty desire; for reflection normally relates to stable conditions and conventions. The path

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to the new passes through the hallucinatory interval; technique of the leap. Inhibitions of craft are liberally disposed of; after all, most pictures teem with superfluous twaddle and the vanity of craftsmanship. One day someone must write the history of painterly platitudes and the servile sophistry of craft. At long last it was time to save oneself from clever variations. Perhaps one might define genius this way: a person in the most extreme state of possession, the isolated dreamer who in dreaming repeats nothing, destroying the real and all conventions, yet giving form to a new myth and reality. Simultaneously he must convert hallucination into knowledge, without excessively dispiriting losses, so that the state of agonized possession is actively transmuted into compelling form. Thus do we draw the revolutionary type in contrast to the consummators, those who synthesize, order, and enhance the timid achievements of an epoch and confirm through their work the obligations to history. The new emerges not from a logical development, more likely to occur where there is homogeneity, but takes form within a visionary interval in which existence is initially disavowed, one works spasmodically and alogically in conflict with the historical legacy. Such conflict becomes neutralized in the perspective of later observers, what is discontinuous becomes approximated to the historical status quo ante. Spasmodic transitions are leveled by retrospective consciousness into timid and retarded gradations, the intervals become buried. Cubist pictures are related to dreams in that verification and corroboration are hardly possible in either; one does not copy, but constructs more or less autonomous realities that are significant precisely because of their remoteness from what is conventionally real. They are important in human terms as successful attempts at escape from overly antiquated attachments and in part owe their wholeness to just that isolation. The dreamer’s anesthesia corresponds to the pictures’ totalizing isolation. Just as the dream is conditioned by the sleeper’s insulating insensateness, so, too, is the autonomy or freedom of the artwork conditioned by its psychic and technical distinctness from other modalities of the real. Both, the dream as well as the artwork, can be corroborated neither by logic nor by mirrorlike resemblance. Thus one can describe cubistic pictures as unmetaphorical artworks. Like the dream they preclude an assumed and superordinate reality. These works represent a prophetic preview of new space and poeticized figuration, pathways to shocks and prospects not yet abused. The visions of the gifted person differ from the shapeless dreaming of the ungifted in that, due to the acute isolation of the hallucinatory interval, they offer means to free figuration. The ordinary and sluggish person, should he encounter the elemental forces of being, lapses into a degenerate, formless angst, whereas the gifted one dreams with precision; he does not cravenly subject those dreams to quotidian reality, but further shapes them.

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In its sweep the foreboding, transformative dream is superior to our conceptions of the present. In the dream one works through the gladly forgotten past, which one fears, one descends to the dead and makes them draw and speak, one opens the gates of the as yet unknown future, and so, of all experiences, these visions extend farthest into the depths of time. Consciousness, insofar as it inhibits us, is shut down and hallucination, now undeterred by conventions, gains an expanding volubility, thanks to the seer’s anesthesia and concentrated powers. It’s worth considering what preliminary work must be accomplished before the upheaval that leads to new figurations begins; especially in Picasso’s case, vast and vehement meditative strata intervene. He quickly subjects these urgent visions to censorship by means of form. Yet this meditative vision is not of a rational kind; its basis remains hallucinatory. We have stressed that the power for transformation springs from a dreamlike detachment. This haste, the oft- bemoaned violent exhaustion of forms that we observe in Picasso’s work, this cyclical sequence of the most diverse figurations that we characterize as psychic pluralism, lies in a firm sense of his own identity. What popular moralists define as character or as the integrated personality is usually nothing more than poverty and boredom. Thanks to his stylistic diversity Picasso has discovered formal tasks for future generations. His shadow, which the young are as yet unable to escape, throws a cloak across the present. The question for the future is whether an equally gifted talent will appear who, by completely different means, will offer an alternative to Picasso’s oeuvre. The authoritative centers and allegiances of older forms of being have been dissolved. Imperiously, they dominated the life of our ancestors and offered them miracles as a foundation. Our being, in contrast to the submissive piety of our ancestors, which was always directed toward a static center, is of a centrifugal kind. Taking the place of religious coercion is the fatalism of the unconscious, which goes far beyond the fact of mere subjectivity. At the same time variations and contrasts are now possible because life is hardly satisfied and defined by dogma any more. Certainly God was formerly the antinomy of being, yet he dominated it uncontested; but now that antinomy is paradoxically displaced into being itself and signifies the possibility of simultaneously opposed solutions. Now inner identity acquires another meaning. If formerly man was torn by the tension between immanence and transcendence, now he has been placed in the dialectical struggle between immanent yet opposed tendencies. Formerly such conflicts between antinomies were resolved by dogma and authority. Now the choice, determination, and interpretation of conflicting forces are left up to the individual. Previously solutions appeared to be ordained from without, now they have the effect of subjective, seemingly arbitrary decrees for which

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norms are scarcely to be found, unless one recognizes the fateful unconscious and subjective possession as norm-creating forces. Formerly the flow of most visionary stimuli was directed toward a center, into the one God, enabling the creation of a canon of hallucinations. Now this power had collapsed into many-voiced waves and dissolved into isolated experiences of separated individuals. Yet these hallucinations could become emblematic, thanks to the archaically collective substratum of the unconscious. In any case we have arrived at a splitting and differentiation of norms, corresponding to a multiplicity of solutions. The vision of the gifted artist differs from that of the average one in that the mediocre one glimmers helplessly in the repetition of vague generalities or of a particular pattern that holds him fatefully captive. The gifted artist, however, transcends the existing figured world. In contrast to our organic determinacy he is vital enough to repeatedly alter and cyclically change his mental character. Art is mostly a mechanically stupid repetition, a collection of biases that inhibit us from acting free of assumptions, instead enfeebling and aesthetically mechanizing us. What is at stake is finally to defend ourselves against the excessive burdens of history, instead of numbly slithering along on the same old comfortable tracks. If one wanted to achieve a more originary, less predetermined visual intuition then the break with tradition had to be consummated. The more violently a stream of visions courses through a person, the more strenuously will he defend himself against them by a protective shield of tectonic forms to prevent being fatally blown to pieces. Within these tectonic forms lie the ancient symbols of procreation and birth, of life and death. These tectonic motifs belong to both sexual zones, are both masculine and feminine, and as a result every image is built into a bisexual organism. Thus do new hallucinations descend into archaic strata. This explains in part why, in spite of the break with tradition, we have extended the depth of history and feel closer and more connected to primitive art. These tectonic forms possess a collective validity, and this compensates for the subjective character of isolated vision; consequently these pictures oscillate between the critical poles of the psyche. The collective, tectonic forms elevate the subjective visions to a normative validity and lead from the stage of unconscious possession to a conscious construction of form. From the zone of passive suffering the artist arrives at active, willed figuration, and these works thus contain the play of basic, antithetical psychic forces. Isolated, hallucinatory vision is now compensated. Nietzsche had sharply distinguished Dionysian enchantment from the reflective, lucid Apollonian condition, although the two complement each other.45 The art of the cubists is remote from tautological repetition and servility to organic life. The cubist values the obsessive state of isolated action; yet he achieves clarity through construction, from the zone of passive suffering he

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passes into the volitional. This pictorial type is characteristic of the beginning of the twentieth century. A divination of new elements breaks through. One doesn’t remain the errant Dionysian, but advances toward Apollonian precision. The archaic collective basis of the unconscious, the normative validity of tectonic forms elevate and expand the meaning of these pictures. Cubist pictures match the general character of our time. (1) One makes oneself as independent as possible from the conditions of nature. (Compare this with the technological character of the times.) (2) One formulates dynamic relations and connections of actions. (3) The activation of the irrational hallucination. (4) The attempt, despite being split off, to arrive at collectively valid forms even as, simultaneously, the individual becomes more strongly isolated. Now the cubist, freer of preconceptions, followed the structure of his own experience and developed pictures without metaphor. The flow of these inner processes or images does not conform to objects as constituted, and the task was no longer to depict a mechanized nature, this most convenient of assumptions, but rather to transform human action and seeing. To be sure: to those bogged down in paraphrases anything unmediated is extremely remote. He who vegetates in the indirect considers anything spontaneous to be unnatural. Now one no longer strove for sluggish accommodation with fossilized being, but rendered one’s own seeing more precise, into a compelling poem. Divesting oneself of the craftsman’s clichés one attempted to paint with fewer presuppositions. Finally one could become free of superstitious conventions and established new figurations that exert an effect on the total structure of being and will alter it. No more humble, timid arrangements but direct pictorial signs of a looking subject. This kind of painting did not match up well with allegorical or associative painting, popular with half cubists who beg and borrow on both sides; this was painting virtually devoid of biases about the object or history. There has been scant investigation of why these subjective or hallucinatory states became so important for the generation of 1905, why they captivated it so. The watchword of “painting after nature” was necessarily weakened, for nature had lost its religious character, and under the threat of a positivist civilization [Sachzivilisation] the human subject had finally to seek itself again. One reacted against a mechanistic positivism that mostly saw objects only and eliminated human premises; a kind of mechanistic mythology of things had emerged, while inner life was ignored. The positivists had overlooked the two-tracked course of psychic processes. Now the cubists developed a subjective approach that stressed the functionality of seeing, which, thanks to simultané, is preserved in the picture. If this subjective emphasis were not to be reduced to a matter of mood then fateful psychic states had to be recognized. Certainly these states still comprise experi-

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ence of the environment, but only as a peripheral irradiation enveloping the subjective stimulus. Now fragments of things are transvalued as expressive means within a human process. Power no longer emanates from those fragments but from the human subject. Things now become symptoms of functions, and therein lies this new, human situation. Now, with the collapse of nature’s authority, with the refusal to recognize an unambiguously given object, a pluralism of subjective experiences of and solutions for the gestalt inevitably occurs, the variable mass of these experiences is no longer related to dogmatically clear-cut objects. Our time is marked by the loss of purpose- driven belief and this is the basis of its formal heresy and flexibility. Later Picasso and the young artists will erect mythic archaisms on top of this skepticism. Picasso rebelled against the notion of a single canonical solution; for him it’s a matter of a dialectical simultané of solution and countersolution. The single style is felt to be a fragment. He renders harlequins, still lifes, and figures cubistically, yet alongside these he approximates an organically developed historical solution of these same themes. In our view the cubistic solutions seem better suited to determine what is to be real in the future. At first there is still a peripheral hint of the object-like; Picasso sketches in representational contrasts and caesuras, as with the sound holes of instruments, the grain of the wood, a piece of wallpaper, et cetera. Things have become words within an utterance, whereas more backward artists derived an old-fashioned objectivity from such fragments of things. For a time bits from past experiences are fused into the pictures, yet now integrated with inner processes, just as in former times one had conversely trusted all too credulously in nature. The viewer is now forced to adapt to an isolated pictorial event, yet collectively oriented tectonic forms facilitate this self-transformation. Just as formerly the religious image was planar and tectonic and, removed as such from the real, corresponded to a transcendent vision, so do the works of these painters grow out of isolated hallucinatory vision, yet not from hierarchically predefined conditions. By the tectonic we understand the elements, or general forms, of spatial experience considered apart from objects. Such structural dispositions are not lyrically tottering figurations, rather it is precisely here that our fateful norms and types of looking are to be found. Thanks to this fact cubist pictures surpass in compelling, developable strength the sentimental decorative works of our time. The tectonic elements are suited to the looking subject, yet are at the same time a significant and effective tool for mastering and adapting to nature. Thanks to these dominant formal factors we alter the real and define new objects; yet these superordinated structural dispositions encompass both poles, the creator as well as the world of things. The path to these dominant factors never passes by way of a nature stylized like applied art, rather they flow from hallucination, because it is there that gestalt types

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(humanity’s means of power) originate, while yet acquiring their power in the transformation of the environment. No passively observational nature painting can be summoned as a witness against cubism. The implementation of cubism, its successful incorporation of objects, was not proof of its collapse but a nuanced development of the cubist conception, one that by such means moved for a time beyond hermetic monologue. A period of restoring equilibrium followed, which was then subsequently inundated by a more powerful, mythic wave. In the beginning the cubist intuition made its first daring moves rather as a form of stylization or primitivization, yet gradually all noninvented structures were eliminated. With that move the heroic time of structural autonomy began, and one exercised one’s formal fantasy. The new mode of seeing still expressed itself somewhat schematically in cubes; yet the cadence of these elements was built up in strict formal analogies. Gradually the artists introduced nuance into the figuration by means of a complex simultané; they dissected the act of seeing and thus varied the formal elements, which intersect, agglomerate, and slice one another in multiple axes. Only later did they achieve a more vigorous formal language. Thus did the cycle of tectonic, freely invented forms begin for Picasso, from which, remote from aestheticisms, he later developed mythic gestalten. Formal and mental clichés collapsed. Elimination of the motif activated constructive energies. Picasso did not linger in stagnant, feeble hallucinations, like those crippled mystics who, in a state of enchantment, unceasingly circle the vacuum at their core. The cubist painters, Picasso and Braque above all, had created a language whose dynamic syntax was extraordinarily elastic. No longer was one painting essays about things. Such monological isolation undoubtedly carries the risk of narrowness, and lesser artists succumbed to it, subsequently seeking once more the timorous comparison with the motif. We will never defend those producers of kitsch and dilettantes of the left who resent a new discovery. The rejection of painterly culture carried a risk, but was necessary; for the cubist conception went beyond technical variation. A new state of mind could not be concealed with old techniques. Space was now experienced as the daily creation of man and was no longer an authoritative cliché for the benumbed. Such plastic freedom was then followed by the courage for mythic invention; the threat of the gods, who unceasingly reminded man of his inferiority, was ended. Now man daily invents man and transforms him beyond the bodily norm. The freedom of this tectonics was decisive; the naive will outpace the sophisticated and will one day see cubistically. It’s amusing how blowhards stammer their enthusiasm for theories of physics they do not understand while for twenty years they advertised their backwardness regarding cubist pictures, proving that they have no sense for concrete transformation. Yes,

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admittedly in the beginning the syntax of the cubists was limited. At the time they attempted their first constructions, tested their hastily sketched formulas. The motif still had a dualistic resonance, not yet vanquished by an as yet cautious imagination. A representation in which one has tried to isolate forms pictorially must be planar. Picasso asserted this spatial concentration of invented forms in sketches of cubist structures, while Braque made these domains resonate through painterly means and harmonized them with a French sense of proportion. Initially people attacked cubist pictures with the silly objection that they were not true to observation. They had simply failed to understand the free compression of the simultané and were incapable of grasping direct visual experiences. The cubists employed multiaxial, transparent planes. Then, to strengthen pictorial synthesis without rhetorical means they attempted a more drastic revolt against traditional technique. They introduced the papiers collés, which eliminated painterly shimmer and necessitated precise forms. They thus renounced the ridiculous partiality to mawkishly beautiful technique and abandoned the dreary maquillage of the antiquated snazzy palette. The artist’s handwriting (a degenerate coloratura), that delight of collectors who otherwise marvel at bibelots, was finally toppled; these new means demanded large, very precise forms executed with maximum technical simplicity; for what was at stake was not a change in craftmanship but of visual intuition. It’s admittedly not easy to speak rubbish about a piece of paper. Few grasped the significance of these papiers collés, in which the artist enforced a concise synthesis and impudently shattered the faded charm of craftsmanship. Formal suggestiveness now functioned with fewer constraints since one had dispensed with traditional techniques that could hinder the production of new forms. The cubists had grasped that pictures can’t be validated by things external to them; for the hallucinatory experience of form is more violently isolating and convulsive than any preconception of objects. It’s quite another thing to impact the real by means of invented gestalten. Artworks are neither theorems nor metaphors; they enable us to transcend given visual convention through the power of the hallucinatory interval and autonomous formal analogies, and we free ourselves from that convention so as to define in advance the future and its order. One either projects oneself into creation or flings into it what is unbearable to us, what we fear, reinforcing in it the evil that we pass on to others. The cubists had subdivided and fragmented our time- bound experiences of space and of objects into discrete stages. Accordingly they structured a dynamic visual intuition as a simultané of formal fields, unifying these with the help of the interrelationship of parts within a tectonic planar whole. By unity we understand the compression of variants and dialectical oppositions; for only by preserving kinetic conflict do forms remain active. The

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tension between forms and the risk of their destruction should be preserved. The simultané comprises a stronger dynamism in the formation of mental images. Also, this oft-criticized breakup of the object was misunderstood. Initially it is not objects that are being represented but freely imagined forms of invented objects. There has never been a mode of painting that wouldn’t have abbreviated or altered the object; for the formal conception is absolutely different from the composite experience. If the goal was autonomous figuration, then the relations of the objects had to be fractured, indeed destroyed. The cubists accomplished this and by doing so they had achieved an optical realization of a tendency within psychic experience. In simultané the experience of volume was structured in a new way and differentiated according to the experience of conflicting viewpoints and bodily motion. Now one presents multifaceted, strongly contrasting experiences of directionality and stratification. The planes interpenetrate and intersect each other according to the sequence in which they are envisioned, we have turned away from the perspectival, mathematical idealization of sight. The perennially stationary viewer has become active at last, no longer staring timorously at something inertly immortal. Death is no longer forestalled, rather the tempo and disintegration of life are intensified. Now strong planar structural units had to be found; analysis and vigorous movement demand powerful units if the pictures are not to collapse for want of stability. At that time the cubists found solutions that matched the now dynamic, not yet deadened mental images. These pictorial articulations of space were adapted to important biological needs; for the so-called representation of nature absolutely does not meet all human requirements. If the immanent structure is to be salvaged and preserved, then the usual conceptions of nature have to be shattered so that things no longer inhibit unmediated human experience and conceal or falsify it through their mechanics. The human subject becomes a motor and the environment a sign. A hallucinatory interval disrupts the usual relations between man and his surroundings. Such change is characterized by an autistically free pictorial construction and insulated inner processes. Now things dominate man neither as a premise nor as a macrocosmic analogy. One remains focused on oneself, the classical harmony between man and world has collapsed; man now values himself as the center and objects as peripheral consequences. A hallucinatory automatism of insulated processes or mythic conceptions appears; one can speak of monologically unmediated pictorial works. If organisms and objects suggestively harbor exhausted clichés and thereby become their vehicles, then liberation from them becomes necessary. Now one operates more unconditionally in one’s own myth. Yet this assessment of man is of a functional and pluralistic kind, and so this confinement within subjectivity is rich in variations. One protects oneself from rapid fixation by

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the changing of subjective signs. The subjective dimension of cubism grew out of a radical experience of space containing standard, structural forms. Thanks to collective tectonic signs a subjective vision achieves a formally normative validity, especially because these show deep ties to the archaic. Consequently, what appears to be arbitrary is consolidated into a fateful compulsion. One protects oneself against isolation. We recall that architecture was particularly influenced by cubist painting, which backward souls, their sensitivity roused only by the milk jug, lemon, and women’s thighs, criticize as arbitrary, while they praise pseudo- cubist architecture. Precisely this influence on architecture shows how strongly cubism defined the attitude of the epoch. Precondition for an optical revolt is the dissociation of mental images and the transvaluation of the hierarchy of the real. Now hallucination takes precedence over tautology. Nevertheless in these pictures forms ultimately become objectified. Yet this object is no longer the determining precondition but is the result, the objective aspect is transvalued as a consequence of subjective envisaging and acquires a different human meaning. Thanks to this transvaluation and alteration of the object cubism was able to redefine the conception of the real. In former times one had countered the exhausted Byzantine academy and its formulas with the truth of nature. This was permitted to explode into an exhausted order, yet to the artists of today the realism of Giotto and Duccio appears as a product of style. Then the cubists countered the structureless sentimentality of the impressionists and the fluid nuances of the motif hunters with an unsullied, lucid tectonics. For the naturalistically domesticated this tectonics was admittedly spoiled by abstraction, and they were so unaccustomed to clarity that precise form remained illegible to them. For most people the tectonic hardens into a hopelessly repeated schema, which is understandable, because it is seized upon as a sign of fear and of the desire for permanence. The tectonic, this powerful instrument against nature, then turns itself against man, who, once the protective incantatory formula has succeeded, slavishly repeats it and elevates it to a fetish of his formal rites. Everywhere the human creative drive is inhibited by our penchant for repetition; yet this is a means of self-preservation in the face of change and death, so we can appreciate repetition and the formation of types, not as a rhythmical caprice but as a defense against death. At the same time the tectonic comprises the pictorial symbols of sexuality. In their sign-like representation man celebrates the procreative powers and demonstrates his appreciation for sexuality’s conservative aspect and with it his lack of fantasy. Tectonic forms are frequently symbols of the gods or natural phenomena, thus the phallic vertical, the sign of the sun, et cetera. In other words, one will hardly dare to shatter these religious, vital, and collectively valid signs.

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It attests to the resolute godlessness of contemporary man that we try passionately to destroy the taboos attached to signs that in religious times were reverentially protected. We no longer endow our products with metaphysical meaning but doubt and alter them, for we value change more than permanence (admittedly a relic: helplessly adored by its benumbed admirers). Primitive peoples or members of collective cultures have on the other hand a fear of their own creations, which they elevate to the status of authoritative powers. In Picasso we find considerable freedom vis-à-vis his own creations and his past. Again and again he breaks free of himself, never congealing into his own copyist. Fetishization of persons or phases is stupid and abhorrent. He unceasingly stages his oeuvre as an intervention, yet never stagnates out of reverence for what he has already achieved. Picasso doesn’t want to be a prisoner of his past, so he achieves this surprising capacity for selftransformation that has influenced generations. The different periods of his work serve respectively as models to those limited artists who, faint of heart, labor in his shadow, exploiting fragments of his work. Art’s future development in France depends on whether someone will finally succeed in freeing himself from Picasso’s influence. It has become increasingly rare for Picasso to take the circuitous path through conventional things. The swiftness of his invention goes hand in hand with this freedom from prejudice. Unlike most, he is not compelled to be the dervish of a stylistic poverty, of a mannered idée fixe. He does not allow himself to become captive to any successful solution, of which he is just as skeptical as he is of fateful ties to things. One could attribute this to Picasso’s passionate curiosity. Thus Picasso became a discoverer of signs for our time and creator of its psychograms. He grasped the fragmentary character of individual styles, which exclude far too much; consequently he conceives different solutions and meditates in broad, seemingly contradictory tensions. In the autistic picture the objects resonate peripherally, while in the naturalistic painting (e.g., Vermeer van Delft) the person is extinguished and remains hidden. In both cases the polarizing tendency is held in check, and one could therefore define artworks as a means of violent displacement. Unflinchingly Picasso explores what figurative possibilities lie within man. His commitment to precise definition protects him against unfettered self-fragmentation. Again and again he asks what painting has not yet accomplished and where its limits lay. He regards painting with deep suspicion, seeing it as a medium that sometimes blinds and constricts. Before a picture he discerns what it excludes. For Picasso is rich in contrasts, and therefore senses the one-sidedness of any solution. Thus he often decides in favor of countersolutions. Picasso does not want to be the dupe of any particular manner, his pluralism of styles derives from a skepticism, a reluctance to assume a fixed position. Unlike most, he has never regarded pictures as dogmas or consummate products;

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to him a picture is a stream into otherness, as yet strange. The monotony of the person, the constricted unity of the self, he rightly considers as evil slavery and an excuse made by the intellectually impoverished. The strong artist puts his identity at risk; it’s the price he pays for the transformation of his work. Picasso hurls his person into the distance like a ball, so as to catch it as he leaps onto the other shore. Perhaps he achieves a brief identity within a given picture, so as then to shatter it in a new series of works. What defines Picasso’s oeuvre is the knowledge that every norm is ultimately an intuitive caprice. We reach hallucinatory strata only by bidding farewell to a reality that has become dead for us; what appears to us as arbitrary in relation to convention is an absolutely compelling destiny. In these pictures, which frequently serve contemporary painters as directional markers— for who else had enchanted and influenced his time like Picasso?— he relentlessly broke away from his own work with his metamorphotic forms. It’s this very simultané, this concentration of intersecting visual experiences, that makes possible such copious change. Depending on the selection and linkage of formal strata these intersections of a manifold vision guarantee inexhaustible variation. The quickly bundled jump from look to look that marks simultané corresponds to Picasso’s nimble seeing and his capacity for change. Simultané means giving shape to the crucial stages of optical visualization and unifying them by means of related or contrasting forms. In this way otherwise unconscious transient acts of seeing are revealed, differentiated, and emphasized. Viewpoints are selected, contrasting glances are mutually juxtaposed, and the surface is filled with the tensions produced by shifting viewpoints and the positions of forms. This pluralism of contrasting viewpoints, this timeless rushing from glance to glance, recalls the rapid forces of dreaming. Such speed is possible because mental images are scarcely constrained or disrupted by external motifs. Now an experience of which we were rarely conscious is given form, the hallucinatory elements are clarified and unified pictorially. Then comes the most basic contrast, namely the strongest representation of volume is set into the paradox of the picture plane. By this means a standard of contrast is created. The picture plane acts as a technical unity, and simplification facilitates an extended reach of memory. We are not worn down by our mental images; for thanks to our plastic bodily existence we sense ourselves as a superior spatial power. In this, too, lies part of the meaning of cubism; namely, a richer experience of space ends in the idyllic happiness of the Euclidian plane. All painting has this limit. Yet this planar summation of volumes makes it possible to unify our spatial envisaging, and such simplicity in turn facilitates comprehension and retention. Some have reviled cubist construction on abstract or theoretical grounds, as if it were the average or result of a generalization, more or less as one

1881–1900 Pablo Ruiz Picasso, born in Málaga on October 25, 1881. First instruction from his father. Subsequently attends the art school in Barcelona, at sixteen enters the art school in Madrid. 1901–4 First stay in Paris. The “blue” period. Returns after a short residence to Spain, settles in Paris in 1901. Influence of Toulouse- Lautrec and Steinlen. 1901 first exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery. End of 1901 to end of 1902 residence in Spain. Spring 1904 settles permanently in Paris. 1905 The Rope Dancer, Les bateleurs, or La famille des saltimbanques. 1906 Rose pictures. Travels to Holland, stays in the Pyrenees, in Gosol. 1907 Les demoiselles d’Avignon. 1908 The “negroid” period. Henri Matisse introduces the word “cubism” with reference to a landscape by Braque exhibited in the Salon d’automne.

1909 The landscapes from Horta de Ebro. 1910–14 The period of analytical cubism. 1911 first exhibition of the cubists in Salon des Indépendants, in which Picasso does not participate. 1910 Cadaqués, Spain. 1911 Céret. 1912 Sorgues. 1913 Céret (Buffalo Bill, The Poet, The Man with the Clarinet, The Woman with the Mandolin, Still Life, etc.). 1914–18 Synthetic cubism. 1917 The Russian ballets. 1918–23 The antique period. 1921 Les 3 Masques. The compositions with large women. 1924 The ballet Mercure. 1924–30 Mythic realism. 1925 Woman before the Window. 1928 Dinard, the small beach pictures. 1928 The large interiors.

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characterizes theorems of physics, whose validity extends beyond individual facts. Cubism is not a matter of stylization, because the object is not adjusted but is a peripheral consequence. For this same reason one was subsequently able to create mythic forms. We offer a literary counterexample. Some authors surprise us by the nouns they favor. They rush from totalization to totality, with speedy summations. The tempo of mental images is accelerated; the major factors are emphasized. Yet these nouns are not in the least rational concepts but condensed processes; here the object is broken up as a temporal sequence and oppositions or affinities are abruptly juxtaposed. It’s no different with the formal components in cubist pictures. In the beginning such visionary elements were still demure, perhaps monotonous. Today they have become more sinuous and nuanced in Braque’s work, more violent in Picasso’s. One could say that Picasso’s pictures have become unmetaphorical, his imagination more active.

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Now we offer a short sketch of the work of this protean painter and tell the story of his inquisitive mind. Since we no longer conceive of the world as a finished work of divine perfection but as something unsettled, in progress, and open to question, we are obsessively curious as to which law and tradition will be overturned and refuted tomorrow. These are the rough dates of this multifaceted oeuvre: Picasso was born in 1881 in Málaga. He paints even as a child. At the age of twelve he does a portrait of his parents; it shows speed of execution and precocious skill. In Paris he begins to paint the poor; compact as paintings, sentimental in attitude, almost a tendentious art, a sweet classicism. One may invoke Lautrec, yet this aristocrat appeared more distanced, superior. Contour becomes somewhat angular and flatter in Picasso’s Ironing Woman, the Beer Drinker, the Soup Eater. Division of planes begins; nothing betrays impressionist influence. There is a push toward composition; this is how he paints The Soup in 1903, in 1904 the Crouching Jugglers, in both cases mother and child. Blue dominates these pictures. One may perhaps be reminded of Picasso’s later large figurative pictures after the war. Still he is given to sentiment, stressing gesture and living in the quiet allegories of the symbolists. Everything rides on the sentiment of the figure; the soup bowl, the absinthe glass are used symbolically. A touch of Spanish pathos. Nevertheless, the instinct for composition surprises. From the tearjerker one comes to the quiet world of the harlequins. Poor suffering devils, pale in thin blues, quiet in gray tones, emaciated in languid rose; drawn with lyrical fragility. In his Mardi-gras Cézanne still painted Pierrot and Harlequin like an apple and a banana; humans as still life. Later Picasso will take up these themes anew, yet unsentimentally, untendentiously. 1907: beginning of cubism. He paints Les demoiselles d’Avignon. One has dubbed 1908 the negroid year and with that wanted to suggest a geographical cause for the attempt at planar representation of the cubic. Picasso rejects the link to Negro art: “J’en connais pas.” Farewell to symmetry; he renders figures articulated in planes, their contrasts honed with chiaroscuro. Even more strictly does he avoid the colorism common at the time, restricting his hues to grays and browns. A sense for the plane is gradually achieved. Picasso’s phases now follow logically. He attempts the large figure. What is given in nature is reduced to simple formal entities. Apollinaire called this “instinctive cubism”; it undoubtedly dominates most of today’s painting. Picasso and Braque gave their needy colleagues formal means and challenges from which they themselves later turned away. A tectonic pathos began, which swept up all who had absorbed Cézanne. One constructs nudes out of simple parts of light and dark that abut one another at sharp angles. The years 1908 and 1909 bring figures and heads of this kind (fig. 7.1), as well as the landscapes of Horta. Out of Cézannesque modeling a play of intersecting planes and bodies in relief has emerged; the painter unites shifting axes

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and viewpoints, nudes and heads are rigorously constructed; volumes, contrasts, and cadences of parts are reinforced. If one painted landscapes, then architecture had to be dominant; hence a quick farewell to the sentimentality of the depicted motif. One should decide: whether mechanical imitation or free creation, repetition or invention; something was being asked besides artistic questions, a very human matter was to be decided. The precursors had maintained, art is above all a technical problem, and one may limit oneself to this; yet no one determined where technique ends; whether with the virtuoso, the wax figure, or re-formation. In 1909 Picasso creates a sculpture, the bronze head. Static mass is finally set in motion, the classic planar view is broken up in favor of threedimensional segments. How everyone was influenced by this piece! We recall Boccioni, his Man in Motion, or Archipenko’s Plafond. In the same year Picasso makes his first attempt at sculptopainting [Skulptomalerei]. Archipenko, his lissome shadow, later makes use of this stimulus after Picasso, in 1913, had shown a painted relief: Guitar and Bottle. In 1909 he paints houses and the factory in the Spanish town of Horta. The villas of Cézanne climb upward, the sequence of cubes from Gardanne. In Picasso’s Horta pictures there is a farewell to landscape. A constructive light slices up geometric forms— cubes, rectangles, et cetera. Now volume is constructed out of planes; light has become a tectonic medium. Braque began with this conception as he painted his House [sic] at l’Estaque (1908). Yet the question of priority is meaningless, what’s important are the results: farewell to landscape and its likeness; subjectivity squeezes through, aiming more directly at spatial structure than at the motif; the distance from nature increases in favor of what is immanently direct. The period of figures and still lifes begins. Braque introduces musical instruments. This art of the prewar period achieves a tempo like no art that came later. In the years 1908– 14 the entire repertoire is being prepared; it is a quiet, ardent time of intense concentrated invention, as one rejects history, existing painting, forms of space, and technique, resolving to sacrifice them for the sake of the new. In 1911–12 there is The Man with the Clarinet (Reber Collection), Head of the Poet, in which the comb of the house painter is used for the waves in the hair (Braque adopted this technique from decorative painting, Severini and the futurists pushed it to the use of the things themselves— hair, etc.). Picasso and Braque bring to an end what one hitherto called the portrait. For them figure and portrait are a spatially expressive calligram, articulation of space triumphs over the sentimentality of the individual motif, as handwriting had previously wiped out the organic. This is not the human person becoming space, rather a visual intuition is humanized, individualized. The futurists, with their noisy banalities, drew the practical consequence in their placarded aphorisms: combat eroticism, the nude; all they saw was a popular manifesto.

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Of the figure paintings I single out Man with Clarinet, Woman with Lute, The Poet (fig. 7.2), Kahnweiler’s Portrait, The Head (belongs to Flemming), Buffalo Bill, Woman with Violin, The Torero. A visual-intellectual passion counters the cozy convention that we brazenly call “nature”; a thinking looking insulates itself from a received conception of the picture. These pictures should be seen on their own terms as internally consistent constructions; gestalt as a tectonic surface calligram, multifariously shaped. The representation of a pictorial object unbreached by conventional reality and having nothing in common with the real, the expression of a formal condition is more highly valued than its verification by ancestor, lover, and uncle. If the real is utilized, then it is as a contrasting sign or phrase in a free structure. At this time— up to 1913— Picasso limited his palette to brown and gray; the planes are played off against one another through contrasting chiaroscuro, to intensify the movement of forms. The color of the fauves has now been sacrificed for something more important. Many still lifes date from the years 1910–12; like Braque, Picasso often paints musical instruments. The forms are broken down into planes; the bright hue of the violin wood heralds a turn to color. One loves violins and mandolins, things that are already human creations, which one analyzes with virtuosity and adapts to the surface, thus inventing them anew. In 1911 Braque and Picasso began producing papiers collés.46 At the time they wanted to topple safe craftsmanship, beautiful painting that abounds in safe mechanized effects— more or less the end of bel canto. An old technique inhibits or falsifies the new stimulus. Collage was a medium of precision, a defense against the cheap luck of virtuosity. One deliberately discarded technique for the benefit of a necessary synthesis. One ceases modeling the planes; one wants to show the ultimate structure as purely planar. As early as 1912 Braque and Picasso had enriched the calligraphy of their pictures with letters of the alphabet (fig. 7.3). Now one begins to paste newspaper clippings and wallpaper samples onto the pictures. One speaks images. Imitators misunderstand this as literary or as a joke; they meggendorfed,47 instead of decor they offer commentary or witticisms. In incorporating imitated or actual things, which perhaps counter the works’ constructive character, the starting point of verism is perhaps to be seen. Yet for Braque and Picasso this meant liberating themselves from the seductions of routine and of the model. Onto the drawings, one pastes newspapers, wallpaper, colored papers as preformed planes; these things enforce precision should painting seek to compete with them. From 1914 there is the painted bronze, Glass of Absinthe. Then come the years of synthetic cubism (1914– 18). Picasso now defines the elements by means of color, distinguishes the planes by spots, hatchings, et cetera, and clarifies volume by color contrasts. Dating from these years are the still lifes, the series of tables with still life, tables before a window, and tables before

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a balcony; and he works on figure compositions; notable among them are Card Player (1914), Woman (1914), and the Pierrots from 1918. In the still lifes the cubist means have become so elastic that Picasso totally counters the “real,” the object. The Bather (1915), by the nimble Archipenko, is probably derived from Card Player and Woman down to its color. Alongside the figurative pictures are opulent still lifes, mostly instruments, tobacco pouches with pipe; colorfully geometrical calligrams. In addition to the figure compositions there are important still lifes. The years 1917–18 bring the unfinished portrait of his wife (fig. 7.4) and that of Madame R. Following these works are the large figurative pictures (antique period, 1919–23), preceded by a copy after Corot. Picasso cannily grasps the limits of every style; he is not the captive of any manner. Here some have spoken of Ingrism, then again of the influence of the baroque. Undoubtedly with these works Picasso encouraged the reaction against cubism and the return to classicism. The timorous lapsed helplessly into a decorative classicism. Picasso feels that a single method is too constricting so he turns it into its opposite. Daimonie— permit us this abused word— and play are often difficult to distinguish. Picasso knows the limits of style and of a particular form, regarding them more as a means than as a goal. This wide- ranging man doubts the notion of the single possibility, in irony or desperation he shows the other possibility, the other style, he is a versatile spirit who seldom trusts any clear-cut solution. For him painting is merely a medium, and he sets ingenuity above it, while for Braque painting is everything and the goal. Braque is the Latin, who restricted himself puristically and deliberately sacrificed himself for the perfection of his craft. A resignation that is perhaps just as difficult as any risk, but which occludes certain paths. The classical had been demolished, yet Picasso, full of curiosity, now tested his strength in trying out the classical norm. One shows one’s mastery of pictorial tradition, one could also be an admired classicist. It stimulates him to test his gifts starting from the other direction, starting from the motif. We have already shown how strongly Picasso lives within the tension between oppositions, vividly sensing his person and his identity in the drama of antitheses. Such stylistic pluralism is nothing unusual in French painting. Recall the heroic and sentimental compositions of Poussin; in his case stylistic contrast grew out of a nuancing of the moral content; a kind of Christian dualism is expressed. There are also the examples of Corot and Cézanne. It’s understandable that richer natures suffer from the constriction, the unquestionably limited extract that defines an artwork. This trivial age readily judges what is direct and immediate [das Unmittelbare] as blasphemous willfulness compared to its leached- out clichés, most of which have become untrue through wear and tear. Ultimately laws are achieved only through obsessive arbitrariness and are intuitive; their

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application partly consists precisely in the abrupt refutation of things as they are; measured against the continuity of reasonableness they appear as something extraordinary, as explosions of arbitrariness. In their intuitive origins art and science encounter one another on a narrow point, and some of the formal affinity between them derives from their arbitrariness and obsessiveness. Probably none of today’s painters has been so intensely self-involved as Picasso; the peripheral world was often extinguished for him, and yet from his obsession he always wrested a form with which he enchanted a piece of the world. No matter how far we distance ourselves from the world we are still always projecting ourselves into it, as it exists in a different sense than our mental image of it; mutual captivity. This double directionality creates the possibility of either a free gestalt or a likeness [Abbild]. These diametrically opposite positions are reciprocally conditioned, and free hallucinatory figurations therefore converge with appearances. A painter as self-absorbed as Picasso could be lured into painting objectively and mundanely to prove to himself that he has a firm grip on his legacy. Perhaps Picasso seized possession of history so as not to stand so isolated and to make reference to a narrow slice of now (the decisive factor), however much this is loaded with archaisms. He took hold of the classical past and essayed comparison with the ancients. In so doing Picasso left behind the isolation of the immediate. He painted his classical portraits, made drawings as seductive as the calligrams of late antique vases. Now he sought the corporeally sculptural, worked in a serenely static manner in secure forms, drew sharp contours and looked at becalmed figures. With these works Picasso has opened up old realms for the reluctant, a trend toward conservative restoration began among the weak. In these pictures Picasso pushed the Greek beyond Maillol back to the barbaric; cyclopean classicisms. Massive figures with large eyes declaim or recline beneath the senescent blue and paralyzing sky. In these paintings Picasso found his way back to history and to the officiously recognized figure, found his way back to the figural compositions of his youth and gave formal strength to the themes of his early period. Picasso has simultaneously painted harlequins, still lifes, and figure compositions both cubistically and in an archaizing classical manner; thus he also looked at his themes in terms of the old official formula, developed his world of forms from the perspective of both poles, attempted his truth in the tension of oppositions, without lapsing into the dogmatic application of a single style. Admittedly the cubist solutions seem to us far more substantial since it is they that decided the matter. The structure of intersecting viewpoints is now calmer and more significant. The contouring of forms speaks in curves. Formal relationships flow, clearly emphasized and measured. Color is clearly articulated. The

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segmented viewpoints have now become simplified and broader. Here I am referring to the still lifes and figures. Then there are the darkly menacing natures mortes, whose severity and surging nocturnality recall Zurbarán. Large dark planes are circumscribed by a delicately thin contour that vibrates chromatically like a trembling bow string. Among such things one hears the cries and laments of sketches for a crucifixion, which perhaps will one day form the center of a work. In 1927 Picasso painted figures and heads. Now he broadly manipulates the device of dissected figural contrasts and plays a multivoiced fugue of optical and figural strata. The contrasts, mutually vibrating, are linked by curvaceous joints and musically overwhelm them. A polyphonic style rich in oppositions. He makes use of form’s ambiguity, in other words a single form can signify multiple objects. In 1928 Picasso brought back from Dinard a group of small paintings representing beach scenes. Then he worked on the cycle of three interiors, including Painter and Model (fig. 10.3). Here the hallucinatory is crisply tectonic. Fugitive visions are resisted with a minimum of static forms and accents. To counter the leaps and deluge of the psyche’s torrents Picasso erects a static barrier of forms. Now the barricade of conservative things is swept away, Picasso is far removed from the grip of remembered conventions and ascetically committed to something new that simultaneously appears as the most ancient seeing. One deploys a minimum of technical conventions; for nothingness is the precondition of all creation. The object, because it dualistically splits and thereby weakens psychic processes, impeded the free shaping of gestalten. In these pictures Picasso avoids anything tautologically conservative and does not repeat the usual biological forms of things. Now pictorial creatures [Bildgeschöpfe] identical with the creating subject appear, released from eclectic seeing. Unmetaphorical images are created, with no need of verification, for one has escaped captivity by things. Here and there a trace of the thinglike is evident, a contrasting paradox. The imaginary, insofar as it has not yet been made to conform to the conventions of the tangible world, is unverifiable; the more laggardly allegorizing reason is adapted only later. Picasso has now overrun the conventions of the mediately real, which is still fetishistically venerated like some transcendental substance. Encountering these pictures, anxious souls will perhaps invoke the normal, which for us appears dead, a mechanized abstraction. With the normal, this democratic fiction, one can defend mediocrity and falsify it as a measure of value. A most important human dimension inhabits these pictures. One no longer humbly accepts the given. The hallucinatory, or the unconscious, no longer acts as a rigidified constant (as in Freud), but as the very force for all change. Here what is static represents a severe compromise of extended yet rapid processes, against which there is an all the more turbulent reaction.

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10.3. Pablo Picasso, Painter and Model, 1928. Oil on canvas, 129.8 × 163 cm. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Pictures are very much the carrefours of psychic experiences of which, for good or evil, the important elements are strengthened by choice. The series of studio paintings displays a severe, particularly archaic structure, a defense against an errant animistic madness (figs. 10.2, 10.3). Still, such forms are not of a recidivist kind, since they afford new relations and forms of space. The geometrical line is clearly defined so that a solution is quickly achieved. Scientific truth really means limitation. The strength of Picassoesque line lies in its ambiguous richness of reference and the integration of different axes of sight. Every form can be read as positioned in different spatial strata that are nonetheless related to a single plane. In Studio I one observes plotted-out fields of influence of the individual figures. One could speak of auras. In Studio II the form fields are sharply separated and the signs inscribed on the masks align with the vertical axis of the picture.48 These completely invented creatures wear constructed masks with parts arranged in accord with the compositional whole. The formal, not the bio-

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logical, canon is in force, the law of transformation and not of repetition. The vital meaning of these pictures stems from the value of the unmediatedly real over a naturalized mechanism. One provides orientation that is true within the terms of the composition; the telepathy of invented formal analogies is in force. These pictures are far removed from a genre-like description of psychic processes, which describes its motif just as loquaciously as an anecdotal genre picture. The concise means suit the rapidity of the hallucination and an elementary archaism. At this time Picasso created a series of figure compositions, creatures of a formal mythology that springs from a formal immanence, remote from any commentary. These unmediated visions appear at the farthest point from the mimetic and the ordinary. These images emanate from as yet untamed psychic domains and overtake reason’s calculations. The ancient signs for post, skull, house, and womb are rediscovered. These works attest that today it is the isolated individual who articulates what is typical of humanity because he does not exhaust himself on detours to dead conventions. Yet what is isolated speaks in the early types of collective signs; it’s the mark of an unhappy time that anything typical has become disfigured into an untrue exception. Picasso is a signal of the freedom that is possible for our time. Never has he been content with passive perception. The sole possibility for man is man himself, and so Picasso is compelled in every hour to leap beyond his own shadow and invent it anew. All creation is self-estrangement and selfdetachment. Picasso leads the struggle between the unmediatedly human structure and an external reality that has withered away. Art for him has been a continual extension of self-awareness. Picasso is not content with a grotesque redrawing, he avoids the witty double game of comparisons, in which each player is reduced to allegory. Even the shadows of his figures are not rendered as doppelgänger, instead they become one of many oppositional emanations of the human person. Shadows, too, are adversaries and Janus is no longer a mirror of the self, but a sign of transformation and of contrast. Picasso had understood that the autonomous picture requires the death of the real. This process is accelerated because new chunks of imagination are exploded into it. These images relentlessly dissolve every reality outside of their own. Yet Picasso creates a dense formal shield, countering his hallucinations by means of the sharp-edged tectonic definition of his gestalten. Here the passive psychograms of intuition no longer suffice. The tectonic serves the picture somewhat like a rhyme, like the conclusion of the acts in a tragedy. Now one can speak of a mantic, psychographic birth of things. Picasso compensates for the subjective element by means of a tectonics through which his discoveries become types. He counters the fatality of the uncon-

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scious with the will to a precise gestalt and his pictures consequently span both poles. One can speak here of an inner dialectic, of a psychically polyphonic structure. Picasso shows that the real is a human invention and must always be invented anew, because it is continually dying away. By means of a state of divinatory possession, Picasso has achieved mythic formations and conditions. Man is no longer a mirror, but a possibility for the future. Such figural myths appear to us to be truer than all depiction, for due to their incomparability they remain irrefutable. Picasso’s cyclical existence indicates a relentless consumption of form and a vigorous contempt for fetishes. Into a weary reality Picasso has spun blocks of invention and myth. He won’t allow himself to be fooled by the limits of art-making. Picasso has invented mythic cycles for his time. He proves that man and the world are being daily invented by human beings.

CH. 11

THE ROMANTIC GENERATION From The Art of the 20th Century, 1931

The most significant change in the third edition of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century was his addition of a chapter on the surrealists. Yet an innocent reader would never guess from the text that these painters were associated with that name, since Einstein completely avoids the term, as he had in his earlier essay on André Masson (text 9).1 The one time that identifier appears in the chapter is with reference to “writers of the surrealist group,” which reads almost as if they belonged to a separate, unrelated movement.2 He makes no mention of André Breton, the founder and leader of the surrealists.3 In fact, he names only three painters associated with surrealism, and then only toward the end of the chapter: Masson (“the most gifted of them”), Joan Miró, and, very briefly, the ultramarginal Gaston- Louis Roux.4 Max Ernst goes unmentioned, and the four works by him in the plate section, all postdating his move to France, are grouped with the Germans. Salvador Dalí is altogether

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absent.5 Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti each receive a perfunctory paragraph in the book’s single chapter on sculpture.6 Einstein’s titling the chapter “The Romantic Generation” also suggests that there was more at stake for him than the production of any single artistic movement, another “ism” to be added to the modernist Babel. The artists he names exemplify something much larger: a “turn to romanticism” (Wendung zur Romantik) that constitutes a radical historical change, an epochal shift.7 This new romanticism is a revolt against the constraints and repressions of a “technological civilization” ruled by reason and standardization; it is defined by the rediscovery of a “longforgotten power . . . namely a free, mythic mode of vision.” With hindsight, Einstein now dates this turn back to the prewar era, to the cubists and artists of the Blaue Reiter. In the chapter’s opening pages Einstein lays out the genesis of this change. The transformation of the world by technology revealed that it was possible “to alter and augment the real to an unforeseen degree.” The rise of a “primitive” industrial working class, a new human type, was a reminder that so- called human nature was malleable. Already in the nineteenth century thinkers such as the geometer Bernhard Riemann revealed the extent to which “reality” is a product of conventions. Biology revealed that human beings are a fluid collection of “functional relations.” The notion of man as a rational being was further undermined by Friedrich Nietzsche and by Sigmund Freud’s rediscovery of the life of the drives, “these counterforces to rationality, in dreams and the unconscious.” There was thus a “discrepancy between psychic flow and rational standardization, or the traditional image of the real.” This subversion of faith in the sovereignty of reason in philosophy and psychology had brought about a romantic turn. This state of affairs gave a new significance to art: artists now strove to capture these psychic processes in images and “impos[e] them onto our conception of the real.” Einstein’s avoidance of the term surrealism and any reference to Breton could perhaps be explained by his earlier association with Documents and the split in the surrealist movement that reached a critical point in the winter of 1929/30. That December Breton published his second surrealist manifesto, which included a vehement attack on Georges Bataille and the dissident surrealists (including Masson), many of whom had become associated with Documents.8 Bataille and company responded within weeks with Un cadavre (A corpse), in which Bataille skewered Breton as an “old religious windbag,” an “old aesthete and false revolutionary.”9 It’s noteworthy that Dalí and Ernst, excluded from Einstein’s chapter, signed the second surrealist manifesto in support of Breton, while Masson was an early dissident and Miró kept his distance.10

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Yet Einstein’s silences and omissions, which make for such a skewed view of surrealism, may have another explanation. Both Masson and Miró came to surrealism through cubism (unlike Ernst and Dalí), and Einstein appears to have become familiar with Masson’s work not through surrealism but through Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler signed Masson to a contract in 1922 when the painter was still working under the influence of cubism, and gave him his first solo exhibition in 1923. Both he and Miró, who had studios in the rue Blomet, had embarked on their “surrealist” path before they met Breton early in 1924.11 When Einstein first expressed an interest in Masson to Kahnweiler in 1926, Masson’s painting still bore traces of the influence of analytic cubism.12 This may explain the odd placement of the so-called surrealist chapter in The Art of the 20th Century, immediately following the one on cubism and before that on futurism, a movement that had dissolved in 1915! Perhaps Einstein wanted to stress the contribution of the “romantic generation” as emerging out of cubism; he notably includes Picasso himself in this genealogy as having “stepped beyond the formal bonds of his generation.” For cubism’s transformation of space now appears as a limited breakthrough. “Seeing had become functional, but was still bound to a static construction of signs. . . . The problem remained: if space could be altered, then it followed that so, too, could the conception of the real and the construction of gestalten.” Cubism fell short in this respect, because ultimately the pictorial result was a “known motif,” while the “romantic” artists saw their task as creation of new objects through the capture of images arising from dreams and the unconscious. “Here we are referring to psychic automatism,” Einstein explains. Even if he never mentions Breton, Einstein embraces automatism, which for Breton was the very definition of surrealism: “psychic automatism in its pure state,” without “any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”13 Automatism becomes fundamental to Einstein’s notion of a new romanticism, which he sees as manifest not only in the art of these younger painters but also in that of Picasso, Klee, and Braque.14 Yet there is an important distinction between Breton’s conception of automatism and what Einstein makes of it. This emerges from a reading of Breton’s most lucid statement on the subject, “Le Message automatique” (The automatic message), published in 1933 in Minotaure. Here he is at pains to distinguish the automatic writing and drawing of the surrealists from that of spiritualist mediums. Spiritualist automatism, in which the subject becomes the medium for a “spirit,” is marked by “the dissociation of the subject’s psychological personality— surrealism proposes nothing less than the unification of that personality. For us, obviously, the question of the externality of the ‘voice’ . . . could not even be raised.”15 Now

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Einstein’s notion of automatism is not identical with the mediumistic writing and drawing of spiritualists, but in certain respects it shares traits with how Breton understands them, precisely in the dissociation of the subject. For Einstein, the notion of the human subject as “an aggregate of functional relations,” as he describes it in this chapter, is the antithesis of any “unification” of that subject. Moreover, for him the hallucinations arising from automatism generate “states of possession.” The “pictures are stations en route to death, marks of self-destruction.” What Einstein must have found particularly exciting about automatism was that he could connect these trancelike states, moments of “selfannihilation,” with the ritual practices of the indigenous cultures of Africa. He believed the gap between the European avant- garde art he championed and the art practices of indigenous and archaic cultures had narrowed; art was partaking in a process he calls the “primitivization of existence,” a phenomenon he identifies with a return to a collective, mythic worldview (text 9). Einstein saw the unrestrained submission to repressed sexual drives as a means of bodily transformation, analogous to what he had described in the last chapter of Negro Sculpture (text 3), in which he dealt with tattoos as an instance of bodily metamorphosis, related to the notion of the body as “an unfinished work.” The submission to “perversion”— this is what he calls it here— reshapes the image of the human form. Throughout the chapter Einstein affirms this new art as evidence of the “primitivization” that has taken hold in Western culture, and he celebrates that. At the same time he stresses the differences: whereas these irrational, hallucinatory practices had a collective basis in such cultures, now they are “autistic,” limited to individuals, while the culture at large remains rational. Yet he believes that this art can function as a kind of “infection,” transferring the effect of hallucination onto the viewer. This turn in Einstein’s writing on modern art was anticipated to a striking degree in the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century: The more we expanded our knowledge of the biological basis, of the breadth of human existence, the more meaningful became primitive man, who had preserved forgotten links and stages of human cultural behavior. For the European, obsessed with the distant past, primitive cultures often became a means of stretching history backward. Such an inclination arose also from the resistance to rational enlightenment; reason was only the visible tip, undergirded by the more powerful forces of dream, instinct, feeling; among the primitives we could still find mythic cultures. A hierarchy of instincts repressed in Europe; a tyranny of the dream and ecstatic rite. Not arrogant individualism, not psychologizing personalism, but homogenizing community. (K1, 117–18)

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This passage appeared in the section on Emil Nolde, incorporated into a critique of the artist— Einstein derided him as a Kolonialmaler (colonial painter) who was practicing an escapist, sham primitivism pursued in ignorance of the actual circumstances of the cultures that inspired him (K1, 118). Yet Einstein came to identify closely with the European cultural attitude he described here; it soon began to shape his criticism and his interpretation of the historical significance of the art of Picasso, Braque, Klee, and the surrealists. Einstein’s relative silence concerning the art of the surrealists— other than this chapter he published only three short pieces, on Masson (text 9), Miró, and Arp16— suggests that ultimately he found the ideas associated with surrealism, most notably automatism and the privileging of the dream, more interesting than the art directly identified with it. We find the likely explanation for this attitude elsewhere, in the Picasso section of the book (text 10). There Einstein writes of how “collective, tectonic forms elevate the subjective visions to a normative validity and lead from the stage of unconscious possession to a conscious construction of form.” It is tectonic form that gives the artist’s subjective hallucinatory visions durability and collective validity. This is essential if these new forms are to become part of the mental imagery of the beholder. Only in this way can art shape a new reality. By giving these visions “form and structure” the gifted artist can “conquer the world and register his visions as anticipated types of a future existence” (K2, 69). It was, it seems, precisely the tectonic aspect that Einstein found weak or completely lacking in the pictures of the surrealist artists. In his earlier essay on Masson, he refers to the activation of the tectonic, yet he conspicuously does not say that Masson takes that step; instead he yields completely to the process of psychic automatism, and in the resulting psychogram there is “no external order” (text 9). For these young artists, we read in the present chapter, “formal wholeness” is not a value. “The tectonic, which all too quickly impedes the process and forces a preconceived selection, is scarcely valued any more.” It was not the surrealists who best realized what Einstein defines as the agenda of the “romantic generation,” but Picasso and Klee. In this chapter Einstein returns to an issue about which he had been silent for a decade. Throughout the 1920s, following his intense political engagement during the immediate postwar era, manifested in “On Primitive Art” (text 4) and other contemporaneous texts, he seemed untroubled by questions concerning the political agency of avant-garde art. When he did broach the topic, he sarcastically dismissed efforts by artists such as George Grosz (K1, 150) and the Russian avant-garde (K1, 160) for what he perceived as their artistic weaknesses— the road to bad art was paved with good political intentions. But now Einstein sees an

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impending crisis in the estrangement of the ascendant “primitive” industrial proletariat from the dominant culture, not to mention its relation to the avant-garde. The failure of artists and intellectuals to face this issue was a cause for their “increased isolation.” He would address this issue at greater length in Georges Braque (text 13), and the crisis would come to a head in The Fabrication of Fictions (text 14). For now he sweeps it under the rug. Despite the “autism” of psychograms and hallucinations, he reasons, the young artists’ obsession with sexuality gives their art a “universal basis.” They “instinctively defend themselves against splitting off and commit themselves to collective groups and forces.” When Einstein’s views on the avant- garde turned virulently negative a few years later, the “infantile” and “regressive” practices of the avantgarde would be a major target. ■

R

ecent French painting seems governed by two fundamental conflicts. One can no longer come to terms with reality, whether by accepting it in religious humility or idealizing it out of awe. There is a further deep-seated split between the civilization as a whole and individual experience, especially since the Latin heritage and bourgeois rationalism preclude far too many energies and experiential modes. Of course, beginning with the impressionists there already emerged a more active resistance to the classical tradition. Still, they were concerned above all with technical issues and problems of painting; the poets, too, were caught up in issues of craft and, other than Rimbaud, hardly anyone displayed traits of a decidedly new type. “Un coup des dés” of Mallarmé, in which he boldly transgressed literary decoration, remained misunderstood or unknown, and Lautréamont, who belongs wholly to romanticism, even as he surpassed all of his contemporaries in intellectual intensity, had remained completely anonymous or was regarded as a literary monstrosity. Instead one read the Catholicizing Baudelaire, who remained an old Latinist in his technique, disseminating morally dusty original sins; far too long one believed that Flaubert, a fallen romantic, a man of feeble invention and petit bourgeois pedantry who in reality loved the old declamation, had created a style of language: an error of the literary petite bourgeoisie that, curiously, persisted longer in Germany than in France. Language was deployed according to sound and solid, repetitive rhythm, a technique of soporific monotony. The painters worked with chromatic equivalents, striving to achieve a compromise between a more autonomous technique and ordinary perception, in other words optical prejudice. This attitude was consistent with bourgeois liberalism, which attempted the magical feat of reconciling conflicting tendencies by a policy of mutual

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tolerance. The programs may have maintained their respective fervor, but the facts, if viewed without bias, remained quite gentle. Even Christianity was dominated by these tendencies, everything transcendent about it was diluted or veiled in favor of rational comprehensibility. One remained the untroubled craftsman of one’s poems or pictures, grazed in the greenery, celebrated female flesh, harmlessly chanted hackneyed feelings; probably the accent shifted from Virgil into late Latinity. What remains important is that, in spite of all that has been said, an element of dissolution inhabits impressionist analysis, though one was hardly aware of its deeper implications. Almost no one asked to what extent art could be a means for influencing and altering the structure of the psyche and of existence; instead one strove in pictures for a comfortable arrangement in the naive belief that pictures were merely a matter of technically autonomous seeing; precious yet piddling bibelots. Education had become so compartmentalized that the old higher spheres of intellectual life had died out; in any case painting was no longer tied to a meaningful intellectual superstructure; the artist remained a technician of sublimated enjoyment. Certainly the introduction of fluid light caused a considerable unsettling of perception; what had been classically static began to totter. With the rise of the working class came a cultural shift. Here a mass of people was asserting itself that did not yet know much at all about the dominant culture; this posed a problem that hasn’t been resolved even today, namely, whether this dominant culture should be adapted to a more primitive class or whether that class should be defenselessly bourgeoisified. The intellectuals and artists of western Europe have up to now hardly adjusted to this fact and this explains their increased isolation. In the east, on the other hand, a fragile art initially disappeared in the storm unleashed by social forces. Theater, cinema, and journalism remained. In the west artists and intellectuals kept to themselves and engaged in aesthetic discussions brimming with technical slogans that were rarely subjected to critical examination. They used dead criteria and sanitized canvases. And so the intellectual level of artists declined miserably into pure craftsmanship. Yet the ascendancy of the working class presented a major problem, that of the primitivization of civilization. The conception of man and faith in the constancy of this well-nigh deified type gave way to the realization that man and his qualities are not immutably fixed but are a product of cultivation. Perhaps Hegel and Nietzsche had a more significant influence on such trends than the biologists, since they took the problem beyond physiology to the mind, which is specific to man. Thanks to technology one had understood that it is possible to alter and augment the real to an unforeseen degree. We find the intellectual premises for such technological boldness in physics. Riemann had established that

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geometry works with conventions and definitely not with distinct realities; that is, that beyond so-called naive experience we can make a more or less arbitrary selection of elements in order to shape a space that suits us. It also happened that the stable elements were shattered and, perhaps due to the influence of the biologists, functional relations now received greater emphasis than the elements themselves. In other words: the classical-static world picture had been transformed into one that was defined by ambiguous functional relationships. Having grasped the importance of the functional, one had to ask on what assumptions such an interpretation was based. One could observe and comprehend function only if the one doing the comprehending, namely the human subject, represents an aggregate of functional relations. We have shown that the divinely fixed human type was shattered by the empirical knowledge derived from biology. Now, moving from a static conception, from a continuous and stable psychic substance, one comes to psychology, that is, to the exploration of psychic functions. But if the psyche was no longer an unchanging substance, acting independently, this meant that psychic types can be altered, and this quest gradually had to crystallize into the principal task of the human being. Up to this point man was understood to be a rational being, an extraordinary overestimation of ratio was being perpetuated because it offered and comprised ostensibly inalterable and stable knowledge. A reassessment began already with Nietzsche, who revealed the dominant influence of the drives, compared with which reason played the role of an inhibitory force against life. This reassessment was then notably reinforced by Freud, who rediscovered these drives, these counterforces to rationality, in dreams and the unconscious. Thus began a turn to romanticism in psychology as well as in philosophy. Certainly it would be wrong therefore to classify the present age simply as romantic; opposing it is the acutely conscious struggle of the working masses, whose fate is bound up with technology; on the other hand it is characteristic of recent psychology that it has been practiced as a psychology of the concrete person. We believe we have highlighted the crucial intellectual events of recent decades. Now we must ask: what role could visual art play within these developments and to what extent could it even respond to them; that is to say, was art still relevant for our time or was it a dead historical residue? In other words, over and beyond art’s value as craftsmanship we are asking about the only value that counts, the human value, and with that question we move beyond a merely aesthetic discussion, which ultimately remains fruitless. Painting, visual art generally, had for far too long degenerated into the technique of the bibelot. The appreciation for mindless decoration held sway, shamelessly.

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It seems that after a long interval it was only with cubism that art found its way back to an intellectual position and painters had intervened more strongly than before in changing the world picture. We won’t deny that this realignment of painting stayed hidden from most, who remained caught up in aesthetic drivel; the vanity of prima donnas, who imagined themselves independent of their time, hindered such insight. One wanted still above all always to remain the free, independent technician and specialist, and therefore humanly inconsequential. Such a position was characteristic of people at the beginning of the twentieth century. One could characterize this type of artist as indifferent to form, that is, as one who is wholly the captive of the procedures of his craft. Art remained an inexplicable realm beyond, and the artist had inherited the reckless irresponsibility of the bankrupt gods; a remnant of ancient idealism and blithe cowardice. What was needed was an open discussion of the moral position of painters. With cubism the image of space had been transformed. Following the mathematicians but acting independently of them, painters learned that space does not imply a stable quantity. Seeing had become functional, but was still bound to a static construction of signs; herein lies the affinity of cubism to classical art. The problem remained: if space could be altered, then it followed that so, too, could the conception of the real and the construction of gestalten. Consequently art unexpectedly assumed a significantly active role, even if this wasn’t widely understood. In this connection it should be noted: not every change in art occurs in that mysterious or incoherent way that has been designated with the term Stilwollen,17 but is conditioned by a change in the character of the artist. In other words, psychic displacements came into play and this may be more significant than the entirety of aesthetic side effects. Up to now art has served mostly to reinforce an order that in the end evaporated totally. Yet now the artist is working subversively, dissolving the existing psychic hierarchy. Cézanne has been closely linked with cubism far too often and too easily. For this reason we need to consider the thoroughly different human disposition of this artist. In Cézanne we observe a restoration of impressionism; he deliberately solidified it into a museum art by subordinating the analytical elements to an indissoluble, synthetic construction. Cézanne was a conservative type; it is characteristic of his intuition that for him the individual motif is based on general arrangements and permanent form types. Certainly cubism had a related approach, but differed totally insofar as it ruptured the cliché of classical space. Gradually one came to realize that the known motif absolutely did not have to be the end point of human processes, but that out of them an as yet unknown or unexpected gestalt may grow. Thus was a long-forgotten power rediscovered, namely a free, mythic

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mode of seeing. One could almost say that chance or destiny again became part of seeing. From this it followed that psychic events and their results do not coincide with the causal, mechanical processes of the real. The problem of man’s irrational dimension emerged clearly, yet was hardly acknowledged. One could almost sense a dread of this discovery. Pictures thus became forces for destruction and disorder as soon as psychic processes were transcribed with less bias, and methods of rational selection were not deployed from the start. Now the basis of classical art, namely the correspondence between mental image and reality and their mutual equilibrium, was thoroughly shattered and classical optimism along with it. The questionable harmony between man and nature was destroyed, and as a result the beautifying or stylizing picture had no currency. We have established the discrepancy between psychic flow and rational standardization, or the traditional image of the real. With that realization the mimetic tendency in art was finished because it excluded important psychic forces; the classical norm and the serene balance between subjective experience and objective convention had become ineffectual. The anticlassical turn began, a significant event for the history of French culture. Yet this development simultaneously posed the problem of a conflict between individual and milieu; for free visions occur only in isolation. A countertendency or resistance against technological civilization emerges. Perhaps this is an early defense by the individual against collectivization. Once the psychic flow no longer coincides with the “real,” belief in a unified causality is ruptured, the stimulus of the available structures and the logical processual schemes are exhausted and unassimilated psychic forces awaken. The way is then opened for an expression of apparently unlogical processes. Pictures by younger artists display considerable abandonment; without anxiety one registers psychic events as they unfold, that is, one follows inner automatism in free analogies, noting unflinchingly that these hardly coincide with external events. From this one emerges with a changed moral demeanor with which only few painters seem prepared to cope. At first one doesn’t bother with beautiful effects, mistrusting the completion of the picture and any sense of equilibrium, because both demand excessive inner restraints and sacrifices; one attempts to escape such castration by civilization and milieu. One knows two strata of the psyche in which man expresses himself more freely and unconditionally: the realms of the dream and of the unconscious. With acceptance of these crucial forces the crisis of Latinity had begun and the turn to romanticism accomplished. Psychic powers were now reassessed. Reason is now regarded as an inhibition and a narrow sampling, its results as dead debris. Psychic processes are severed from the conventional mechanics of the real and become autonomous. One follows these inner events and relates them in pictorial signs.

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With the rapid growth of technological civilization and the resulting standardization of human beings into a part of the production process, a large mass of repressions had accumulated that now came bursting through. Such transvaluations always occur whenever, acting from a mechanized consciousness, an excessively large mass has enforced tremendous repressions. A parallel example is the turn to mysticism at the end of the Hellenistic epoch. Violently one tries to displace the crushing weight of consciousness, history, and mechanizing conventions. A similar regression to primitivism can be observed among the early Christians, inner processes began to dominate and the technological culture of the Romans collapsed. An incomparable shift in values came about, as inner mythic forces were directed against the state and milieu; admittedly, in those times the psychic processes were projected onto an objectified God. Similar tendencies can be observed again at the end of the Middle Ages, for example, with Francis of Assisi, who sacrifices the hierarchy of the church to a sentimental solution. Thus the primitivization of existence emerges as one of the most significant trends in contemporary art. Inner experience is set unchecked against the mass of cultured, bourgeois prejudices. To be sure, it’s doubtful whether this effort is strong enough to succeed in disrupting conventions, especially since only a small circle of people is influenced by such attempts; for the question is whether the artist represents only the most vulnerable type and his experiences deeply affect only weaker sorts. In any case artists were driven to cease cultivating art as a technique of beautiful prejudices, no longer using it as a servile instrument for reinforcing the prevailing order; now they dared to record compulsive processes and freely represent inner analogies. The cubists had consolidated different optical viewpoints and expanded the selection of optical movements. Now one presented discrepant objectrelated analogies, that is, one left behind the phase marked by indifference to the object or by its destruction, and attempted to record concrete psychic processes, injecting them into reality by dint of images and imposing them onto our conception of the real. For cubism as well as for this more recent art it remains important that, coming from seamless causal relations such as similarity, transition, et cetera (the usual continuity is merely a result of mechanization), one disrupted the comfortable order of things, revealing incoherence, disorder, unexpected irrationality. Hence: one notably expanded the chosen range of psychic factors and introduced chance, the fateful and scarcely expectable, as an important force. This manifests itself in the emphasis on hallucinatory and psychographic processes; one submits to intuition, which dictates the gestalten, and one seeks to seize these by means of drawing, that is, one no longer accepts the world as something finished but as thoroughly provisional and strives to infuse it with not yet worn-out experiences and viewpoints by sacrificing oneself to a fateful

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inspiration. This changed the nature of the artist. The conscious, volitional creator gives way to a passive, suffering type who yields to obsessions and initially shuts down his own will, yet will perhaps subsequently shield himself against his suffering by means of protective tectonic forms, congealing the accelerated inner psychic flow in stable, tranquil forms. Here we are referring to psychic automatism. Obviously this is marked by a certain lack of contrast, so that psychograms often assume an ornamental character. Yet because of their element of surprise and unexpectedness these psychograms differ from ornaments that repeat regular forms by their imprévu. The automatic flow is often disrupted or subsequently corrected, rather as one might alter one’s dreams in the telling of them. By the activating of consciousness a psychic double game comes into play that corresponds to the opposition of psychogram and tectonic form. The counterpoint of contrasting psychic realms generates a double game akin to romantic irony. From time to time the painter, rather like a fakir, will augment the suggestiveness of his influence and train himself to activate the automatic processes within himself. Should one wish to communicate these processes one had to free oneself from the static, regularized character of cubist pictures, and so a dynamic art emerged, which is to say: what one captured was above all movement itself, no longer integrated into a preordained constructive schema. Perhaps such dynamism suits the human subject of today, who gradually evolved from a settler into a wanderer and belongs to a society that revolves in a state of permanent wandering. Yet if one dared to introduce irrational psychic processes, events from the realms of the dream and of the unconscious, then the conception of the person had to be altered anew. The human subject was no longer this image of order, no longer a stable type, but a bundle of events difficult to assess, concealed for far too long so as to preserve intact the image and likeness of God. The ideal conception of man was therefore violently shattered, the more so as objective values had disintegrated. The lack of inhibitions among these younger artists perfectly matches the general attitude of today. We hardly have criteria any longer, in our private affairs all is permitted. Art, like contemporary man, has become godless, the authoritative aesthetics of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance has for now completely broken down. If one acted with fewer inhibitions toward oneself, pursued what was repressed, then one discovered a subsoil, namely that of sexuality. If one now recorded these mental processes with less bias the sexual perversions also had to break through and be registered. So here, too, the image of the ideal human being was destroyed. And yet in perversions a creative drive emerges, one tries namely to free oneself from physiological destiny and unambiguousness, one wants to escape the fate of an imposed unambiguous bodily form and reject the vanity of the classicist. The pervert is not satisfied

1. The synthesis of impressionism; consummated by Matisse and the early Derain. 2. The tectonic regrouping of space and of spatial elements combined with the destruction of objects for the purpose of refiguring them; the stage of early cubism.

Now one had to ask: what forces had compelled such destruction, and which objects or representational analogies were to replace objects that were no longer psychically viable? This destruction was induced by the reshaping or regrouping of psychic energies, by a liberation of repressions. If the inherited, mechanized forces were no longer effective, this promptly raised questions concerning the object, concerning a new content of the mental image [neuen Vorstellungsinhalt]. At first one felt that a mental image is not a concise abstract extract but a long process; it was therefore necessary to record the important stages or analogies within the complex of the mental image. If, however, one sought new connections between objects, then previously rejected or little used psychic powers had to be newly awakened, which means: tapping into the circuits of repressions. Art especially generates an enormous number of such repressions, because in it one encounters a particularly trenchant selection of experiences and sensations; for what the naive viewer applauds as artistic discipline is by and large merely craven narrowness and an accumulation of prejudices. Two basic processes reveal such repressions in a truer light: the dream and the unconscious. If one availed oneself of these realms then one had to make the move to a hallucinatory art. The hallucinatory has nothing to do with the ludicrous abstraction of the aesthetes nor with a vague idealism; we consider these artists realists of the immanent. With reference to cubism we spoke previously of the irruption of a hallucinatory interval, that is: as yet untamed psychic forces are interspersed with conventional conceptions. To begin, we emphasize an important aspect of contemporary hallucinations. In earlier times dreams and the unconscious were focused on God and took the form of prophecies or visions, they were thus interpreted col-

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with the available sexual means, he creatively generates new forms of stimuli and release. In other words: perversion compels us to revise our conception of man and explodes the conventional image. We can say that perversion is the basis of the imaginative. So if one records and finds an outlet for repressions the rational image of man is shattered and sexual conventions with it. Thus is one impelled to change and expand the bodily image of man. The phases that French art has passed through during the past twenty years break down roughly as follows:

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lectively and considered to be foundations of existence. Today they are very much experiences of individuals and for that reason appear arbitrary; we say “appear” advisedly, because psychic forces erupt compulsively. The psychogram corresponds to the unconscious; the compulsive psychic flow is known by the name “automatism.” We note once more that autistic characteristics are preponderant in this art. Yet they are strongly constrained by one factor, that of regression, of psychic archaism. As soon as the forces of the dream and the unconscious are roused, atavisms, ancient repressions long dormant, hardly touched, are activated. These old regressions commonly manifest archaic, collective features. We note that these attempts to record new psychic experiences simultaneously stir up the most ancient strata. From a historical standpoint such endeavors are therefore extremely complex. Corresponding to what is most new is an even stronger regression, which simultaneously operates in a stronger retroactive extension of the historical aspect. Simultaneously a tremendous excitement seizes the individual, who swings like a pendulum between a new effort and the most ancient memory. With such an intensified regression one became even further removed from the classical position. Now the artist pursues his visions in psychograms. No longer are wakefulness and control valued but rather unrestrained submission, one is overcome by a downright masochistic mood. Censorship by reason is resisted as are tectonic and classical restraints. Wakefulness is now considered an inhibited dream, a diminished hallucination, while the unconscious, or the automatism of analogies, is elevated to the most important means of discovery and invention; one returns to the mantic. As in a dream one records analogies, that is relationships that are not part of a rationally bound, causal sequence but that follow upon one another in abrupt, obsessive compulsion and that we can interpret by making symbolic connections. Thus emerges a psychographic handwriting that occasionally recalls the paintings of somnambulists. Now and then one protects oneself against this inner dynamism by launching controls, that is by ironic contrast, and slows the psychographic process by tectonic antitheses. Stasis was a result of fear of death, a means of arresting the process of rolling headlong toward death, it was a safety belt for the terrified. This static safeguard had been strengthened to such a degree that an indifference, an equanimity toward death was achieved, producing such calm that only aesthetic factors were still valued. Now one abandons oneself anew to this desperate psychic flow, no longer remaining indifferent, seeing in art something like a confirmation of one’s own annihilation. One paints out of cruelty toward oneself, and such pictures are stations en route to death, marks of self-destruction. If the artist yields to this inner flow without bias, a kind of immanent impressionism will likely emerge. Partial symbols or contrasting signs of

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events become linked. Things are rendered not as attributes of permanence but as symptoms of inner processes and in keeping with the psychic flow. So one records things not for the sake of completeness, but transcribes them according to the psychic accents; in other words: one captures the psychically important elements or features. Here we recall the participation of the primitives, in which a part that is symbolically most important stands for the whole. Because one records things not as detached objects but as the content and stages of psychic processes, they become active. To state it differently: they themselves become forces within our soul. We observe here another typical regression, namely into animism. Now the persons of today feel threatened by their inner images, just as the primitives were frightened by the ax or the tree, which they fashioned into demons and then sought to placate. If the artist isolates these processes, he necessarily dissolves the tectonic markers of permanence as well as something else, namely the apprehension of space that ties things together. Symptoms of experience fly curvaceously onto the canvas, barely stabilized as static elements, and in this submission to dynamism we glimpse an important feature for these young artists. It’s precisely here that Masson, the most gifted of them, has probably gone farthest. We must examine in greater depth why subject matter regained such special importance for the young. Subject matter no longer consists of a thing or an indifferently observed object, it is a symptom of an experience, of an obsession, and acts with the force of an idée fixe. Consequently it will dominate or torment the one undergoing the experience. In any case pictorial content is now a motif in a different sense, it is the actual stimulus, one no longer observes but abreacts. These experiences play out in hallucinatory processes of states of possession, one suffers through them. One will try to rid oneself of these vexations by projecting them. One can purge such idées fixes by transferring them from oneself to something not human, for example into a landscape, onto animals, et cetera. In order for such a projection to be effective a temporary identification with the motif must have occurred.18 Now one transfers one’s own suffering, the threatening idée fixe, by means of projection, yet after the projection this identification is forgotten so that a relative healing can occur. Here we have a further important form of regression, the totemistic. Masson, for example, transfers his phobias or his suicidal inclinations to animals, he paints a struggle between fishes armed with knives (fig. 11.1),19 or between horses and birds. Thus art here acquires the exact meaning of self-healing, just as primitive man, when someone is taken ill, carves a figure into which the illness or the evil spirit is transferred, as a result of which the afflicted person becomes healthy. One can characterize such images almost as doppelgängers. Obviously such a mass of regressions includes a primitivization of

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11.1. André Masson, The Battle of the Fishes, 1926. Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, 36.2 × 73 cm. Purchase, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

forms, especially when infantile dreams, long forgotten and repressed, burst through. Thus the early stage of ornamental notation corresponds to passive hallucinations, in which case, as we have noted, a stabilized image of space seldom emerges. Occasionally with Masson autonomous rotating planes go hand in hand with the dissolution of space, and a unified spatial image is often destroyed by the force of abrupt analogies and symbols. Yet in psychic terms these pictures are quite differently situated than the hallucinatory artworks of the primitives: they are namely autistic in nature and present experiences of the split individual person; to penetrate the layers of the dream or the unconscious it was necessary to detach oneself from the collective consciousness— and today the collective is for the moment still rational. One will perhaps attempt automatically to erect a defense against such a powerful split. Several factors prove such a tendency: these young artists formed themselves into a group; they compensate for their strong autism with a penchant for collective politics; they rightly trace their experiences to a universal basis, namely the sexual. Therefore they instinctively defend themselves against splitting off and commit themselves to collective groups and forces. The meaning of pictures is now changed. Previously one sought formal wholeness, everything related to process was to be excluded from the picture as one attempted to institute an assured permanence and order. Now, however, one offers seemingly incoherent analogies of a flow of inner events, more or less as the cubists gave form to the optical discontinuity of seeing. Pictures are therefore somewhat like speech, in which parts of

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objects, aspects of mental images, surface like words. Consequently one places no value on formal wholeness, one practices a kind of immanent impressionism. The tectonic, which all too quickly impedes the process and forces a preconceived selection, is scarcely valued any more, at most as a bulwark against the all too rapid compulsion of the processes. Even so, the artist will later bring the various contrasting analogies into formal harmony and unify them. We find similar tendencies among writers of the surrealist group in the utterance of an unmediated sequence of signs. As the boldest work we single out the “Grand jeu” of Péret. Admittedly the poets have not yet dared to reject their attachment to grammar. Which things will we now single out as characteristic signs? Certainly those that are painful, disturbing, and not yet comprehensible. Thus it’s no longer the optimistic assessment of the classicist, who recognizes creation in every figure, that is in force but rather, pessimistically, the gladly forgotten, disconcerting, and frightening experiences are stressed— in other words, the classicist’s obliviousness to pain and despair has finally become an object of contempt. We are all too happy to forget the negative experiences of childhood. Now it is precisely those that will be emphasized and recalled. One will practice a mnemotechnics of traumas, that is to say that one turns back to one’s childhood and remembers the great mythic terror that one has experienced and that adults flippantly reject as superstitious and childish. Here, too, we can observe a regression. There is a desire to transfer the old fear into images and into inhuman creatures, and just such a desire for projection into inhuman forms compels the most violent alteration of the figural world. Yet such signs are not chosen, but arise in the automatist process. That is to say: this art is not a matter of will but of fate, fateful, and therein lies its major impact; as a kind of infection, as a transfer of the somnambulistic or possessive experience onto the viewer. This kind of impact corresponds to the suggestive effect of magicians. Everywhere we notice evidence of a primitivization and an escape from technological civilization. Following this general characterization we now offer short sketches of the individual artists. André Masson began under the influence of cubism after he had painted several landscapes that recall the world of Poe or Lautréamont. His oeuvre begins under the sign of death, of terror and turbulent mourning. Then cubism had an impact on him, and from its static equilibrium he fled into psychographic dynamism. Here we take note. Today’s painting is still under Picasso’s shadow and for every young artist striving to be his own person there is the imminent problem of escaping it. Given the Spaniard’s capacity for rapid change the task appears especially difficult. Here we sketch briefly the relationship of the later Picasso to the young artists. After the cubist formal solution had run its course the pictorial object became extremely important even for Picasso. He stepped beyond the formal bonds of his generation and suc-

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11.2. Joan Miró, Tilled Field, 1923–24. Oil on canvas, 66 × 92.7 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2019 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/ Art Resource, NY.

ceeded in creating mythic beings; therein lies his relationship to the young. Yet Picasso remained the classic master of stasis, who creates balanced, restful forms because he remains within a solidly defined conception, representing the result of the psychic process rather than capturing the process itself. This seems to me the basic difference between him and the young, although we don’t judge whether their dynamics amount to any more than a youthful phase. After his cubist- influenced phase Masson developed toward a strong psychographic freedom. He dissolves the structure of space, what counts is above all rapid drawing. As signs of the fugitive he paints pictures with sand that have been disturbed by the most ephemeral waves. Sand pictures like fleeting deposits of the tide. After that a process of consolidation appears in his pictures. We also mention the Spaniard Joan Miró, who began with Spanish folklike elements. Looking at his Tilled Field (fig. 11.2) or the Catalonian Peasants, buoyant, garrulous pictures, one recalls the Flemish and Hieronymus Bosch. One juggles with dancing associations. Humor and rustic farce speak from these pictures, which function almost like puzzles. Later Miró puri-

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11.3. Joan Miró, Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird, 1926. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm. Purchase, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2019 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by Art Resource, NY.

fied his anecdotally prolific head and put the brakes on his dexterous hand. Now we see his return to the Iberian herm, to the phallic pole, achieving a naive ignorance (also a form of suicide). His most successful works appear to me to be his papiers collés, which he has finally purged of garrulous commentary. Now he draws the old Iberian with the gigantic foot (fig 11.3), and Mercury soars with a pregnant belly. A naive, somewhat too pronounced archaism. Yet the all too adroit acrobatics give way to a simpler manner. The new encounters early beginnings. We also mention the young Gaston- Louis Roux, who takes from cubism a counterpoint of contrasting elements. Later the object will become crucial for him, perhaps under Léger’s influence, he wittily constructs figures form objects without significantly altering their structure. We shall deal with Giacometti and Arp in the section on sculpture. With the creation of new objects a turn toward the mythic had been accomplished.

CH. 12

THE BLAUE REITER / PAUL KLEE From The Art of the 20th Century, 1931

The third edition of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century distinguished itself structurally from the first two not only by the addition of a chapter on painters associated with surrealism, but also by this separate chapter on the three major representatives of the Munich Blaue Reiter group, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee (the introduction and the section on Klee are presented here). In the two previous editions these three artists had been included in the long chapter on the Germans. Now, in a strange upheaval of chronological convention, Einstein brings his long account of modern European painting to a close with a chapter named for a pre-1914 group. Marc, after all, had died at Verdun

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in 1916; Kandinsky and Klee had moved on to the faculty of the newly founded Bauhaus after the war, and most of their works illustrated in the book date from that period. Yet Einstein does not title the chapter “The Bauhaus,” which he mentions only in passing, dismissing it as “a craft school.”1 No, what was historically significant about Klee and Kandinsky was to be found in the ideology of the Blaue Reiter group, not at the Bauhaus. Despite their age (Klee was fifty-two and Kandinsky sixtyfive), these two artists had “nevertheless and regrettably” to be counted among the young because the biologically younger representatives of Neue Sachlichkeit were, artistically speaking, “gray reactionaries.” After the “turn to romanticism” and the “move to a hallucinatory art” (see text 11), Einstein now saw the Blaue Reiter in retrospect as a precursor of this newest tendency: anticipating the young surrealists in France, these artists chose “romanticism and the representation of free, inner processes.”2 In this respect their art was more contemporary and forward looking than “the comfortable gutlessness of antiquated Sachlichkeit.” Einstein concludes his chapter— and his long, 209- page account of twentieth-century painting— by hailing Klee’s art as a “prophecy of what is to come.” Einstein’s attribution of this kind of historical precedence to a German group is a rather remarkable revision for someone who, less than a decade earlier, had written off contemporary German painting as “l’art de seconde main,” second-hand art.3 Few artists came off well in The Art of the 20th Century, but Einstein reserved some of his most withering judgments for his German compatriots. The art of Die Brücke, Einstein sniffed, “begins and ends in eclecticism, cloaked in literary bombast, in profound banality. . . . This is the reason why such a movement, which was devoid of movement, died out quickly and deservedly” (K3, 207, 208). Oskar Kokoschka was dismissed as “a talent who wants to be a genius and pays for his overexertion with eclecticism” (K3, 221). The work of George Grosz, Einstein’s old collaborator at the Dadaist magazines Die Pleite and Der blutige Ernst, provoked one to ask “whether art that deals with topical motifs but treats them with conventional means is not ultimately reactionary” (K3, 228).4 Otto Dix was dispatched more pithily as “a reactionary painting left- wing motifs” (K3, 232). Among contemporary German painters, only Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (despite his earlier Brücke association) and Paul Klee received anything approaching unalloyed praise.5 Klee was “the most considerable personality among the German artists”— arguably not much of a distinction, one might conclude, given what Einstein thought of the others!6 Yet Klee is one of only a handful of all modern artists who earn high praise from Einstein, and his writing on him belongs to the best of the period.7 Even as he elevated the Blaue Reiter to precursors of the romantic

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turn, Einstein did not spare Marc and Kandinsky, charging them with “form-destroying mysticism,” creating paintings in which “rapture and ecstatic hollowness cover up crudely feeble form” (K3, 249). Marc was dead, but following his critical remarks in the introduction Einstein went on in his separate section on Kandinsky to subject him to some especially harsh treatment, repeatedly comparing him unfavorably with Klee. Noting how the two artists were often mentioned together, Einstein nevertheless saw them as “pursuing absolutely different goals.” Klee’s art penetrated “more remote and more consequential strata than Kandinsky’s, which remains timidly in a preliminary stage” (K3, 259). The latter’s “doctrine of thinglessness” (Dinglosigkeit) seemed “based on a fundamental error” (K3, 255). This comparison must have created an extremely awkward situation between Klee and the thin-skinned Kandinsky, longtime friends and Bauhaus colleagues who at the time were living side by side in one of Walter Gropius’s three Meisterhäuser at Dessau when the second and third editions appeared.8 When Einstein sent Klee a draft of the text, soliciting his opinion, Klee expressed his gratitude to him for having done “full justice to my oeuvre.” But in closing he made a gentle plea: “that the contrast you draw between Kandinsky’s work and my own should in your formulations assume the mildest possible form.” 9 To judge from the published text, Einstein disregarded Klee’s request. According to the best evidence we have, the awakening of Einstein’s enthusiasm for Klee appears to date from the beginning of 1923, roughly a year after he had begun work on The Art of the 20th Century— previously there had been no mention of Klee in Einstein’s criticism. There were plenty of opportunities to see his work in Berlin after the war, where he was shown regularly at the Galerie der Sturm, yet the major catalyst for Einstein’s admiration was probably the large retrospective exhibition (270 works) at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, held in February 1923, in which roughly half the works were from the years 1920–22.10 When he visited Klee in Weimar shortly thereafter, Einstein inscribed a remarkably effusive dedication in Klee’s copy of Negerplastik. Affirming a harmony between their respective “worlds,” he wrote, “I love yours in every respect, and am deeply obliged to you that I may walk in it alongside you.”11 His enthusiasm was such that while the Nationalgalerie show was still on view, he began a book on Klee, and was planning a second publication.12 It appears that the book was to deal with Klee’s drawings— in any case at the end of 1924 he was in correspondence with the artist about such a project.13 Neither of these planned publications materialized, nor did a third, an essay he later planned to write for Documents. In the end Einstein would produce only the short, laudatory essay of just over three pages in the first edition of The Art of the 20th

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Century (K1, 140–43), reprinted virtually unaltered in the second (K2, 153–57), and the present newly written text, roughly twice as long, in the third edition. The total adds up to little more than a dozen printed pages. Yet the present text leaves no doubt about Klee’s exalted place in Einstein’s pantheon. In the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century the encomium to Klee strikes an anomalous note— his art seems at odds with the values Einstein so forcefully espoused elsewhere in the book. After all, he declared the reshaping of spatial perception as the “ur-motif of plastic art” (K1, 11); “things acquire value for the painter only when they are signals and signs of spatial experience” (K1, 139). He judged most artists accordingly. The cubist painters Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger set the standard; others, such as the fauves and expressionists, were brusquely dismissed as producers of “posters” and “ornament,” who moved from “two-dimensional sensation to a two-dimensional representation” (K1, 62).14 Yet for Klee, whose characteristic art was even more emphatically two-dimensional, Einstein had only praise.15 It’s tempting to conclude that initially Einstein admired Klee in spite of himself, against the grain of his own principles. In the Klee text in the first edition, Einstein’s insistence on the primacy of space (Raum) seems strangely forgotten— the issue goes unmentioned. What matters is not Raum but Traum, dream—Traum and its cognates appear no fewer than twenty- two times in this three- page text, almost as often as the word appears in the remainder of the book’s 174 pages, and in those instances it is usually deployed pejoratively.16 Klee’s art is the “realization of dreams”; he renders dreams “concrete,” infusing them into our consciousness. He aims at “enlarging the gestalt-world from regions that remain concealed to ordinary sense.” He is “out to discover a new reality” (K1, 142). Einstein introduces other, related terms— visions, hallucination, myth— that, like dream, will soon become pervasive for his later writing on Braque, Picasso, and the surrealists. In this respect the Klee text is the most forward looking in the book’s first edition. The qualities Einstein perceived in Klee in 1926 had by 1931 become paradigmatic for what he believed to be the most significant painting of the era. Einstein’s emphasis on the dream suggests that he may have been interpreting Klee under the spell of André Breton’s first surrealist manifesto— it had appeared in October 1924, roughly five months before Einstein submitted the last pages of his text for The Art of the 20th Century to the publisher.17 We recall that Breton named Klee, along with Picasso, Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, and others, as an artist who anticipated surrealism.18 Surrealism, he declared, was based on “the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought.”19

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He famously identified surrealism with “psychic automatism,” which expressed the “actual functioning of thought,” uncontrolled by reason.20 Without yet using that term here, Einstein strikes a similar note, citing the “virtually unconscious graphic motor activity” (fast unbewusstes graphisches Hinfahren) of Klee’s drawing (K1, 141). Yet since he had apparently begun a book on Klee a year and a half before the appearance of Breton’s manifesto, we can only guess whether his interpretation was indeed influenced by Breton, or whether Breton simply provided Einstein with a framework for theorizing his admiration for Klee.21 Especially noteworthy in 1926 is Einstein’s designation of Klee’s art as romantic, “a special instance of the romantic, in which a primitive stance emerges from a sensitive complexity” (K1, 143). Romanticism was a tendency for which Einstein otherwise showed little sympathy at this time.22 To be sure, Klee had himself characterized his art as a “cool romanticism . . . without pathos,” and a number of critics of these years also identified him with a new romanticism.23 But as we have seen in text 11, romanticism later becomes the rubric under which Einstein views the painters associated with surrealism— rather than labeling Klee a surrealist, he labels the surrealists romantics. So while the Klee text may seem strangely anomalous within the 1926 edition, it serves as a virtual blueprint for the “romantic” turn in Einstein’s art theory a few years later, which emerges with full force in the 1931 edition: Klee, previously “a special instance of the romantic,” becomes, along with Picasso, Masson, and Miró, a foremost representative of “the turn to romanticism.” If most of the text of the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century was a modest revision of that of the second edition, with some cuts, emendations, tweaks of prose, and hardening of judgments, the section on Klee was, except for a few passages, a wholly new text, and this is indicative of his centrality to Einstein’s later art theory. Not only was the section substantially longer than that in the first two editions, the number of illustrations increased from seven to twenty-five, now surpassed in quantity only by those for Picasso and Braque. Einstein’s 1931 text on Klee is one of his most brilliant. It’s also one of the most concise and eloquent statements of his mature art theory— for the most part it does not suffer from the redundancies that pervade the Picasso section of the third edition (text 10) or the later Georges Braque (text 13). Expanding upon notions introduced in the first edition, he presents a uniquely radical interpretation of Klee’s art. Where earlier Klee was innocuously immersed in a “private mythology” in an era when “myth and world” could not be reconciled, engaging only in “mutual mockery” (K1, 142), his art now instantiates myth as a “form of revolt.” For it is no longer identified with preservation of the past but revolt against the present. It means “the destruction and suicide of

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man as he is in favor of new and possible formations.” It has become “a means of altering the real.” If in his first text on Klee Einstein’s silence on the issue of pictorial space sharply isolated Klee from the cubist heroes of that book, now his art stands at the cutting edge of contemporary practice, which had moved beyond the cubist focus on space to create “new objects.” In the introduction to the Blaue Reiter chapter Einstein sums up Klee’s importance: “he succeeded in pushing beyond aesthetic problems to the invention of objects and introducing figures born of his inner creative process into reality, thus competing with it.” Einstein now elaborates and expands upon his earlier interpretation of Klee’s art and, without mentioning Picasso by name, identifies a similar process at work in Klee. He names three “powers” (Kräfte) necessary for a renewal of pictorial art. The first is “mediumistic writing down” (das mediale Niederschreiben), which elsewhere Einstein calls a “psychogram,” or “écriture spontanée.”24 This is the pictorial recording of undirected psychic processes, “the technique of the trance,” which is identical to Breton’s psychic automatism. Throughout Einstein refers to this as “writing” or “writing down,” perhaps because like writing it records a process that originates within the mind, it is an index of a psychic process rather than an iconic depiction of external phenomena. Although Einstein does not refer to any illustrations by title,25 he probably had works like She Roars We Play or Before the Snow (fig. 12.1) in mind, both illustrated, which in their fluid curvilinearity resemble the automatic drawings of André Masson. In the second the “tectonic powers” come into play. Here Klee “contains and controls” his visions, “integrating them with more general, stable, structured, and established forms.” As with Picasso, this involves the exertion of conscious control and the conversion of the solitary visions of the first stage into structured “collectively valid signs.” Possibly Einstein had in mind Monument in the Fertile Country (fig. 12.2), also illustrated, as representative of this tectonic phase. The third stage, triggered by the artwork’s metamorphotic power, is the subject’s “identification with a new gestalt.”26 In the Klee text Einstein puts the greatest emphasis yet on the phenomenon of metamorphosis in the work of a modern artist— he had introduced the term in his Documents essay on Masson, which linked his art with the practice of totemic identification, first discussed in Negro Sculpture.27 He compares Klee’s art to primitives in the reenactment of the “basic drama of metamorphosis.” The art of the primitives manifested a “desire to free oneself from captivity by the systematic norm”; “the same drive is at work today when the artist seeks new relations between gestalten; the basic drama of metamorphosis, of gestalt transformation, is played out anew.” And here Einstein introduces a new

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12.1. Paul Klee, Before the Snow (Vor dem Schnee), 1929, 319. Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 33.5 × 39 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Image courtesy of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

element: the equation of the primitive with the child. The child, like the primitives, as yet uncorrupted by reason, possesses “mythic powers.” “In one phase of life, childhood,” he writes, “we possess the courage to invent objects, because we’re not yet required to prove our musings in wide-reaching actions. . . . It is these very powers that define the artist, who attempts a free formation of objects.” Much in Einstein’s Klee interpretation coincides with the artist’s own views, as expressed in his diaries, his few published theoretical texts, and his vast corpus of pedagogical manuscripts.28 In these Klee presented a concept of art that was in some respects very close to Einstein’s own, although formulated in different terms with different emphases. “Art doesn’t reproduce the visible but makes visible,” declared Klee; he asserted the “relativity of visible things,” of how art can shows things in ways that contradict “the rational experience of yesterday.” The artist “regards the present state of outward appearances in his own particular

12.2. Paul Klee, Monument in the Fertile Country, 1929, 41. Watercolor and pencil on paper on cardboard, 45.7 × 30.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

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world as accidentally fixed in time and space.”29 From “dream, idea, fantasy,” come “realities, realities of art” that extend life beyond what it usually seems.30 And if Klee does not actually employ the term metamorphosis in his writings and lecture notes,31 the concept of genesis, of the artistic process as an open-ended one, of formation rather than form, is not that far removed. As he had with Picasso, Einstein presents Klee as an artist who practices psychic automatism.32 In a diary entry for 1908 Klee had referred to “psychic improvisation” as his “primary domain” (Urgebiet), in which he could “express whatever happens to be weighing on my soul, to record experiences that might be transposed into line even in the darkness of the night.”33 And during the interwar period he even titled two works “psychogram.” Many of Klee’s pure line drawings suggest such an automatic process, what Einstein calls “mediales Niederschreiben.” Certainly numerous drawings from the interwar period, and the fluid linear figuration of works like Before the Snow, suggest that they might be the result of such a process. Yet in his theoretical and pedagogical writings, published and unpublished, Klee never mentioned working in such a way— on the contrary, if his works were an open-ended play with plastic elements, this was a conscious process. Involuntary factors entered only into a later stage of the process, in the form of associations or memories. Nowhere does Klee indicate that he regarded these as emerging from deep, archaic strata of the psyche.34 There is a further, more fundamental difference to be noted between Einstein’s Klee and the artist himself. Although Einstein was virtually unique among his contemporaries in hailing Picasso’s stylistic pluralism, he is curiously silent about the even greater stylistic diversity in Klee’s oeuvre, in which we find styles figurative as well as abstract, geometric as well as biomorphic, linear as well as painterly, severe styles alongside more fluid ones. Einstein neatly divides this polymorphism into the automatic and the tectonic, but that does not do justice to the extraordinarily inventive formal play in Klee’s art of the 1920s. Throughout his writings Klee consistently emphasized the abstract pictorial means— line, tonal values, color, structures— and his art can be seen as driven by an exploration of the possibilities of their combination, independently of representation. Another critic, Wilhelm Hausenstein, recognized this when he wrote that in Klee’s art form “represents itself . . . it has become its own object. Form paints itself. Drawing draws itself. The medium emancipates itself as the serf once did.”35 With his insistent focus on “the real” and the creation of “new objects,” Einstein ignores the artifice and the pervasive spirit of parody in Klee’s art.36 Finally, it should be also be noted that Klee’s statements on his art, in contrast to Einstein’s utopian claims for it, are marked by a clear-eyed

THE BLAUE REITER

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round 1911 Marc (born 1880, died 1916 in the war), Kandinsky, and Klee joined together in a community, the Blaue Reiter. The meaning and aims of this group were effectively communicated in a 1912 anthology of the same name. This group, in this case not an association but an intellectual community, seems to me to be at the center of the history of recent German art. Here more than a variation of painterly craft was being discovered and put to the test. The crucial point is that for these people something more important than just painting was at stake, namely the reshaping of the psychic structure. This movement most definitely joins in the progress of great European painting. Finally the Germans are taking on the problem of autonomous painting and of freely generated hallucinatory processes. What matters here for now is not a critique of individuals or analysis of problems by individuals, but this: the Blaue Reiter was a community of men who set an absolutely new goal for German art and had grasped that painting, if it has any justification whatsoever, must be more and something other than pure craftsmanship and the dexterity of super-apes. Now expressionism, which had contented itself with cowardly ornament, handed-down arrangements, and insufficient variety, was finished. Apart from this group what emerged at the time as German painting has the effect of old, exhausted handicraft. Certainly there were later reactions against the spirit of the Blaue Reiter, among them the comfortable gutlessness of antiquated Sachlichkeit; this slogan was supposed to hide deficiencies of personality and imagination. This objective posture was merely a reaction, a revenge of the covetous petit bourgeois against the newly achieved inner freedom. More aggressively than other Germans Marc, Kandinsky, and Klee attempted to bring a changed human attitude to their pictures. Finally one summoned the courage to destroy exhausted and constraining conventions, and dared to record uncompromisingly their discovered visions. One tried to capture the processual character of inner vision, introducing dynamism

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awareness of art’s limits in the modern era— as he famously remarked in his Jena lecture, “uns trägt kein Volk,” the people are not with us.37 He likened his art to a summer holiday, a momentary escape from the “gray of the workday” to refresh one’s senses and spirit.38 “The picture,” Klee told his students at the Düsseldorf Academy, “is a thing without purpose, and it has only one goal, to make us happy.”39 Einstein could hardly have shared such sentiments. ■

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into the picture so that visionary events could act directly within it. No longer was the painter someone who represents or arranges but a pure medium for visions. One struggled against the classical stasis of the canvas in order more freely to transcribe previously unconscious processes. Such a sheer uproar had seldom raged throughout Germany. One demanded something more than new pictures, namely new psychic states. The concept of the artist was thus stretched far beyond anything related to material craft. The history of this group is authentically German. Young people band together, are torn apart by the war. Marc is killed, Kandinsky goes to Russia, experiences the revolution there. In Russia, during the initial ardor one hoped to find all the answers. Such a situation suited the somewhat vague didacticism of Kandinsky. This man of insulated visions now attempts to forge a doctrine and a doctrinal system from his experiences. One strives for a transmissible technique of hallucination, and the pupil is to receive instruction in inner vision. Rather like training dervishes. Kandinsky returns to Germany after the war and at the Bauhaus he connects once more with Klee. At the Bauhaus— a craft school when all is said and done, albeit established on different foundations— one now wished to perform the old drills in a new soul, with German thoroughness. A matter better suited to the simplistic operations of the constructivists than to people who were actually recording new experiences. In Russia Kandinsky had no doubt been influenced by the suprematists. There the course of political processes had played out according to the scientific prophecy of Karl Marx, and so one believed that science was sufficiently advanced to have something to say about everything. Thus was the Russian artists’ faith in doctrine confirmed and tremendously strengthened. An orthodoxy of the new object. Freewheeling religiosity now latches on to feeble art theory. Since it was impossible to say anything at all about complex psychic processes, artists were content with the miserable doctrine of the square and the triangle. One practiced an aesthetic that conformed to the associationist or atomistic psychology of the 1890s and philosophized in elements instead of investigating complex psychic processes. We see the impact of this antiquated attitude, which corresponds roughly to that of the Enlightenment, in the art of Kandinsky at the time of his return. This painter, who had previously distinguished himself by his emphasis on the processual and the dynamic, had now become a playful if tasteful geometer. Free form had senesced in the triangle and circle into symbolizing pedantry. Marc died in the war, so from him we have only the beginnings of an oeuvre. His wartime drawings proved that this man would probably have

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developed further, even if we reject the cosmically tarted up banalities of some of these works. Of Paul Klee we can say that he succeeded in pushing beyond aesthetic problems to the invention of objects, introducing figures born of his inner creative process into reality, thereby competing with it. For that reason we see Klee as the most considerable personality among the German artists. No kilometer-long canvases can dissuade us from judging Klee’s miniatures to be more important than the pathetically spruced up monuments of agitated academicians. The two surviving artists of the Blaue Reiter are today between their fiftieth and sixtieth years.40 Nevertheless and sad to say they must be counted among the young. This tells us how problematic the question of new talent is. It demonstrates how false it is to regard painting as young simply because those who practice it belong to a chronologically later generation. The youth that comes after will frequently be reactionary and defend the heritage of the grandfathers against those who revolted against it. Accordingly we are labeling the younger sachlich artists as gray reactionaries. The painting of the Brücke folks corresponds to that of the fauves, and remains postimpressionist painting in the spirit of 1908 and 1910. In Beckmann and Grosz we saw the backlash against the deficiencies of expressionism; in Beckmann probably also a certain reaction against so- called nonobjective painting. Meanwhile we consign Kokoschka to late impressionism, in other words, Beckmann’s position is intellectually more complex than Kokoschka’s. With Klee, however, it’s not a matter of nonobjective painting but precisely its inverse, namely the introduction of new objects and gestalten, and not through combination but on the basis of freely inventive psychic processes. With Klee, psychic processes are activated that until now we could not discern in German painting of the nineteenth century. It is above all for that reason that this man seems significant to us. We believe that an analysis of Beckmann, on the other hand, will yield few new elements of human significance. Ultimately the important thing in historical development is not repetition but destruction of the given and creation of the new, even though the conservative efforts exceed by far the capacity for actual production; a fact that makes art appear to us as downright reactionary. I am aware that with this assessment of the imaginative effort in Germany as well as in France I am offering a close-up perspective, for later there will be others who will find stages of linkage and transition, a result of the mutual adaptation of image and world. What remains important about the group Blaue Reiter is this: painters finally addressed the problem of the rational and the hallucinatory. One decided in favor of the romantic, that is, no longer overestimating the seem-

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ingly elegant and successful solutions of constricted reason but opening up psychic domains that previously had glimmered in the abject lowlands of superstition and deformity. As the young artists in France would later do, one chooses romanticism and the representation of free, inner processes. Kandinsky relapsed into the doctrinaire and into rational geometry. From the very beginning he trusted in a kind of sentimental physics of colors, the cognitive result of which was a series of allegories. To be sure, this dynamic effort was regrettably weakened because one’s analysis was based on an antiquated psychology, applying statistical methods of psychology to complex processes unsuited to such a methodology. Klee, on the other hand, abandoned the narrow domains of aesthetic indifference and pushed toward bold gestalt creation. For this reason we see in him the definitive representative of the new German romanticism. The artists of the Blaue Reiter protected themselves against the risks of their intrepid isolation by seeking with the aid of old intellectual methods to universalize experiences that, though individual, nevertheless become generic. In their books they dissect psychic processes into elements, instead of representing the specific total complex of an experience and going on from there to develop a typology of psychic events. One wants simply to shield oneself against the force of imagination with the ersatz of knowledge, believing one can generalize about experiences by splitting their results into abstract and general elements. Yet the pure color or the straight line is not a precondition of an experience, but its extracted and generalized result. In their books these artists were hugely accommodating to the outdated clichés of aestheticians, who were in no position to describe experiences and instead dialectically compared nearly vacuous concepts with each other. Even so, artists at least have the excuse of acting in self-defense against the tempest of experiences.

PAUL KLEE As models Marc and Kandinsky posed a danger: painting as retreat. Kandinsky didn’t succeed in achieving gestalten and therefore no transformation or re-formation of reality. His aesthetic was rather of a negative kind. Consequently he was content with second-rate means, with lyrical ornament; he remained monologically narrow and increasingly mechanized his visions to a point beyond redemption. Kandinsky underpinned this tendency with an excessively facile symbolism, so his painting leads to something like allegories of his theorems. One paints the tacky miscellany of abstraction and an ascetic stance ends in eloquent commentaries. One has often mentioned Klee alongside Kandinsky, yet to me it seems as though the two men are pursuing absolutely different goals, that their

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endeavors are absolutely antithetical. For Klee one thing seems decisive: namely to capture clearly delineated gestalten at the moment that he conceives the image. His vision penetrates more remote and more consequential strata than Kandinsky’s, which remains timidly in a preliminary stage. Rarely do humans alter themselves and their environment; measured against our preserved heritage the new appears like a faint shimmer. The later nineteenth century was an age of description, and replacing a metaphysics that treated things and their existence as questionable was a metaphysics of solid bodies, perception [Wahrnehmung] was now believed to be something unequivocal and the sole foundation of experience. Myth was dead, beyond things there was nothing or only vague speculation, psychic processes were at best a source of error that one could safely ignore. After realizing and perceiving that, for example, space could be a virtually free creation one gradually came to ask whether, if space is formed by human beings, it might also be possible to create new gestalten. The question of the possibility of myth was raised. Yet this kind of mythic creation stands utterly opposed to the sagas of old. It is born in isolation and grows cut off from any milieu, whereas in earlier times myth was a collective expression. The new myth is therefore to be taken as revolt, where formerly it preserved the experience and inheritance of the general population. Man unceasingly transgresses the real if he wishes to be alive and to prevail. In expressing himself he is not content with the existence that fate has granted him nor with its forms; he is gifted and driven to actions that outstrip every existing condition. In the unconscious we possess powers that have long been rarely tapped and for that reason haven’t been adapted to our current circumstances, for otherwise there would be no need to repress them. Then again, within that same unconscious that harbors those unadapted powers there are inheritances that consciousness has forgotten, among them atavisms that operate automatically. Every effort at forming new objects or myths is marked by these sediments of mutually opposed psychological and historical natures. Consequently on one hand there will be a conflict with one’s environment, on the other a rare harmony with ancient conditions and structures, which means that the formation of new objects will frequently be permeated by archaisms. In one phase of life, childhood, we possess the courage to invent objects, because we’re not yet required to prove our musings in wide- reaching actions. Superficial people think children are playing when they make peculiarly alogical leaps that an adult scarcely understands. Actually they are projecting into the present something new, as yet unconscious, but also inherited atavisms that as adults they will probably forget, since only rarely does one have need of them for practical action. The banal reaction is to think that the child is lying or is a mythomaniac. One will now grow up and

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lose both powers because one can permit oneself only those actions that are in harmony with one’s milieu and practical goals. So the mythic powers of the child are forgotten. It is these very powers that define the artist, who attempts a free formation of objects. Here we have an initial explanation for the sometimes infantile or primitive character of newly formed objects. Anything new comprises at the same time a regression, because strata long untapped are responding to it. A tectonic new art will perhaps rouse repressed memories of earlier tectonic tendencies: thanks to the present, Sumerian, archaic Greek, and Byzantine art are being brought closer to us. To be sure, in this way contemporary art becomes historicized. A psychographic tendency will awaken memories of ornament as found in the Neolithic era, early Nordic art, et cetera. For history is shaped from a contemporary perspective and we select from the past on the basis of its current significance. This fact explains the continual change in our representations of history, even as it refutes all possibility of an objective writing of it. This would explain the convergence of today’s art with the primitive. Yet in human terms a psychic archaism is more significant than a merely formal archaism. One has often attempted to show a relationship between modern art and the drawing of schizophrenics. The schizophrenic successfully tries to assert his emphatic independence from his environment, his signs and images are often rendered in an infantile manner. They become so alive to him that he elevates them into objects and beings. Undoubtedly there is a certain kinship between the maladjusted schizophrenic type and the freely inventing artist. Yet in one respect the two differ entirely: the schizophrenic is in general committed to only a few types, he is helplessly obsessed and hardly capable of altering his gestalt world, and his mental images revolve around particular idées fixes; although major parts of his consciousness are perhaps able to function, because of his obsessions he is incapable of calming himself sufficiently to make successful use of them. The artist, on the other hand, through adequate sublimation and the transference of his condition to the viewer, achieves a self-healing, and this allows him to form ever newer signs with considerable rapidity, proof of a heightened vitality; whereas at best the sick man forgets his idée fixe in order to protect himself from it but usually pays for this ultimate repression with the deterioration of his person. Yet we don’t regard the insane simply as sick people but rather as human beings unable or unwilling to subordinate themselves to the prevailing conventions, persons who possess remarkable powers as well as stubbornness in unusual measure. Admittedly, with schizophrenics it seems that the mass of infantile archaisms seems rather to prevent the creation of new forms, while with the artist these constitute the major accent. Klee brought an important change to German art. At last someone broke

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free from the negative phase of object destruction. To reach that point it seems one had to pass through the neutral zone of ornamental creation, indifferent to the object. With Klee an important human problem now comes to the fore, namely that of the transformation and re-formation [Verwandlung und Neubildung] of the world by man. Through this process man regains the magic power that for so long he dared not use. The primitive, like the child, believes that through words, stories, and images one can create and control beings and things. In the new forms, too, we observe such typical regressions. Here realism acquires a more profound meaning, namely no longer that of imitating and reproducing [Nach- und Abbildens] but of newly forming [Neubildens] something concretely real. For the renewal of art three powers seem necessary: (1) mediumistic writing down [das mediale Niederschreiben], that is, unrestrained submission to as yet unassimilated psychic processes, in other words the technique of the trance; (2) tectonic powers, that is, the control and raising to consciousness of visions and the integration of solitary experiences into collectively valid signs; (3) identification with a new gestalt, hence metamorphotic power. In other words: a picture achieves psychic wholeness when it comprises various primary psychic strata. Thus the question of pictorial totality [Bildtotalität] is not, as one generally assumes, a merely formal problem, but above all a question about psychic wholeness. Admittedly in pictures a particular stratum of the psyche will usually dominate, for pictures are for the most part psychically one- sided fragments. Perhaps for that reason they unleash specific tendencies in the psyche that find an outlet in the picture itself. For Klee it’s a matter of intercalating gestalten and objects into reality; therefore the meaning of myth is no longer preservation of the past but revolt against what exists in the present. If in a picture newly invented gestalten come together with older inherited forms, two different modes of reality may then engage in mutual persiflage. One of the most important functions of pictures seems to be: to liberate us from the bodily norm that has been imposed on us. Proof of how deeply rooted is this need are those drives classified as erotic perversions. Which is to say: we’re no longer content with the physiologically given reality of the body, and thus fantasy would be a sublimated perversion or— and this is more important— a psychic reaction against erotic fixity. Kandinsky believed an ascetic rejection of this world would be enough, replacing it by recording lyrical ornaments; in other words, he behaves with artistic indifference toward anything to do with the gestalt. This corresponds roughly to the objectless trance of the mystic who strains to purge himself of images and impressions so as to achieve a state of unconcerned, serene nothingness.

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In Klee’s case such an attitude appears as a phase in which to make oneself more receptive to new things after a purification of the person. With Kandinsky one can speak of a fear of identification with any gestalt or thing; art as escape attempt. Lacking the power of metamorphosis he therefore destroys both. With identification one arrives at a primitive, childlike condition; namely one concedes to the inner image an activity and power almost equal to one’s own, similarly to how the child speaks of things and toys as beings and lives with them accordingly. With children this equivalence is evident in their fondness for speaking of themselves in the third person. Here one might detect an animistic transitional stage that gradually dies out, since adults, as their awareness grows, differentiate between conscious beings and those apparently lacking this power— in other words, a rationalization of existence is accomplished with a clear overestimation of rational selection. Characteristic of this more recent art is that it has completed this turn against rationalism. With that step one gained the courage to begin to paint seemingly absurd gestalten and images, that is, pictures hardly governed by a “reasonable” formal structure. Yet it turns out that reason is more of an inhibiting factor, a psychic barrier and facade, behind which more important powers, too long concealed, lay dormant. One could almost say, reason is a tool for reacting against psychically unassimilated strata and preventing them from becoming active. A reasonable conception of existence means an unequivocal and verifiable description of it. Reason commits us to those forms and experiences that we can visibly confirm, as when we compare a still life with the actual fruits and pots; this is how it constricts creativity. Yet we continually experience elemental and unverifiable events such as the dream and the miracle, in which the psyche is seemingly unconcerned with physiological or extrinsic formal correctness. Reason imposes on us an idiotic monotony of existence and of gestalten,41 which it at most varies or rearranges; a fatal limitation. In earlier times one defended oneself against such a monotony of gestalten by means of myths, the creation of gestalten was determined not by aesthetics but by religion. As a social symptom of this desire for an alteration of types we note the phenomenon of exogamy among the primitives, which is ultimately motivated by a desire for the alteration of a stable type. One wants to free oneself from captivity by the systematic norm, to acquire new or unknown bodily and psychic powers. Another means to this end was transformation into animals, plants, streams, et cetera. The same drive is at work today when the artist seeks new relations between gestalten; the basic drama of metamorphosis, of gestalt transformation, is played out anew. In a picture this is extremely easy to realize because every form can carry a huge range of meanings. Accordingly a number of intimations of objects can be embedded in any given form, that

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is, in order to make forms unambiguous one must locate them precisely in a particular representational context. This touches upon the issue of labeling or titling the picture. With Klee these titles evoke the old magic of names. They contain perhaps the first suggestion to the viewer, and delimit one’s initial experience of the picture. We spoke of the three basic pictorial powers, writing, constructive forms, and the complete inner image [Vorstellung] of a gestalt. In the act of passively writing down, a mediumistic power, a capacity for enduring suffering, is manifest; hence docile, plantlike forms will emerge. In the tectonic we attempt to protect ourselves from the wandering dream, to forcibly impose boundaries and edges upon it. In the psychogram one attempts to preserve the dynamism of processes by recording only those signs that originate directly from the stimulus, in other words not to impose a calm, preconceived order on the signs. On the other hand one enters the tectonic phase if one contains and controls experiences by integrating them with more general, persisting, structurally sedentary forms. Here the visual artist has two elements at his disposal that we also find in language. Corresponding to the dynamic psychogram would be the verbal form, and to what is statically persisting, the concept: the noun. It is characteristic that in art the wandering nomad avails himself of dynamic forms, that is, he attempts above all to preserve movement, while the settler and farmer tame their experiences with tectonic or crystalline forms in accord with their own sedentary state. This conservative way of life corresponds to matriarchy, domains of permanence and the house. The plantlike domains of the calligram show humans as botanical growth, buffeted by wind or ruffled by a probing touch, completely sacrificed to the elements. In seemingly geometrizing gestalten Klee wishes to locate more resistant, more conscious figures, crystalline beings as it were, into which rock formations and a state of persistence are projected. In this way gestalten are brought into proximity and linked through the formal character of more distant configurations. The plant-human would perhaps be the unconscious dreamer, while tectonic figures are products of the will and resistance to the dream. So with Klee two mutually opposed strata of the psyche stand out and from this emerges a contrapuntal mood, important in Klee’s art, namely a tense humor of oppositions, a kind of romantic irony. Thanks to mediumistic writing one dreams one’s way back into the actively tactile plant world, or by virtue of the tectonic one arrives at the slow domain of minerals, where formations willfully articulate themselves in sharp edges, or reflections of celestial bodies are mirrored in an astral human. Motile forms may stem from air, water, or fire and the signs of psychic excitation are thus surprisingly tied to the old elements. One experiences nothing less than a return to the old theory of the elements, from which

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the human being and all gestalten derive. The gestalt would now be merely a synthesis of different cosmic forces, out of whose variety and tensions psyche and person emerge. In other words: forms make possible extraordinary approximations and metamorphoses of the gestalt into seemingly alien entities, and in this metamorphosis we witness the functionally mutual bonding of beings and phenomena. Form now denotes something more than merely aesthetic excitement: namely the power of self-transformation and the unity of the metamorphotic process. By the same token, plants and rocks now acquire a metamorphotic force, that is, they transform themselves and become active within new and different beings and thus acquire a power as vital as that of man. The positivistic hierarchy of consciousness is violently shattered; through forms, then, one can produce a valorization or transvaluation of the world. In the mediumistic script-picture the gestalt will form automatically or as though by accident, the act of writing down is a search for a gestalt, whereas with the tectonic the gestalt-specific is often a precondition and is willfully enforced and one entrusts oneself from the beginning to a firmly established order. If plant, mineral, star, and man are virtually equated, then in place of a human figure a humanized plant can appear as an actor or an emotion can be transferred into the structure of a mineral. Such equalization of phenomena is arguably childlike; it’s similar to the way the child accepts all things as relatively equal play companions and willingly shares and transfers its mental capacities to them, because it does not yet differentiate itself through a fixed consciousness of self. Now, in place of an arm a branch grows or a head becomes a blossom. The adult, that is, the standardized human being, will label such metamorphotic urges as play. Characteristic of children’s play is that they are not yet bound to firm practical goals and are therefore not confined within the narrow choice of logically simplified events. Thus they are capable of acting and experiencing abruptly, through analogies or symbolic contexts, while adults risk such experiences only in dreams or in poetry, experiences that they scarcely integrate into their rationalized daily routine, and which they either forget or by which they are more helplessly driven than the child. We can say that the child endows things with a stronger reality than does the adult. To be sure, it occasionally exacts revenge as it destroys that reality in a fit of temper, something almost inconceivable to the adult. This is a sign that an incipient self-awareness and a need for willful superiority is breaking through, or the child absorbs things within the stream of its emotions and enters the phase of object destruction. So here, too, the ludic impulse acts against belief in given relationships and instead transforms them as in a fairy tale. Just as the child loves dolls or marionettes, so, too, we encounter in Klee’s art marionette-people, figures that involve caprice and play. As in dreams, in Klee we find steep stairways down which we tumble, spaces for

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flying, or, as in nightmares, narrow corridors with dark exits. Often the child destroys a doll or a toy, but carefully preserves a part of these things that stand for the whole— a doll’s arm, a wagon wheel, et cetera. Here, too, as with the primitives, we again find a factor that has become important for recent art: that a part represents the whole. In other words, the psychic process is fully launched by a partial cause and the resulting partial pictorial conception is completed in the mind. And so if every part of the image has not yet been fixed, a wider field is left to psychic energy. It shows that the gestalt serves not only to represent and to act as a doppelgänger, but can also work psychically as a symbol or an instrument of magic. Possession of a person’s hair or fingernails suffices to gain power over them. A name is pierced with a pin, blood appears on the paper and in some distant place the person who bears that name dies. All such magical occurrences return in Klee and manifest a deep reaction against rationalism. The result: the humor in Klee’s pictures, fraught with contrasts. We take note: humor is the absolute opposite of caricature, whose origins lie in an intellectual comparison of ideology with reality. Humor may show the solitude, the aloofness of a person. The connections with given existence are shattered, perhaps due to fear and oppression, in any case one is motivated to resist by distancing oneself. One knows all about the polyvalent meaning of form and gestalt. Perhaps the child, too, has fashioned its playful world as poetry in order to protect itself against a grim existence. It wishes to conjure forth beings that are not subject to death, and to shape a reality without falling prey to dreary repetition, a sign of torpid death. The factual, straightforward conception of the world excludes metamorphosis; even if something new should emerge, it is immediately squeezed into the readily available frame of reason and becomes defined. With Klee the gestalt serves as a springboard to metamorphosis. Every gestalt is merely provisional and a prelude to the unforeseen. One will shield oneself from fear and all too rapid metamorphosis by deploying mineral forms of long duration; a desire for home and hearth is evident here. One puts up resistance to the playful process of transformations. In general one is a captive of one’s bodily form and believes that such is the law and measure of all existence. But now a feeling stirs that intermittently passes through one like a flash: all being and every seemingly secure form is a mere accident, and the meaning of man lies not in preserving that form but in metamorphosis and the destruction of existing gestalten, a process whose phases we do not foresee. With this a different human attitude is gained, one accepts the unforeseen miracle as a norm while the logically organic occurrence is reduced to an accident or is interpreted as man’s inability to alter his species. Sexuality, that is, the production of human beings, now appears as a hopelessly monotonous means of species preservation. One defends oneself against such despair by creating fantastic beings

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that psychically mean more to us than our own persistent form, which binds us to an all too narrow destiny. In other words: by creating new beings man shows his hopeless sorrow over his fixed corporeality and his disgust for it. The early barbarian and anticlassical peoples of Asia Minor and Greece may have been governed by similar feelings; for them the chimeras and monsters were a counterfoil to man and the classical norms. These monsters, which shone forth earlier than the heroes of myths, were later devalued to distortions by peoples narrowed by classicism and relegated to the subterranean realm of Pluto or the devil and hidden there. With the ascent of consciousness fantasy appears as an illogical and hence a lower function, its creations condemned as ridiculous caprices. Now we are returning to a stage of counterreaction, the depraved empire of the devil has been discovered anew, and within it one unlocks the vital powers that rationalism had unjustly repudiated as inferior. In later mythology one increasingly humanized the spirits and forces of nature and the norm of the human form was imposed on them. The pinnacles of such narrowness are late Greek art and the Renaissance, vain standardizations based on the beautiful human being. Just as one had banished misunderstood powers and beings to the lower domains of superstition, now one mistrusted the gifts through which the available world could be magically transgressed. In Klee’s miniatures we observe the return of the demons of dreams, resurrected through ancient powers and concentrated into the most intense reality. Now the real no longer refers to clearly logical coherence; it is overpowered and ruled by visions that rise from forgotten graves. Judgment is overturned and unreason, namely vision and the creation of the not yet known, becomes the foundation of existence. With trepidation the primitives loved to capture the barely visible spirits of the dead in images so as to preserve the thickness of the blood; we, on the other hand, strive to draw the spirits we do not yet know. Such an attitude is possible if one no longer trusts in the gods of knowledge, through whose existence all visions are predetermined and which they forcibly draw into themselves. Such freedom of formation and invention is possible only if one would dare to shed the dogmatism of God and with it every predetermination of existence. Now one entrusts oneself to currents of incalculable premonition and, instead of reverential imitation, one alters. One has overcome the classical phase exemplified by Pygmalion, who makes his wax doll so lifelike that she breathes, and returns to the magical epoch in which unforeseen beings could be glimpsed in a branch or a lump of clay. We spoke of Klee’s forms, it remains for us to address the lights and darks of these sheets. Here the darkness of the night is an attribute of beings and flows from them. Then we encounter odd gestalten who carry on in

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a pallid, lightless desert, or others, whose facets sparkle like suns; that is, in such gestalten celestial bodies are endungeoned; perhaps it’s an astral forebear embodied there. Humans are capable of sprouting as plants or, mineral-like, reposing inertly, of shining as stars or darkening as moons. That is to say: man is the acrobat of world- like conditions that emanate from him. For that reason it is his destiny to yield to every condition and transition; man is the dreamed-of play of unceasing metamorphosis. We observe in Klee a basic feature of contemporary existence, primitivization, that is, weariness of an all too complex civilization. One flees the immense mass of mechanized, reified consciousness that has become almost estranged from the psyche. In Klee’s case such primitivization does not mean decorative slickness or a loss of form but a fundamentally altered condition. Now it is no longer about preludes to the destruction of things, but about the reshaping of the psychic structure, whence new gestalten bore their way into reality. Art means not only unrestrained self- expression, it can be something deeper, namely the destruction and suicide of man as he is in favor of new and possible formations. Thus does art regain its long-forfeited powers, namely those of prophecy and the interpretation of dreams; it has again gathered strength as a means of altering the real, wedging into a dying reality a new reality that stands closer to man, corresponding to his entire soul and not just narrow reason. Art is again empowered as a magical instrument and a prophecy of what is to come.

CH. 13

TWO CHAPTERS FROM GEORGES BRAQUE 1934

Of the many artists on whom Einstein wrote, Braque was the one with whom he had the closest personal relationship, dating back to the early 1920s. The friendship seems to have deepened after Einstein’s move to Paris in 1928. Braque was Einstein’s witness at his marriage to Lyda Guévrékian in December 1932, and the Braques and Einsteins socialized and even vacationed together. Braque chose his friend to curate his first retrospective, at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1933, which was followed a year later by the publication of Georges Braque.1 The book stands alongside Einstein’s Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century as one of his major works of art criticism. It is also a valedictory, his last publica-

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tion on art and, to adopt a phrase from T. J. Clark, his “farewell to an idea”— in Einstein’s case the idea that modern art could decisively alter human subjectivity and, with it, our construction of the real, forging a new collectivity.2 Janus-faced, Georges Braque comprises both the final statement of Einstein’s utopian hopes for art and intimations of their imminent collapse.3 As he began work on The Art of the 20th Century in 1922, Einstein may have felt closer to Braque’s work than to Picasso’s. He wrote DanielHenry Kahnweiler that the deeper he immersed himself in cubism, “all the more do I love Braque and Gris, naturally above all Braque, whose oeuvre I am tracking closely.” Even with much yet to do on his major survey, he reported that he had already begun writing a book on Braque.4 In his first substantive article on cubism, which appeared in February 1923, Einstein took pains to emphasize Braque’s “distance and free independence from Picasso.” Picasso, “the dialectical painter,” appealed to those given to “more facile analysis than does the quiet Braque, whose visual meditation is somewhat veiled.” He was “le peintre d’une pureté lucide et audacieuse,” Einstein enthused, switching to French. He praised his Canéphore (fig. 7.8), recently exhibited in the 1922 Salon d’automne, along with Gris’s The Nun, as having “saved” painting, having “recovered the object,” achieving the “happy equation of fusing intuition and object”— proof that cubism was not dead.5 Einstein’s preference for Braque over Picasso seems to have remained intact in the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century.6 His art was “purer and more unified in style and as painting,” whereas Picasso, “due to a surfeit of inner productivity— daily negates himself” (text 7). The turning point in Einstein’s assessment of Picasso coincided with the exposure to surrealist ideas. We have noted (text 10) how in the book’s second edition Einstein completely rewrote the Picasso section, expanding it to more than four times its original length, while leaving the text on Braque essentially unchanged. Picasso’s “dialectical” nature now became a virtue; he fled the “narrow decisiveness of a single style”; he was hailed as the Zeichenfinder, the discoverer of the signs and “psychograms” that would define the era (K2, 79).7 In the third edition of the book, the section on Picasso totaled twenty-four pages, that on Braque, not quite seven. Einstein’s state of mind as he was at work on Georges Braque comes through in a letter to his friend Ewald Wasmuth from the summer of 1932: “in these weeks I am finishing a thick book that will appear in Paris and New York. . . . This Braque book is naturally not a book about Braque. The less so as I have quite had my fill of painting as though it were mashed up spaghetti. . . . Dear Ewald, I am so tired and sick of everything that I can’t do this any more. Art, art, assez, assez. I can no

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longer bear to smell the swindle. . . . I have had quite enough of this stupid genius business, which is so revoltingly mercantile.”8 That this was not just a passing spell of bad humor is indicated by several other letters, including one from the previous autumn, again to Wasmuth: “the art book that I still have to do will be my last. I am fed up with it, it disgusts me. Fed up with theories, too. We have been pasted over with this wallpaper long enough. Either something completely different will come my way or Herr Einstein isn’t writing any more.”9 These letters strongly suggest that by the time Einstein published Georges Braque he no longer believed much of what he had written there. That he wished to distance himself from the book when it finally appeared, in French translation, in the spring of 1934 is suggested by a note on the copyright page: “This book was written in 1931–1932.” Between the completion of the manuscript and its publication, Hitler had seized power in Germany. If the “Braque book” isn’t about Braque, what is it about? Its contents are an odd patchwork. The German manuscript consists of seven chapters of vastly unequal length— chapter 6, for example, at eightynine pages the longest, is longer than the first five chapters combined, which total eighty-two pages (CEA 204–9). Perhaps this is why when the book was published the first four chapters were consolidated into one, with chapters 5 through 7 now renumbered as chapters 2 through 4.10 The first five chapters read like a collection of individual essays on various topics, with scant mention of Braque. His name occurs only fifteen times in those chapters— merely twice in chapter 1 and not at all in chapters 2 and 4. Where Braque is mentioned at all, it is usually in passing as a single isolated sentence, an apparent interpolation— probably a concession to the publisher, as well as to the reader, who might reasonably expect the name “Braque” to appear in an eponymous book before chapter 6! Yet even in that chapter Braque serves primarily as an occasional example for Einstein’s discussion of cubism— in the published version he is mentioned twice in a single paragraph at the bottom of the chapter’s first page, and doesn’t reappear until thirteen pages later. Only in chapter 7 of the manuscript (chapter 4 in the book), dealing with Braque’s art since the end of the war, can Georges Braque truly be called a “Braque book”— there his name appears more times by half than in the other chapters combined. Even so there is, strikingly, less concrete discussion of his art here than in the mere six- plus pages Einstein had devoted to it in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century. Indeed, apart from a passing reference to Braque’s early series of cubist landscapes at L’Estaque and La Roche- Guyon, the only works mentioned by name are the etchings for Hesiod’s Theogony, on which the artist was working at the time Einstein completed the manuscript.11 The origins of the “Braque book” are obscure, and its genesis—

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insofar as we can reconstruct it— may partly explain its patchwork character and internal contradictions. There is evidence that the book is an amalgam of two separate publication projects, a collection of essays that Einstein referred to as his “aesthetics” and a publication on Braque. This is suggested by the correspondence over a three- year period between Einstein and Ewald Wasmuth and Wasmuth’s partner Sophia Kindsthaler. Mention of the aesthetics first occurs in a letter to Wasmuth from the spring of 1929— Einstein wrote that he hoped to finish the book in three months.12 As was so often the case, he was overly optimistic, but by 1930 he must have made some progress, informing Kindsthaler that he hoped to send his “aesthetics,” which he described as “individual essays” (einzelne Beiträge), “to the printer” (in Druck zu geben).13 Evidently he did not act on this plan, since roughly a year later he related that the German publisher Lambert- Schneider was interested in the book. The manuscript needed only “stylistic corrections”; he expected to complete it in “two or three months.”14 A few months later, in the late fall of 1931, he mentioned a new project: he was working, grudgingly and out of financial necessity it seems, on “a book that is being published in Paris and by Weye [sic] in New York but this is by no means a fabulous thing (this between us, even though it sounds wonderful).” This book, which he did not identify, was clearly not the “aesthetics,” for he added that after he was done with it, “I will try to bring out my aesthetics.”15 Later in that same letter he returned to the topic: “for the rest I want finally to wrap up this aesthetics,” and he refers to a second book, an “art book,” a Kunschtbuch.16 It has been generally assumed that this “Kunschtbuch” is the one subsequently copublished by Weyhe as Georges Braque, but there was as yet no mention of Braque. Then six months later, in February 1932, Einstein reported the imminent publication at the “end of April or May” of a “thick volume by me in Paris and New York by Weyhe, it’s called Réflexions, and costs a lot of money.”17 So was Réflexions the “aesthetics,” or was that project now combined with the “Kunschtbuch,” as yet unidentified? The title Réflexions also suggests that Einstein, at an advanced stage of the prepublication process, apparently did not regard it as a book on Braque. Not until the previously cited letter to Wasmuth from the summer of 1932 does Einstein mention Braque, when he remarks that the “Braque book is naturally not a book about Braque”— his first and, prior to its publication, only surviving explicit reference to it.18 Of course the book that was finally published in Paris, London, and New York wasn’t titled Réflexions, as Einstein had announced, but Georges Braque, so it seems plausible that the two books— the aesthetics, or Réflexions, and the “Kunschtbuch”— had been merged into a single volume.19 If, as seems probable, Georges Braque in its first five chapters com-

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prises what Einstein referred to as his “aesthetics,” it might more accurately be called his anti-aesthetics. This is especially evident in the book’s first four chapters, the first two of which are presented here. Chapter 1 is a radical critique of the practice of art history that was well ahead of its time. Einstein launches a frontal attack on the discipline, charging art historians with aestheticizing, domesticating, and normalizing the artwork, for reducing the history of art to a formalist narrative of technical progress. As a corrective he calls for a “sociology or ethnology of art,” which approaches it as “a living and magical medium,” as a “vital force and practical instrument.” Artworks achieve their “primary significance by their indwelling power of insubordination and the subversive energies they release.” They have the potential to alter human subjectivity and “to modify the real.” At a moment when the writings of Alois Riegl were inspiring a new generation of scholars, Einstein flatly dismisses the notion that art is a reflection of its time— “artworks are completely inadequate for determining the character of an epoch.”20 Rather he sees art as a field of conflict; it may develop against the dominant currents of its time, or, like “[m]ost of so-called modern art,” it may have a “reactionary bent.” Einstein also rejects another influential Rieglian notion— that of the unity and continuity of art history; “[a]t its best art signifies revolt against a unified tradition.” Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche and anticipating Michel Foucault, he asserts that our relationship to history is always perspectival: “History begins not in the remotest past, but has its source in the living, breathing present, flowing backward into that which has vanished as though in a cloud. The past shimmers as a projection of the now.”21 We shall see that this principle also applies to Einstein’s reinterpretation of the work of Braque. In Georges Braque Einstein goes further than ever before in presenting a general theory of the status of art in modern society. Central to this is a critique of “liberalism” in chapters 2 and 3. It had produced a culture of absolute relativism, reducing reality to a “formless heap of interpretations,” fragmenting the world into a congeries of meanings and sensations— impressionism was its artistic manifestation. The rationalism of modern science, quantifying the world, instrumentalizing and standardizing human subjects in the service of industry and technology, was a reaction against it, but at great cost, impoverishing human experience. Marxism emerged as part of this rationalist turn and constructed a new myth, an economic myth, a social utopia that challenged the “tangled mass of opinions” that characterized the liberal bourgeois order. Against this, cubism— the cubism that since 1928 Einstein had identified with hallucination and the deepest, archaic layers of the unconscious— constituted a reaction, a reassertion of the human capacity to construct a compelling version of the real.

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I have previously noted how, after his political engagement in the revolutionary moment following the war (see text 4), Einstein went silent for over a decade on the issues of art’s social and political agency and the avant-garde’s relation to the working classes. We have seen how this changed in the surrealism chapter (text 11) in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century, and he now returned to this question in Georges Braque. He recognizes that the proletariat has more urgent needs than art: one should, he concedes, get used to the idea “that for the present a time without art is possible and necessary” (GB, 276)— an astonishing sentiment, coming from Einstein, and one in conflict with the utopian views he expresses in the book’s later chapters. For he concludes Georges Braque with a serene assertion amounting to a declaration of “mission accomplished”: the final sentence reads, “Myth has once more been integrated into the real and poetry again becomes an originary element of the real” (GB, 409). The tensions within the book appear already in its opening pages. Einstein assails the art-historical genre of the monograph for its “myopic perspective,” its “apotheosis of the petit bourgeois ego, in which the bourgeois encounters a mirror image of himself, delightfully exalted,” in which pictures are revered “as self- sufficient organisms detached from their manifold living interconnections.” This, he writes, is what marks “the aesthetic cast of mind.” Yet with illustrations of 102 works by Braque, a separate luxury edition of fifty numbered copies with two original etchings signed by the artist and a color pochoir, plus an additional two hundred numbered copies with one signed etching, Georges Braque certainly looked like a monograph, and a fancy and expensive one at that. In its high production values the book appears as an exemplum of the very aesthetic culture of “rare or precious bibelots” that Einstein targets in chapter 1. That is but one of the oddities of this idiosyncratic book. Sebastian Zeidler is one of the few scholars to acknowledge that something seems not quite right about Einstein’s “Braque book.” He has described it as “a largely commemorative exercise. In his heart of hearts, Einstein was well aware Braque was no longer producing significant new work. Picasso, on the other hand, had lately been growing strong again.”22 Yet the book gives just the opposite impression. In all of Einstein’s previous accounts of cubism, going back to 1923, he had treated it as the joint project of Braque and Picasso. Braque’s name appears fifteen times in the long 1931 Picasso section of The Art of the 20th Century— and that’s just the Picasso text, which directly precedes the section devoted to Braque. In his dismissive comments on the book, Zeidler writes that “by 1930 one member of the cubist dyad had faded away”— he means Braque.23 Yet in Georges Braque the one who has “faded away”— no, disappeared— is

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Picasso. In chapter 6 Einstein refers often to “the cubists,” twice to “Braque and the cubists,” and even to the “two major masters” of cubism, but, remarkably, the name “Picasso” appears nowhere in the book. In one passage Einstein writes of how the “daring” paintings of the “two cubists” constitute “a historical deed of the first order,” but only Braque is named: “In him a reinvention of the world, of seeing, and of space is attempted and realized.” The omission of Picasso’s name becomes even stranger given that in June 1932, only a matter of weeks before he completed the Braque manuscript, Einstein had assisted Picasso, presumably at the artist’s invitation, in installing his retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris—at the time the largest exhibition of his work ever held.24 If Picasso is totally absent from Georges Braque, one could say that he is there in spirit— for Einstein Picassifies Braque. In the Braque section of the 1931 edition of The Art of the 20th Century, Einstein had drawn a sharp distinction between the two painters. For Picasso, he wrote, “painting is a means and often almost too limited”; for Braque, on the other hand, painting, the refinement of his painterly craft, was everything, a goal in itself. His art was “governed by classical belle mésure,” by “classical equilibrium,” by “self- control.” In contrast to Picasso’s “daimonie,” his violent bursts of inspiration, Braque’s “conscious selfrestraint . . . precluded everything dramatic” (K3, 136, 139, 140). Yet now, in a book completed only a year later, with no mention of Picasso or his art, Einstein theorizes and interprets Braque’s art since the war much as he had theorized and interpreted Picasso’s in The Art of the 20th Century (text 10): now Braque, like Picasso, is possessed and driven by visions and hallucinations.25 In cubism, Braque had “altered the structure of seeing; yet now he dares a more complex and more deadly adventure” (GB, 375). We read of “psychograms,” of Braque’s “daring to plunge into the hallucinatory currents”; his paintings “grow from visions, thus from absolutely chaotic events” (GB, 379, 384, 385, 387). Since the war he, too, has embraced “mythic realism” (GB, 367)— the term Einstein had applied to Picasso’s paintings from 1924 to 1930 (text 10). This interpretation works plausibly enough with Picasso’s monstrous creatures of the late 1920s (see figs. 10.1–10.3), but it is hard to square with the illustrations in Georges Braque, which overwhelmingly consist of still lifes with guitars, fruits, bottles, and other familiar paraphernalia of the cubist genre; it is these that make up the vast majority of Braque’s output through 1930. In fact, eight of the postwar paintings in the Braque section in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century, offered there as examples of the painter’s classical belle mésure, including Guitar and Bottle of Marc on a Table (fig. 13.1), were carried over into Georges Braque, presumably as examples of the “romantic” Braque

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13.1. Georges Braque, Guitar and Bottle of Marc on a Table, 1930. Oil and sand on canvas, 130 × 74 cm. Leonard C. Hanna Fund, Cleveland Museum of Art. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art/Bridgeman- Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

who works under the spell of visions and hallucinations. Since Einstein seldom refers to any specific works in his text, it’s difficult to know how he would reconcile this apparent contradiction. To be sure, his reinterpretation of Braque as a “romantic” may in part be based on the stylistic change in his art that began in 1931, evident in ten works illustrated at the conclusion of the plate section, of which The Bathers is an example (fig. 13.2), and in the plaster panels related to the Theogony cycle that

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13.2. Georges Braque, The Bathers (Les baigneuses), 1931. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 195.4 cm. Private collection. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

serve as frontispieces to the individual chapters and the plate section. These are characterized by the emergence of a fluid, transparent curvilinear style evocative of spontaneity and automatism.26 This drastic change in Einstein’s interpretation of Braque, now extended retroactively to his entire postwar production, might be seen as an example of the principle of history as “perspective, plotted from the vantage point of today,” that Einstein articulates in the book’s first chapter. As Einstein became more focused on what, in Georges Braque, he termed the “sociological situation of art today,” he must have recognized that the aesthetic refinement he had previously lauded in Braque’s art made for a poor fit with his critique of liberalism and its culture of aesthetic nuance. This, arguably, is why he had to radicalize Braque beyond recognition— otherwise this painter he had formerly praised for his “lucid and audacious purity,”27 for his cultivation of painterly craft, could be seen as a symptom of the aesthetic culture of liberalism that was Einstein’s target in Georges Braque. To make Braque fulfill the radical demands that Einstein now made on art, he read into it qualities and invested it with a power that it could not sustain. One might say, anticipating the title of a book manuscript he completed exactly one year after the publication of Georges Braque, that he was fabricating a fiction. ■

CHAPTER 1

TWO CHAPTERS FROM GEORGES BRAQUE

A

n effect of the breakdown of culture and consensus was that artworks, having become meaningless as an instrument of religion and piteously degenerate, were viewed in isolation and regarded as selfsufficient and independent phenomena. One now valued artworks above all as aesthetic structures, that is, for their manner of representation; one imagined that what was seen could be fully rendered in words and, numbed by the din of one’s own bark, failed to see the hopeless chasm between discourse and image. These coiffeurs of description, so fond of metaphorically embellishing a Cézannesque blue or paraphrasing an Ingres green, failed to grasp that words can never adequately or faithfully translate an optical experience. This demonstrates the embarrassing pointlessness of lyrical description; effete word decorateurs exploit pictures, instead of letting pictures conquer their own biased seeing. So one debases oneself as the illustrator of another’s creation instead of primarily using pictures like any other material to form one’s own intellectual position. One construed artworks as absolute, virtually autonomous organisms, failing to recognize that with such idolatry one was practicing a putrid metaphysics, shattered into shameful anecdotes: the crochet work of bankrupt fetishists. No one dared view art itself as problematic and suspect, for then one’s own purpose, namely describing pictures, would have descended into ridiculousness; yet art lay before craven eyes like the serene realm of unfulfilled pipe dreams in which the banalized person stewed and lied; if anyone touched art with a firm hand, its idealization by these acrobats of denial snapped into pieces. So that one might regard art as isolated and absolute, it had to forfeit nearly all vital and effective power; now it dozed as a calm, distant paradise for the frail and cowardly, beyond life, beyond questions and turmoil. Yet Schultze,28 otherwise a socialized creature of the state, was now permitted a free, inconsequential, rosy red outlet for his feelings. Any analysis of art that went beyond form would have exposed all this idealization as suspect. Aestheticians were infected by this ludicrous idealization of the artwork. To counter a failed Christian reality one now optimistically constructed another reality, pure and absolute, a rationalist myth for the unsuccessful; from there one proceeded to instruct and make demands. Now one fabricated the conceptually standardized artwork as a mean, a comfortable, sedate middle point that weakens and domesticates the extremes, even as it reluctantly touches myriad possibilities. So one devised the doctrine of classical proportion, of the beautiful and the noble, mercilessly castrating what was dangerously vital. Now everything that happened was reduced to conscious, conceptually stabilizable expressions, one constructed the facade that is the conscious person, and with respect to experience placed the high-

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est value on the unruffled products of that consciousness. The principles of this classical cast of mind were equilibrium and harmony at any cost, and one therefore neglected extremes of energy and excitement. With the quiescence effected by what doctrine construed as the normal artwork— a vague hypothesis and embarrassing compromise— art had been cravenly rationalized; late antiquity was held up as the ultimate realization of the classical standard. And so art was reduced to misery, a spiritually shallow platitude that, far removed from visions and miracles, vulgarly swaggered about. With the prescription of the normal artwork came a relentless leveling, the democracy of the average nonviolent soul had succeeded. Artworks had become badges of a mediocre order and consequently tamely bourgeois; such order and clarity were achieved without strain, since anything disorderly or out of the ordinary was pedantically excluded. This ideology of the normal artwork allowed art to be harnessed peacefully to bourgeois society; now it had become unthreatening and untragic, namely, it had become normal. Serving this process of bourgeois democratic normalization was a mode of history writing that fostered an idealistic distortion and falsification of art’s development. Art history was now defined by the principle of exceptional technical achievement, although it remains a completely open question whether a technically perfect solution is the most meaningful one or is in fact devoid of human import. Now one wrote the adoring chronicle of champions and their technical records, while critique and issues of meaning dwindled between hymnically commended reproductions. Classicists— we’re speaking of Wölfflin— imagined that forms were self-generating out of and through themselves; such art scholarship was the shadow of a feeble imitation of the philosophical doctrine of the self-movement of the Idea. The cultural contextualization of artworks, of their limitations and their agency, was forgotten, there was no longer any possibility of absorbing them historically. Characteristic of this idolatry was the art historians’ unscrupulous concealment or dismissal, as historically unimportant, of most documentation relating to the commission of artworks; the rosy selection was dazzling, and perfection and the Grand Prize were considered the order of the day. We once proposed a different formula: in the domain of art the artwork is the exception, the rarest of things.29 With such optimistic procedures art historians uprooted the artwork from its living context in favor of its dehumanized, cowardly idealization; out of subservience to this notion one had pasted together the consoling myth of autonomous genius, so that the petit bourgeois might admire and celebrate himself in his heroes, for Schultze is the forefather of his heroes, who parade past him as his dazzling projections, fashioned in accord with his desires and needs. We won’t attempt to describe the exceptional work of Braque nor to imi-

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tate his forms, his hues, and mandolins in words; speaking and painting— each has its own way.30 For us a work matters insofar as it shapes its time or is molded by it. Now one will examine these creations to determine how closely they approach our own disposition, that is, how they fit into a preexisting world picture and into our own life, or how they contradict, unsettle, or influence it. Questions concerning execution or technical accomplishment will be relegated to studio conversations about craft. For us the artwork is a vital force and practical instrument, but as an isolated aesthetic phenomenon it seems inconsequential and dead. We despise the appreciation of artworks as rare or precious bibelots; technical issues scarcely interest us, especially since technique and its reactionary means mislead one into adapting new or extraordinary experiences to prejudices based on craft, thereby destroying any originality. One could well-nigh say that paintings themselves and their technique are no more than parti pris. At long last someone should investigate the demoralizing, soulless effects of technical virtuosity. As a rule one recklessly overestimates works of art, as though one could unfailingly read in them the entire face of a generation or era. Yet artworks are completely inadequate for determining the character of an epoch. A significant amount of art may develop against the current of its time or, out of embarrassment, offset or conceal a particular cultural tendency. Most of so-called modern art, for example, has a decidedly reactionary bent. Artworks engage us only insofar as they comprise the means to modify the real, the structure of the human subject, and our conceptions of the world, hence the major question, how can artworks be integrated into a world picture or how might they destroy and surpass it? This turns the position of the art historian on its head. For now the task becomes to investigate art in relation to its biological foundation, therefore it’s no longer enough to present a descriptive history or to evaluate art aesthetically like schoolwork and then hand out grades; a sociology or ethnology of art must be attempted, in which it is appraised not as an end in itself but as a living and magical medium. Then images will regain their importance as vital, active forces. By contrast, one who investigates the aesthetic dimension touches only on technical accomplishment, neglecting how form comes into being as well as the complex historical situation of the artwork. Certainly we must break with the myopic perspective of the monograph; usually it heralds the apotheosis of the petit bourgeois ego, in which the bourgeois encounters a mirror image of himself, delightfully exalted. One has enshrouded and walled off pictures with paraphrases. Artworks are smothered by these clichés and all that is extraordinary in them senesces in the usual terminology. The paraphrase, numbing in its cheapness, then becomes infectious and is mechanically transferred to other monomotifs—

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vérole des mots— and so the clichéd monograph proliferates, an embarrassing example of commercially bustling inertia; names, numbers, and adjectives are interchangeable, the rest will always fit as in the eternal calendar. With the monograph there is a danger that the maker will be all too sharply separated from the work and that both will be torn from a meaningful context. For it is precisely the pictures that one reveres, as self-sufficient organisms detached from their manifold living interconnections— it is this that marks the aesthetic cast of mind. Servile dependency, atavistically religious drives may be belatedly at work here; divine privileges and the end of fetishism. Formerly images and statues served as vessels of divine or cosmic powers, as means for their veneration. Images were used as instruments of magic; through them one conjured up elements and powers, compelling them to remain in force, or one preserved the vital force of the deceased, that it might be resurrected to live on in a young descendant. Images, then, were practical tools for containing, conjuring, and neutralizing the dreaded omnipotent forces. But gods and the beyond moldered away and were forgotten, yet the ancient custom of reverential devotion survived in the attitude toward images, which were now granted— as the gods were formerly— an antiquated, playful transcendence. On the whole— an embarrassing disgrace— the usual aesthetics continued to be spoon- fed, coated with ersatz religious terminology that one used to defend the problematic status of art. In vain one sealed off art in a precarious beyond and used idiotically luminous catchwords like absolute, pure, unconditional, placing it beyond all morality, placing it like the timorously revered Idea in an untouchable realm beyond the real; here is an outlet, devoid of magic or risk, for religious needs and feelings, one speaks of self-sufficient totalities. Such an antiquated aesthetic of lifelessness gleams vacuously, the meager, belated table scraps of a dead metaphysics.31 Now, without risk or consequences, weaklings use others’ experiences to draw from them shadowy feelings and borrowed forms. The fragile soul needs and reveres the readymade order contained in the pictorial image, the longed-for crutch that props him up. Images and books are prostheses for the psychically blind. Perhaps those receptive to instruction have the greatest need of art; yet, unable to nurture it as something vital, they merely exploit it, and soon the artwork is sanded over with prattle. It’s similar with those in the business of describing works of art, who, instead of suffering through their own visions, use the visions of others as a prop. Weak souls misuse the artwork as an excuse, so as to avoid suffering extreme states that are unbearable to them; wind-resistant screens are erected to protect the faint- hearted. They conceal their own weakness and utilize the strength of another in comfortably arranged and charmingly approximate results. Aesthetic exploitation is the parasitism of the lifeless.

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The same applies to the painters who produce variations of others’ achievements, to the pompiers advancing from the rear toward the latest discoveries, who all too nimbly vulgarize the innovators’ visions and timidly yet shamelessly adapt them to the old established art. Feeble devotees and shameless exploiters abuse art as an escape route and seek in it the desired extinction or disguise of their own personalities; that’s why one identifies with the artist and his work, in order to gain new values and powers through such destruction or adaptation. Yet in judging art, feelings of inferiority soon lead one to distance oneself and through negative judgments, exact revenge by feigning one’s own superiority. Should this fail, then in resignation one will vainly reinforce the identification with the artist all the more and preserve it at any price. One crawls beneath the skin of a superior being so as to escape one’s own smallness and avoid the risk of direct experience; thus art now serves as a means of averting or mitigating such experience. Finally, pictorial images then stare out as lifeless signs of a faint beyond, in which unbearable and unrealizable wishes and drives can be dissipated without risk; so art can degenerate into the domain of the cowardly. Now one takes comfort in seeing in every work of art an autonomous and definitive solution, an organism closed in upon itself; one constructs a beyond of aestheticisms, and pictures are removed from vital connectedness. Yet pictures can continue to be effective only if one senses them as fragments that dissolve in the stream of reality or waste away like frail creatures. Pictures hold meaning as teeming centers of energy and intersections of experiences. Art that in dead transcendence is drained of life by ancient metaphysical clichés forfeits its energizing power; the aesthetic attitude and the concomitant isolation of art effect a diminution and curtailment of those energies. Two approaches seem above all others to shape the writing of history. On one side there are those who optimistically interpret history as development, secretly positing a vague telos as a prevailing value. We distrust such optimistic simplification, for it neglects periodic regressions, contradictory tensions of historical dialectics, thanks to which history loses any ultimate transcendent goal that humankind is all too happy to claim for itself. One blithely claimed unity for the history of art, and attempted— albeit unsuccessfully— to misrepresent it as a clearly circumscribed science and, with inadequate means, to approximate a science’s rational ideal. So in the quest for unity one tried to ensnare what was truly new in the deadly nets of a closed and finished tradition. One concealed instances of revolt so that a convenient typology might appear justified. Yet artworks achieve their primary significance by their indwelling power of insubordination and the subversive energies they release. At its best art signifies revolt against a unified tradition. Now one may cast off the deadly burden of historical

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inheritance and, unconstrained by the leaden shadows of the dead, realize oneself and create a new reality— first and foremost in opposition to the classical aspect. Let us stress at the outset that we value the work of Braque not as a continuation of tradition, but as a break with it. Applying another, metaphorical method are those who are fond of interpreting historical events as analogies or parallels to historical antecedents and aligning these with one other. In this way one simplifies whatever happens into a static, monotonous mechanism, whereby one secretly presupposes a predetermined harmony, a law of resurrection. Here a belief is arranged to fit predetermined types; a guaranteed repetition is asserted, so as to pile up a comforting, lazy unity of history by means of metaphysical doctrines. Behind both attempts lies a desire to unify history into a continuum and to mitigate its unsettling tensions, its terrifying contradictions. At its core, such an effort constitutes purely and simply a reactionary writing of history; one understands what is most novel as recurrence or succession, not as opposition or turning point. Yet there are not only the tendencies toward a uniform inheritance, there is an equally strong struggle against the dangers of historical ossification. Accordingly, to the same degree a revolutionary principle also governs the writing of history; for humanity swings to and fro between creation and adaptation, between deadly risk and the search for security. Many regard history as an objectively given domain of facts. We hold a different view. History begins not in the remotest past, but has its source in the living, breathing present, flowing backward into that which has vanished as though in a cloud. The past shimmers as a projection of the now; the sorting and appraisal of epochs are generated and defined by today, by its structure and power; hence one cannot speak of a single objective history, rather any construction of history is perspective, plotted from the vantage point of today. Should anyone attempt the swift accommodation of a subjective, creative work to the deadening past and anxiously dig around for old analogies, this reveals that a person afraid of death is securing his threatened present in the past and seeking to justify the rapidly fading moment by the return of the dead. To us it seems that the task of art history should be, beyond a pure history of images, to investigate the conditions from which works of art grow. We therefore condemn an art history conceived as a history of the autonomous movement of forms and styles and reject such aesthetic absolutes. If the art of today is to be adequate to the present historical situation and serve the refiguring of the human subject and its structure, then contemporary art can only be subversively fashioned; what is at stake is not to arrest time and mitigate crises, but to convey what is catastrophic as the epoch comes crashing down.

CHAPTER 2

TWO CHAPTERS FROM GEORGES BRAQUE

Today’s society is undergoing a realignment between individual and collective energies. Seldom has the conflict between these two tendencies affected the individual life with such vehemence. If one doesn’t want to reduce art to a matter of aesthetics, it is necessary to ask to what extent it merely provides a buffer for the individual or what collective energies are active within it. The intellectual depletion of this bourgeois society now coming to an end is evident in how the most significant achievements of recent decades have either been directed against it or realized apart from it; the greater share of the art has come from isolated individuals, so that significant achievements appear downright abnormal or monstrous. In antiquity the gods provided justification for the real, and its images of the world were imposed on subservient subjects by priests and kings; any wayward alterations were punished as a sin. Reality and its representation were an inherited destiny, divinely preordained, and the individual accordingly acted with pious humility. A ritualistic art was in keeping with such a disposition; one scarcely dared to breach the canon established by the priests. If one violated the artwork it lost its magical efficacy. Images served as magical instruments for the protection of life and therein lay their meaning. Their aesthetic import was irrelevant, the painstaking fashioning of images was above all an expression of reverence for the gods and rulers. The regulated character of this art hardly stems from aesthetic intentions, it is grounded rather in magical rites and a numerical mysticism derived from astrological considerations. An artwork that contravened rule and type was deficient in suggestiveness and magical power; probably the priests punished innovative experiments as sinful, since those engaged in them had drawn on forbidden powers. The static calm of early ancient sculptures accords with a belief in eternal gods and is conditioned by the desire to preserve the power of these gods and of the dead. These clearly articulated figures display the spirit of these urban cultures and are consistent with a hieratically stratified social structure with the gods and their representatives, the kings, at its crowning apex. This art remained free from servile realism, since the mythic was revered as the dominant reality and the precondition of all being. We shall now attempt a brief sketch of the world picture of the nineteenth-century liberal, to which impressionism belongs. Liberalism appears to us as the historical consequence of a complex accretion of experiences and sedimentations; it’s the result of excessive choice among possible models of reality. With the growing complexity and diversity of experience came a sensitivity to nuance, the subtlest individual tint acquires significance, there shines the prospect of the most minute distinctions in interpretation.

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The unanimously shared canonical image of reality is broken down into countless interpretations (a historical parallel: the formation of sects that occurs when a religious system dissolves), and the available world pictures forfeit their inexorable authority. Everyone now has the right to a personal interpretation, images of reality become exquisitely nuanced. An example is modern philosophy, in which a congeries of opinions achieves unity by technical sleights of hand. The didacticism of old, the compelling reality of metaphysical and visionary authority, disintegrates into the opinions and interpretations of less constrained individuals. One defended oneself from this anarchism by abstracting an image of reality that was no longer qualitative, and therefore no longer of a concrete individual nature. A consensus was reached with a quantitatively defined, scientific conception of the world that was based on superstition, that is, on strict causality; the rights and freedoms of the individual had no place here. This mechanistic worldview now became a substitute for fate, and was accepted on faith by the majority. Yet the human impact of this sensible, rational myth was extremely limited, since such knowledge was difficult to communicate. This quantitative worldview suited advanced technology and industry, especially since human beings were now appraised as quantifiable labor while the individual’s person and character counted for almost nothing. Technology and science meant deindividuation, a technological collective. This world picture differs from previous ones in that one sought to replace a mythically figured reality with a constructed abstraction; not so much to enable experience as to reduce it to a limited number of types, that is, to explain it. Thus the rational world conception is governed by a depletion or destruction of gestalten, and if the formulation of such laws were comprehensive it would foreclose anything genuinely new. Hence this conception stood diametrically opposed to an essential element of all art, namely the discovery of the gestalt, of new vision. Now one was limited to standardized description and valued what was comfortably, quantifiably graspable, namely processes capable of mechanization. Reality became hopelessly impoverished and oversimplified, no longer was there any possibility of accommodating the psyche’s basic strata, which require continual reshaping of figured reality to live and flourish. Out of this congestion of unordered experiences and all too many interpretations of reality there followed the anarchic subjectivism of the nineteenth century, which understood the real simply as an assumption or a phenomenon, while any direct understanding was repressed and fell into decay. To counter this unruly mass of interpretations with an unassailably objective order, one credited mathematical calculation with a special, indeed excessive importance, for it was believed that this constituted a type of knowledge free from subjective whim. Now one made an effort to determine relational models, that is laws, for as many processes as possible. But

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on a psychic level this attempt remained largely ineffective, because numbers are never capable of capturing action and direct experience. Thus on one side stood the rational world, on the other the threat of the unfathomable psyche and ungraspable event. With the increase in subjectivism the mass of reality became ever more violently unsettled and fragmented: everyone had the right and possibility to venture a personal interpretation and personal reality as long as society wasn’t harmed and went on dozing indecisively in the cozy mire of common sense. So the ability for peremptory action was lost, and every passionate intention and resolution dissolved into the mass of myriad opinions and washed away. Interpretations and impressions were what mattered, one admired the slightest nuance, while binding doctrines that once had a religious basis gave way to an anarchic, yet indecisive individualism. Spirit was shattered into bits and the mind’s power to apprehend the real had collapsed. Because all was now reduced to playful interpretation, there developed an ever stronger skepticism regarding reality and the shaping of being. Such was the consequence of the idealist orientation, of the Christian faith, which, when confronted with reality, had lapsed into skepticism. Being, previously unambiguous, now evaporated into hazy clouds of interpretations applied according to one’s comfort or taste. This one today, another tomorrow. One practiced an aestheticism of discretionary opinions. Here we are providing a sketch of the liberal position, to which the current mentality is strictly opposed.32 In painting the first sign of this new attitude, which created and circumscribed an unambiguous reality beyond all comparison and compromise, was cubism. The dissolution of solid pictorial form, clarity of structure, and the classical closed composition by the impressionists wasn’t at all based on a technical decision but came from the collective spirit of the epoch, whose representatives were embarrassingly surprised as the painters drew belated conclusions from the spiritual situation of their time. This liberal era believed itself thoroughly unsympathetic to Christianity, yet with its idealist attitude it was at its innermost core simply the consequence and end of Christian civilization. Liberalism had valued interpretation over the shaping of a single, unitary reality, and had therefore unconsciously continued to act out the old Christian drama of the superiority of spirit to fact. One overestimated the spiritual superstructure. Because there was no centralizing suggestion of a God or of revealed teaching, the old unified, authoritative spiritual order collapsed into a tangled plethora of numberless individual opinions, as a result of which untold energies were scattered— except for the inadequate attempt to fashion a quantitative world picture. The Christian world picture was dissolved; no longer was there any obligation arising from spiritual ties, no trove, so one rushed from variations to gradations, cherishing individual nuance. This formless

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heap of interpretations was quickly exhausted. In place of a binding reality there was now every imaginable opinion; people became neurasthenics and artistes of interpretation in which anything definitively real had perished. This hopeless accumulation of interpretations was countered by strengthening the quantitatively based, causal image of reality, so as to impose limits on the newly achieved freedom and arbitrariness, at whatever cost. Yet a scientific world picture unleashes only limited psychic energy, since in principle it does not allow for unforeseen events and because— this is especially important— conflicts and instances of dialectical irrationality are neglected or denied for the sake of a unified system. Consequently the scientific world picture is lacking in psychic stimuli and tensions. Technology became another compensation for liberal individualism. Now the individual person became valued solely as a producer, and productivity became quantifiable yet spiritually inconsequential. While an exact figure had to be placed on productivity, beyond the debt of labor demanded by society the individual’s personal opinions, character, and life trajectory were less and less subject to control and cultivation. Grouping persons according to their quantifiable technological productivity generated new forms of association organized along the lines of production. In defiance of every form of liberalism a fateful social order emerged from these economic conditions, one that at first barely comprised those intellectual elements necessary to effect a primitivization of society. Now, in opposition to the liberal type, the class-conscious proletarian, born of technology, stepped onto the stage. His existence was one-dimensional, marked by a barren destiny defined by technology and labor; for this rationalized primitive an unambiguous but one-sided worldview emerged from this economy: Marxism. Here one found the new barbaric actuality and a narrowly deterministic view of humanity, fatefully defined as an economic reality. Meanwhile, transcending all subjective individualism, collective associations had been formed that grew out of the intolerably coercive economic system. The liberal epoch had failed because of its surfeit of multiple meanings, out of which the contradictions degenerated into complete meaninglessness. In its mass of interpretations it had forfeited any possibility of the necessary. Yet rising out of the gloomy furrows of mud, a new and violent destiny was gathering, shaped by these forces: (1) the economy, (2) the collective types that emerge from within it, (3) the formation of a social doctrine as a result of economic pressure, (4) the suppression of personal opinion in favor of the doctrine that history and the economy function according to laws. A primitive type, the proletarian, with a rigid, devoutly embraced doctrine that he defends and enforces as would an orthodox sectarian, now stands opposed to the educated liberal with his tangled mass of opinions; a new human species attempts to achieve domination. Social utopia, an

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economic myth, replaces interpretation. The result: a form of primitivism wrecks and displaces the liberal’s sophisticated intellectual superstructure. Now a rationalist world picture, comprising a clearly defined reality, is set against the dualism of interpretation and reality; in the economic sphere fate and necessity, which had died out in the free play of opinions, are resurrected anew. Man sees himself fatefully defined by economic processes; technology is perfected to such an extent that its mechanisms seems superior to human will. Now the individual is valued only as a symptom of society, much as in their own limited domain the impressionists had valued the motif only as the symptom of painterly technique. The person, the individual, collapses in the face of the new collectivity, and the fabrication of new communal types begins. One is now far removed from the obliqueness of the liberal, who valued the real only as apparence or as phenomenon. From the liberal standpoint painterly realism, for instance, would represent merely one opinion among others, while for us it signifies a slavish tautology that calls into question all human freedom. The myriad interpretations of reality had overburdened the brain and memory of the European and diminished the capacity for decisive action. Instead one practiced variation and paraphrase. To be sure, one element of this belief will initially be salvaged: namely the destruction of the static world picture; for if reality had formerly consisted only of a particular experience of the phenomenal and its interpretation, that reality was now reshaped and dissolved into a multifaceted simultané of functional dynamisms. In fact liberalism, with its hostility to doctrine, had drawn the ultimate conclusion from the Christian valorization of spirit. After the death of this unified doctrine countless pluralisms emerged, and every hard fact became lost in the subjectivisms of a thousand opinions. The worst feature of liberalism was that one could no longer achieve a unity between the constructs of mind and concrete facts. And so in the sport of jeux des mots [sic], one lost touch with the real. If one accepted subjectivism in principle, it made no sense to impose limits on it. So one day it was felt that the individual could shape something more significant than a mere interpretation or painterly viewpoint, namely an as yet unknown fact. Yet such a step meant stringent opposition to liberalism, which had diminished the complexly real [das komplex Wirkliche] to a mere opinion, while recognizing only quantitatively verifiable, that is, mechanical, processes as facts. Reason had been overrefined to the point of incoherent meaninglessness, yet one remained captive to a classical idealism, trusting the autonomy of ideas over an unambiguous reality. Facts melted into fictions, which at best were consolidated into a loose chain of conventions that nonetheless lacked persuasive power. The weakness of this individualistic liberalism lay in its

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loss of the capacity for producing compelling facts other than those that were mechanically quantifiable. For the sake of consistency, all cognition had to be condemned as provisional and as a prospective error, yet with that this rational epoch had received its verdict. These insights grew in influence to the degree that they were embraced by a segment of society. Beyond all this stood works of art, resembling idols, and all aesthetics was directed toward guaranteeing them a higher, independent existence on the basis of their noble yet idiotic lack of purpose. Art was thus reduced to a virtually ineffectual power, independent of history; the artist worked on in aestheticist indifference; his intentions were mainly of a technical kind; yet with this painters had lost their inner connection to any spiritual vitality. Art degenerated into a reactionary luxury of a vegetative elite, who with the aid of their pictures withdrew in snobbery from the events of their time. Art had been idealized, had become autonomous to such a degree that it rocked playfully to and fro, beyond the prevailing intellectual currents.

CH. 14

EXCERPTS FROM THE FABRICATION OF FICTIONS 1935

Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (The Fabrication of Fictions), a sprawling draft manuscript of nearly five hundred typed pages, remained unpublished for more than three decades after Einstein’s death.1 It is his last major project that approached something like completion. Three others on which he worked during the 1930s— his autobiographical novel “Bebuquin II,” “La traité de la vision” (The treatise on vision), and “Handbuch der Kunst” (Handbook of art)— exist today only as notes and fragments.2 The bloated text of The Fabrication of Fictions has been succinctly— and aptly— described by various commentators as

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a “monstrous pamphlet,” “a great antimodernist tirade,” “an auto-da-fé of twentieth-century European avant-garde culture,” a “furious attack against poets, artists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, physicists and . . . along with Einstein himself: ‘the intellectuals.’”3 But its target, as Nicola Creighton has argued, is more precise: “a frustrated utopia, the utopia of the Braque book.”4 After the confident assertions of Einstein’s previous writing on Picasso, Braque, Klee, and the surrealists, The Fabrication of Fictions makes for painful reading. Having at last recognized as a delusion his dogged belief that the avant- garde could forge not merely a new, collective visuality but a “future reality,” Einstein now expunged all remnants of that dream with this searingly cathartic, exhaustingly repetitious invective.5 “Poets or painters,” he bitterly concedes, “are incapable of endowing existence with any primary meaning or shaping a primary reality.” Purged of his former illusions, he now wonders whether “the history of modern art is merely the chronicle of an unbridled egotism, of an overbred vanity.” Since its posthumous publication in 1973 there has been considerable speculation about the date of the manuscript. Some commentators have dated it to the early 1930s, which would make it contemporaneous with Einstein’s work on the Braque book— indeed, some thought it might be the “aesthetics” to which Einstein referred in his correspondence with the Wasmuths, thus placing its origins at the beginning of the decade.6 Now, thanks to a recently discovered letter from Einstein to Fritz Saxl, we can establish a date by which he had completed the draft. In it he reported that he had “just finished a new book— an extended critique of the spirit of today and art [sic]. In French it’s called— La fabrication des fictions.” Although undated, the letter can be securely placed in the latter half of May 1935, since a few sentences later Einstein adds, “The Italian exhibition is here. You must see it. I had to write a long essay on it.”7 The essay in question is an unpublished twenty-page manuscript; the exhibition that is its subject was L’exposition d’art italien: De Cimabue à Tiepolo, which opened at the Petit Palais on May 16.8 Saxl’s reply to Einstein is dated May 29, so his letter falls within that two-week period. Subsequent correspondence with the Czech collector Vincenc Kramárˇ, from February 1936, indicates that Einstein was revising the manuscript— he wrote that he was at work on three books, one of which was “eine kritik und sociologie der moderne” (a critique and sociology of modernity). No other book by Einstein fits that description.9 Then, in 1938, while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he was quoted in a Catalan newspaper as saying he was preparing a “sociology of art or fiction and reality.”10 The original subtitle of The Fabrication of Fictions was “Eine Verteidigung des Wirklichen,” a defense of the real.11

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This would indicate that at this date he still intended further revising the manuscript for publication. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, even before Einstein completed Georges Braque in the fall of 1932 there were signs that he had reached a crisis. Beyond the letters to Ewald Wasmuth and Sophia Kindsthaler, cited in the introduction to text 13, Einstein’s growing disillusionment is also evident in a catalog essay he published in 1931 for an exhibition of ancient bronzes in a New York gallery.12 That text comes as a new departure in his work, dealing with art on which he had written nothing previously— in its broad historical scope it looks ahead to the “Handbook of art” project.13 The show featured Hittite, Etruscan, Greek, and Egyptian statuettes. Taking the long historical view, Einstein now acknowledged the yawning gap that divided the art of modernity from these cultures. “The works of early antiquity,” he writes, “were expressions of an important magical worldview, and functioned in the preservation of the people and their gods. . . . A statue at that time signified much more than a mere representation or an isolated creation in form. It served a precise purpose, namely the preservation and strengthening of life.” The contrast with modernity was acute: “art has evaporated into vague cloudiness, and works of art sink into a swamp of circumspections. . . . Let us frankly admit that art has forfeited its spiritual power since it is no longer harnessed to the service of a great and well- disciplined scheme of things. Art, by itself, can never create this scheme of values, and purely aesthetic and formal criteria reveal precisely the spiritual poverty of a large part of contemporary ‘artistry’” (BA 3, 224). These remarks would seem to mark a major revision of Einstein’s utopian claims for art’s agency, and in substance anticipate certain passages of The Fabrication of Fictions. Yet in Georges Braque, completed the following year, he was seemingly still clinging to that utopia. It appears that a decisive break must have come by the beginning of 1934. A lacerating self-critique appears among the notes and fragments for “Bebuquin II”: “The perpetual phony revolutionary becomes utterly sterile and remains hopelessly behind the changing conditions of the times because he is always fighting for the same revolutionary utopia, which he seeks to achieve by a change in artistic form.”14 That sums up the faith that Einstein had expressed in his Art of the 20th Century and Georges Braque; its illusoriness must have become even more painfully apparent with Hitler’s seizure of power. The passage appears in a section dealing with Einstein’s political activism during the failed 1918–19 German revolution. Yet this harsh verdict, it is clear, is a retrospective reflection from 1934. This devastating realization must have been the catalyst for Einstein’s plan to write The Fabrication of Fictions. “Artists

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will never make major history,” he writes there; “[t]oday’s modernism will fade away, for it lacks norms and social commitment. This art will perish in autistic overrefinement and playful isolation.” In Georges Braque Einstein had confidently proclaimed the death of bourgeois liberalism, a remnant of the nineteenth century with its cultivation of nuance, manifested in the art of the impressionists, its shattering of the real into myriad opinions. The art of Braque— and by implication that of Picasso, Klee, and the surrealists— was extolled as an antidote to that culture; the turning of the tide had begun with cubism. The Fabrication of Fictions is among other things a recognition that liberalism had never died; it had merely entered a new phase. Worse, there was no longer so much as a hint of any effective opposition on the part of artists and intellectuals; the avant- garde, in its solipsistic isolation, is now seen as an acute symptom of the persistent liberal mentality. It is, incidentally, the first time that the term “avant-garde” appears in Einstein’s writings, and he uses it repeatedly, yet with the thickest irony, for “the now senescent avant-garde hobbled along belatedly behind the masses.” “Despite all claims for its modernity,” he declares, “our most recent art is negative and reactionary,” a product of self-delusion: “We develop ideas, spin fairy tales, or paint pictures, yet we’re the first to be duped by our works.” To be sure, Einstein’s indictment of the avant- garde remains, with few exceptions, general: he repeatedly refers to “artists,” but he seldom names names. He refers at several points to generations— those of 1910, 1920, and 1930, respectively, without any indication of exceptions or exemptions, or distinctions between the good, the mediocre, and the bad, in contrast to The Art of the 20th Century. He refers briefly to the French purists, but his most explicit critique targets the Russian constructivists. They had found “an ersatz collectivity in the tectonic. Yet . . . pictorial tectonics without a corresponding tectonic society is musical sport.”15 To be sure, he had been critical of these artists before (K3, 236–40), but marginal notes and interpolations indicate that now his critique encompasses even Picasso and cubism. In one instance he inscribed “Dynamik Kub.” beside the following passage: “intellectuals constructed a deceptive surrogate for the facts they ignored and for their failure to engage in positive action. Theories, poems, and pictures were injected with an imaginative dynamism. . . . The pictures showed the genesis of seeing.”16 Einstein had earlier described cubism in just these terms, as representing the unfolding process of perception (see text 7). Now he concedes that although this might have resulted in change on a “technical or formal plane . . . socially one comported oneself in a reactionary way.”17 We have noted that Einstein initially subtitled his book “a defense of the real.” And the most radical change in The Fabrication of Fictions

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is his position on the real, a reversal of the thesis he had so passionately articulated in his writings of the early thirties. We recall Einstein’s claim in his Picasso chapter: “The real is a human invention and must always be invented anew, because it is continually dying away.” And in 1932: “The mirage of a finished, stable real,” a “fixed reality” in which most people believed, was a “straitjacket,” a constraint on human freedom. “Vision and myth,” he insisted, “are not fictions, but an early phase and beginning of the real” (BA 4, 220). In The Fabrication of Fictions Einstein rejects that position with a vengeance: vision and myth are mere “fictions” after all; far from inventing the real anew, the “mythomaniac” avant-garde is guilty of a “rejection of the real.” In truth the avant- garde was engaged, not in the creation of a new reality, but in a “suppression of the complexly real,” in an escape from that “conventional reality” for which Einstein previously had nothing positive to say. Revolting against their milieu, artists “imagined they could fashion a reality out of pure fiction.” Einstein hasn’t abandoned his core belief that the real is a human creation, but as he eloquently argues in the closing pages of the manuscript, it must be a product of collective consensus in which artists and intellectuals play no privileged role. “What matters is not, as intellectuals believed, to reject reality, but to reshape it collectively. Within this labor art can again find its place if it cooperates modestly in the production of a new reality.”18 Part of this critique inevitably carries with it a drastic reversal of Einstein’s views on those features that were fundamental to his later art theory up through Georges Braque. Metamorphosis, we’re now told, was for the moderns only a “fantastical comedy,” one that engaged them because “they no longer grasped concrete facts.” The “primitivization of civilization” (text 11) is now exposed as a “primitive regression,” a sham primitivism. Repeatedly Einstein contrasts the primitives with the moderns, always to the detriment of the latter. “The primitive believes in metamorphosis because his ego is not yet defined, the modern artist works metamorphotically as a result of a hypertrophic ego.”19 It’s no different with dreams and hallucinations: “Primitive and ancient man regarded ecstatic states and dreams as crucial expressions of the collective,” whereas now such states “enabled flight from one’s milieu and the obligations of community.” Those “hallucinatory intervals,” which Einstein had hailed as “the path to the new,” the source of a new collective mythology, were now dismissed as “monological”: they went “unheeded and unanswered”; degenerating “into ineffectual aestheticisms, they pale into private fictions.” Metamorphosis, primitivism, hallucination— these were manifestations of the epochal “turn to romanticism” that Einstein had proclaimed at the beginning of the 1930s. Now he condemned them as a “roman-

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tic escape from community and the present.”20 Along with that reversal comes a new explanation for the romantic turn: it’s no longer attributed to the influence of Nietzsche and Freud, among other factors, as it was in The Art of the 20th Century; it is a generational reaction to “the severe trauma” of the war, an escape “from painful facts into romanticism.” Indeed, Einstein now goes so far as to see in the entirety of postwar art a reaction to the trauma of the war, the manifestation of a “fear of reality” that sought escape in “private, imaginary, insular zones.” One of Einstein’s most conspicuous shifts is on the issue of style. In Georges Braque he dismissed style as “merely a prejudice, a constraint, a means of anxiously avoiding new, spontaneous experiences” (GB, 315). He had earlier praised Picasso effusively for his pluralism of styles; they constituted a resistance to a narrowly circumscribed notion of subjecthood. Now, in a comment in the margin, he links Picasso with Dalí for his “formal eclecticism.”21 The very constraints imposed by style are recognized as a means for containing the anarchic individualism of liberal culture, for the “setting of limits and restrictions”; it was determined “by social facts and convictions.” “For above all else, style brings out commonality and negates exceptions.” The achievement of a “universally binding style” signified the strength of a culture. “The liberal era, which proclaimed the utopia of unrestricted individual freedom, produced no style.” One of the more significant aspects of The Fabrication of Fictions is how the issue of social class, particularly the place of intellectuals in the class structure, has now become a central theme, indeed the theme. We have seen that Einstein had touched briefly on the working class— for the first time in over a decade— in his chapter on surrealism and in Georges Braque. There he briefly addressed the relation of this “primitive” class to the “dominant culture,” and how intellectuals had failed to acknowledge this momentous social change, reflecting and reinforcing their social isolation. Now, in the span of five years the issue has shifted: it is no longer the status of the proletarian masses that is in question, but that of intellectuals, who have been left behind and marginalized by history. “The proletariat was now superior to them,” declared Einstein. In The Fabrication of Fictions politics and art come together as never before— Einstein had rarely linked these domains in his writing. When he had been politically active— during the ill-fated German revolution of 1918–19— he published a single short text on art. Conversely, when he was most productive as an art critic, as he was in 1913–14 and from 1921 to 1933, he wrote almost nothing on politics, at least in any explicit sense.22 His critique of artists and intellectuals echoes some of the most corrosive self-criticism in “Bebuquin II.” During the German revolution, we read there, “Beb” had felt a bond with the communists, but was

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nevertheless deeply conflicted, fearing “a mechanization of his person and of life, a hopeless normalization that destroys everything that made him exceptional as a person.”23 He had “artificially cultivated and isolated his personality to such an extent that he is no longer suited for COMM[unism].”24 In The Fabrication of Fictions Einstein writes of those intellectuals who sought to connect with the Communist Party, yet “refused to give up their old intellectual privileges.” “To the writers one thing seemed the bitterest fate and tormented them worse than the fear of death: anonymity, the loss of their exceptionalism and their fame.” In the final pages of the manuscript, included here, Einstein acknowledged that only revolutionary social and political change could rescue art and intellectual life from the dead end of elitism and social irrelevance. “A new style of mind is possible only after a revolution that creates altered social conditions and would generate new human types. Intellectuals must once again acquire a sense for useful collaborative work and abandon the utopia of the aesthetically perfect but pointless act.” As the civil war in Spain began in July 1936, Einstein must have seen an opportunity for such “useful collaborative work,” a chance to renew and redeem his life, and he and his wife Lyda set out for Barcelona the following month, leaving Paris, as he later put it to Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, “without saying a word.”25 In Spain he joined the anarchosyndicalist militia of Buenaventura Durruti, made up of “workers, proletarians from the factories and villages.”26 A thread connects Einstein’s remarks, in a 1936 radio address on the occasion of Durruti’s death, on his experience in the Durruti Column, with his critique of the avantgarde in The Fabrication of Fictions: “He [Durruti] had banished the prehistoric word ‘I’ from grammar. In the Colonna Durruti we know only a collective syntax. My comrades will teach the literati to renew literature with a sense of the collective. Durruti had recognized the power of anonymous labor in the most heartfelt way. . . . Namelessness and communism are one and the same.”27 If we are to believe this testimony, in the Spanish Civil War Einstein finally experienced, however briefly, that collectivity he had vainly sought in the German revolution and subsequently hoped to see achieved through art. His old friend the Dutch journalist Nico Rost encountered Einstein in Barcelona, wearing the uniform of the CNT militia.28 He “was quite different from how he had been in Berlin: not sarcastic, no longer bitter, but enthusiastic and as a result much younger.”29 Near the end of the conflict Einstein wrote to Picasso that fighting alongside the painter’s compatriots “is probably the best memory of my life.”30 ■

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FROM BOOK 1

T

he chronicle of intellectual miracles shimmered wanly and ambiguously. The intellectuals had written their own history, bluffly fashioning themselves as its heroes. They organized a noisy advertising campaign to persuade consumers of the importance and necessity of their products. We’re referring to that falsified writing of history in which intellectuals propagated a shameless cult of genius and their own deification. Brainy prima donnas had dolled themselves up as fetishes and deputies of the gods and staged self-serving forms of adulation. Intellectuals had concocted a historical tale of wondrous exceptionalism. They were mum about the impact of milieu and the substantial power of anonymous achievements. At all costs they wanted to enforce the brazen myth of absolute genius and the dogma of the primacy of spirit. The intellectuals conjured away their own historical and social contingency. The deeply rooted human preconditions to which artworks owed their existence were relegated to mute obscurity. In this way intellectuals deceptively perpetrated their history of dazzling miracles. The general forces that unify humanity were obscured so as to build up the asocial myth of the hermetically closed- off visionary. Intellectuals concealed that the greater part of significant artistic achievements had been shaped and produced collectively. The historians had concocted a dazzling story of abruptly occurring miracles, concealing that successful artworks produced by solitary individuals are extremely rare, representing the exception.31 Strong cultures are distinguished by a considerable yet widespread level of achievement and are governed by a universally binding style that sustains the weak, yet constrains the undisciplined. Every great style served a meaningful general order and was of its time. Most of today’s artworks are characterized by either an indifferent or a hostile attitude toward the dominant powers. Proof of the weakness of today’s modernism [der heutigen Moderne] is its difficulty in producing average achievements of substance.32 Existing society was incapable of integrating art into a broader milieu, consequently everyone strove for an untethered exceptionalism. This fact sheds light on the disjointed artificiality of modernism, which is not integrated into a culture requiring commitment. The intellectuals risked seemingly daredevil experiments; yet these were gymnastics in a void. Such acrobatics posed no danger, since the artists were experimenting only with aesthetics. They executed the “latest things” yet forfeited any connection to reality. So modernism remained ineffectual, with scarcely any impact on actual conditions.

For a modest fee intellectuals provided the bourgeoisie with a personal soul and ideological privileges. The position of the capitalist bourgeoisie was at risk; it required more aggressive ideological means to set itself apart from the masses and to sustain its power over them. The liberal haute bourgeoisie was politically reactionary, yet with respect to theory and aesthetics it acted modern. The poets— artistic révolteurs— were in fact servants of political and economic reaction. Those in power felt instinctively that it served their interests to let oppositional tendencies dissipate innocuously in aesthetics. It was a feature of modern artworks that they carried no obligations, they effected neither facts nor actions. These seemingly seditious poems were destined to fade away, to remain ineffectual, since they were accessible only to a narrow elite. Whether wittingly or unconsciously, intellectuals were working to save those in power. The most recent modernism is marked by a breathless competition for asocial isolation. The intellectuals provided ever-crasser means for achieving distinction. They were attempting to preserve the narrow segment of buyers for their products. Their own existence was linked for good or ill with this consuming minority. The end phase of capitalist democracy is characterized by an almost manic individualism. The more dangerous the threat to the special status of the elite, the more it cherished the individual, visibly different facade. Modern art is a desperate effort to protect individuals from social integration. It attempted to rescue a dubious elite. In the enterprise of liberal free competition persons were not judged according to communal criteria or shared characteristics; what was emphasized, rather, were those qualities that distinguished the individual from the masses. One strained to be a distinctive person, so as to detach oneself from the community. To that end one activated strata of the psyche that hadn’t yet been rationalized and mechanized. Threatened with socialization, the individual escaped into the unconscious and mobilized his hallucinatory powers. Meanwhile one erected a corresponding hierarchy of values, elevating barely controllable forces to a dominant position in the scale of values. One sought to resist collectivization by experimenting with novelty and the newest formal refinements. The slightest tint or alteration was hailed

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Artistes33 will never make major history. The modernist enterprise will die out, since it lacks living material. In former times art served modestly to solidify conventions and defend important shared values and human standards. Today’s modernism will fade away, for it lacks norms and social commitment. This art will perish in autistic overrefinement and playful isolation. . . .34

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as a major discovery. This microscopic, myopic perspective suited a finely nuanced individualism, a boundless demand for unique significance. . . .35

There is one thing in which the moderns distinguished themselves from their ancestors. In former times the old idealistic dualism reflected religious and social arrangements. The gods stood opposite humanity, paradise shone in the clouds, far from humble earth, a gulf divided kings and warriors from the mass of the people. Secular and religious hierarchies and castes were established, the split was sealed as socially valid, society was based on and organized around myth. Today such mythical division is the work of isolated individuals. They feel threatened by collective consensus. Now individuals isolate themselves in order to preserve a willful subjectivism, a fictive independence, and to free their persons from constraining social factors. The individual escapes into intellectual superstructures, into private myths with no collective basis. Anarchic adventurers want to preserve their position of power and status, their privileges as intellectuals. These supposed rebels act as desperate revolutionaries. Artists fled conventional, concrete facts for the remote precincts of imaginary forms. Poets forgot the shared actualities and indulged themselves in the latticed gardens of metaphor. They wanted— even if it cost them all sense of reality— to salvage the specialness of their persons and to this end they adopted an archaically mythical position. One thing they feared above all else: that their vain exceptionalism would be consumed by the real. So they practiced an imaginative art and an aesthetic or visionary version of reality and escaped the complexly real. In their pictures artists now suppressed any resistance by the object and universally comprehensible signs for things. They intensified the subjective, metaphorical propensity of artworks. In this way artists won over the capitalist elites, since they purged the artwork of an uncomfortable reality that was collapsing in crisis, helping one to forget it. Yet an art of substance couldn’t achieve a broad effect, since it was made by aloof individuals and created for isolated consumers. The success of modernism rested on its offering an endangered minority the possibility of forgetting the bankruptcy of its rule and its reality to produce a special kind of person— thanks to the production of special signs and special languages. . . .36

The whole of modern art was dominated by a tendency to resist all assimilation, to mitigate or obscure any influence by the milieu. Today’s artworks defend the fiction of the absolute individual. The efforts of poets and paint-

The moderns imagined they could shape a style as they pleased and could do so under all conditions. These isolated idealists believed that form develops out of form in a sealed off, airless vacuum, and trusted in a mysterious, supposedly self-sufficient automatism of the spirit. Style was always the expression of a stable society, whether it be of the dominant power blocs or of the collective. . . .39 Style means commitment and the binding positing of values. It rests on the foundation of a social order. Art history offers clear examples. Often styles end in barren schematism, in sublime yet ridiculous boredom, since they are no longer sustained by a vital society. By means of style not only are sensations and feelings given fixed form; intuitions and language are dictatorially defined, while those forms and elements that contradict the attitude and interests of the dominant groups are excluded. The gothic cathedral offers a photographically faithful reflection of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and of feudal society. Early Christian pictorial compositions give an optically faithful illustration of the religious, symbolic, or social value of the elements in the composition. Recall the images of donors, et cetera. The later perspectival version of the picture signified not only an optical structure but allowed for the representation of the social gradations in deep space. Similarly the planar arrangement of figures in Babylonian or Egyptian reliefs corresponds to the social hierarchy and reveals the social classification of the figures. Every style is influenced and conditioned by a social value system. Later we will show that the tottering minority, attempting to salvage its individualism, emphasized and propagated in its artworks psychic strata that

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ers didn’t converge in a consolidated reality, which meant that creation of a modern style was therefore impossible. Proof of the moderns’ inability to shape a compelling visuality is evident in how, in their attempts to consolidate modern pictorial devices into a unified visuality,37 they almost always compulsively worked either classicistically, availing themselves of outdated conventions and forfeiting a subjective approach, or weakly regressed into archaism. In this way these artists showed how loosely they were connected to the present. Antiquated classicism as well as awkward archaism enabled their escape from their milieu and the present. Such an escape was necessary to preserve one’s own person. With their subjective art and original formulations artists provided their consumers with a feeling of limitless power and freedom. To the parvenu they sold the sensation that the world was at his disposal, that the dawn of each day would see him freshly decked out and transformed. This subjectivism suited the anarchy of private capitalism. . . .38

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were not yet socially harmonized. Intellectuals and parvenus competed in a championship for magnifying markers of individual difference. Only to a limited degree was great art creative in the modern sense of the word. Submissively, faithfully, the ancients illustrated their general, inexorable historical situation. In this respect art proved to be more of a secondary force. Yet the moderns contested the conditionality of art; consequently they had to oppose their milieu and an affirmative sense of reality. These rootless types imagined they could create an art directed against their epoch, believing they could fashion a reality out of pure fiction. Thus the moderns came under the spell of myth. The major styles emerged from circumstances and conditions for which the character and culture were already defined. Apparently poets or painters are incapable of endowing existence with any primary meaning or of shaping a primary reality. It seems that art truly blossoms only when the basic problems, such as social structure, forms of life, visuality, et cetera, have already been fixed and remain only to be corroborated by images. The moderns, predisposed to idealism, went astray by imagining that in isolation, socially aloof, they could produce a binding reality by means of the imagination. Proof of the embarrassing servility and bondage of the youngest artists was that they actually satisfied and idealized the individualistic needs of the minority. These aesthetic rebels decorated the dubious, decaying facade of a minority that was hanging on only with effort. Art has always been a kind of propaganda. The artists of antiquity or the Middle Ages handled publicity for the gods and kings. Modern liberal artists gained their livelihood by idealizing and popularizing a newly rich haute bourgeoisie. The aesthetes of yesterday provided the aloof private person with monologues so that he might quickly procure for himself a special soul. Only after the collapse of social hierarchies did artists emerge who claimed to create and market a personal visual intuition. The question is whether such a claim does not expect too much of art. The moderns were no longer satisfied with representing a given, recognized state of things. They claimed that through their hallucinatory apartness they could produce new objects born of dreams. The artist had become a mythomaniac and strove to launch his private, monological myth. The primitives regarded images with awe, as eerie doppelgängers and spirit-filled dwellings of the gods, heroes, and the dead. This is the origin of the boundless overestimation of art; the spiritual interpretation of it was long based on that. Later, artworks degenerated into harmless aesthetic fictions. Finally, since every area became isolated and specialized, the moderns wrung from pictures something like a self- sufficient reality. This was possible because liberalism’s reality had decayed into pluralism. The people of the nineteenth century had made reality, like life itself, into a collection of technical special-

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ties; their descendants took these now only loosely connected domains and made them dangerously self-contained. The liberal decades were marked by the rush of countless, isolated aspects. Every style is made possible by collectively recognized facts and values and is at the same time contained by them. The artists of early antiquity sensed that the world was a work created by gods, to alter it would be an act of blasphemy. The realism of early antiquity was conditioned by the panic fear of the gods. One believed creation to be fully realized. Because it was revered as the work of the gods, any deviation from it was a crime against existence, a disfigurement. At the same time the formulations of style imply dissatisfaction with the world as given. This awareness is perhaps characteristic of later epochs that live with less fear of the gods. Now artists alter things, wanting to improve them. There was a term for this: beautifying. There is a moralizing element in this aestheticism. Perhaps the attempt to define a manner is explained by the threat one feels from the heavy weight of tradition; there is a desire to impose an order on it, to simplify it, so as to stake out a solid position and avert confusion. Every style presupposes a formal faith and constraint— to put it differently: style belongs to the realm of belief and often of superstition. Consequently a given style frequently continues to be cultivated—even when it is exhausted. Style is influenced by extra-artistic factors— such as custom, religion, and social rank. If the social groupings are shaken up, then it’s left to the individual to believe in a form or to reject it, whereas previously forms possessed an authoritative force. Accordingly we’re prevented from having a complex experience of antique or other works of art. Style is motivated by the desire to find limits and to restrict or repress what is individual and exceptional. Consequently every definite style must be a contradiction of the liberal age and its utopia of anarchic freedom. For above all else style brings out commonality and negates exceptions. The early twentieth century emphasized the markers of difference. Individualists rejected those elements conducive to community and pursued a socially negative art. Consequently all attempts to achieve a binding style were from the beginning destined to fail. Style means the setting of limits and restrictions; it comprises a selection that is determined by social facts and convictions. Style impoverishes complex relations and induces the forgetting of a significant number of possibilities. Style is a choice among values. Modern art served a narrow minority and satisfied its sophisticated needs. Modern art is consequently one-sided; it emphasizes experiences that are private or that serve to set one apart. By means of imagination artists tried to compensate for this limitation. The cost of the development and satisfaction of asocial needs was the diminished validity of art, its neglect of primary existential factors. This development demonstrates the falsity of the optimistic belief in a

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utopian progress of art. History is not only a becoming but also simultaneously a gradual dying away of energies. The artists of the twentieth century served a minority in decline, a dying social class. The peoples of antiquity had a premonition of the possible waning of an epoch and created the myth of the world in decline, the legend of the Golden Age. The feudal lords of old anticipated their tragedy and invented this legend. The moderns reversed the fable and fashioned the allegory of the inexorable rise of their superiors and plastered the streets with posters declaring their optimism. The liberal era, which proclaimed the utopia of unrestricted individual freedom, produced no style. The insulated modern artist, lacking the experience of collaboration that is characteristic of groups, initially encounters an unstructured mass of impressions. The artist of antiquity or the Middle Ages on the other hand experienced from the beginning sensations that had already passed through certain value-shaped social filters or conventions. The ancient or medieval artist processed motifs that belonged to a stable world and came to him socially mediated. It’s understandable that the moderns aggressively defended themselves against an unruly onslaught of sensations, forms, or ideas. This random flood of impressions necessitated protective measures on the part of the artist. So now the moderns adopted the defensive posture of the primitives. This signals, formally and psychologically, something negative. This process of simplification reveals the desire to forget; one attempts to anesthetize oneself against the incursion of unordered sensations. Primitivization signifies a flight from complexity. Now, psychologically as well as formally, the moderns activate regressive archaic strata. Even in its peak achievements and despite all claims for its modernity our most recent art is negative and reactionary. Its charm and success lie in the possibility of the comforting regression it offers the reader or beholder. Poets and painters cut off from society were unable to establish any formal consensus. Thus the arts had forfeited their aim and meaning. Now specialized artistes developed their techniques and chattered about art as an end in itself. Such a watchword was a euphemistic way of confirming that art had lost its purpose. The historians40 wrote as poets, as though forms developed out of forms in a process of eerie self- perpetuation. Their sole remaining criterion was the vague one of taste. One sought to defend the arts’ endangered position by interpreting them as inhabiting absolute, autonomous realms. But in doing so one was at the same time merely confirming that the arts were estranged from the collective.

Around 1920 people wanted, even at the cost of their intelligence, to find something beyond this reality, which had sunk away under the weight of superstructure and skepticism. This sentiment found satisfaction in an art of the imagination. The generation that had experienced war with open eyes fled from painful facts into romanticism. This generation suffered from severe trauma, from a wound inflicted by reality. Now one sought an art that wrested the viewer from the turmoil of events, which was to insulate those who had suffered in the war. The postwar generation relegated what was factually real [das positive Wirkliche] to the status of secondary symptoms and regarded individual imaginative experiences as direct human occurrences. Such an attitude conveys a deep anxiety before the complexity of events, to which one fears to succumb. The feudalistic male societies [Männer-

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Today’s modernity mainly accomplishes the pleasing suppression of the complexly real. The reality of the dominant groups excludes the fullness of life and reality. The artists themselves are hardly imposing basic structures onto life; the artistes of today, split off from society, are not in the least capable of that. In order to fashion or defend a slender vestige of individual personality the moderns had to suppress a reality that had been normalized by technology and become psychologically specialized in the most extreme way. The seemingly bold poems and pictures of today exhibit panic flight. They grew out of trauma, a phobia of reality intensified by war and permanent crisis. The defense of the distinguishable person cost such far-reaching suppressions that no result could make it worthwhile. Since much-praised “pure reason” had induced bankruptcy, intellectuals fled into dreams and the unconscious. They wished to avoid the threatening quotidian reality that the artistes had not mastered. The real had now become so much the product of exhaustive technological calculation that it scarcely yielded stimuli or surprises. Theoretical and technical formulations of the real had been achieved on a massive scale; yet the whole lacked any social meaning. These thoroughly calculated and standardized complexes were incapable of triggering any individualized reaction. Now the as yet unstandardized realms of the visionary and the unconscious offered an escape from technological normalization. Here was a risk of regression; for millennia these strata had been infected by religion and myth. The flight of intellectuals into the imagination, through which they negated an affirmative reality, represents a late phase of Christianity. This attitude is defined by Christian ressentiments. Church fathers in default conducted themselves like heralds of the future. . . .41

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bunde] into which the youth had been coerced during the war led to a powerful eruption of long-suppressed individual needs. The seriously damaged war generation was profoundly disillusioned by reality and existence. Inevitably these young people quickly became resigned, the war had perhaps broken their will. Now one found escape in the most idiosyncratic dreams and distant contemplation, avoiding all social coercion and stabilizing community. One wanted to be alone at last, to forget complex reality and take no notice of one’s neighbor. Intellectuals of the war generation honed qualities of the soul that were hardly understood by the larger society, guaranteeing the individual the most extreme isolation. The fatalism under which this generation had spent the war and its crucial years, the enforced daily obedience against which one quietly rebelled, had produced severe repressions that now surfaced with great force. Members of the war generation had for years renounced their own will, particularly with regard to the realization of their previously cultivated individuality. The only thing that they could still call their own were dreams of ineffectual notions and fictions. During these years they had secretly engaged in psychic automatism [seelischen Automatism (sic)]. The accumulated repressions had to find an effective outlet if one were not to go mad. Understandably this ravaged war generation recoiled before reality in horror. They were too weary for actual revolt. Those who returned found strange poems and pictures in which the dangerous reality of the masses’ experiences had been forgotten. This was the basis for modernism’s success, and so the postwar generation was enthralled by it. At the same time this art enabled those now too weak for revolt to fulfill their pipe dreams of insurrection privately and without risk. Out in the world one was a citizen, at home one dreamed like a wild anarchist. The postwar generation neither possessed nor believed in a common or binding reality. It had experienced the catastrophe of bourgeois reality up close. It was too weary to form a community. So it escaped into private, imaginary, insular zones of dubious validity. Renunciation, fear of reality, and the incapacity for active revolt characterize the art of the postwar era.42 These men felt disgust over daily being forced to live together— and the only memory of their living together was fear of death. This very military discipline had produced passionate individualists and simultaneously broken them as persons. Understandably this generation favored an art that set the individual hermetically apart from any milieu or commitment and isolated him even more sharply. Those returning home soon grasped very clearly that the war with all its victims hadn’t brought about the hoped-for change in conditions. They hardly knew anymore why they had fought, and to what ends they had been sacrificed.

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Attempts at revolt were everywhere suppressed since initially, thanks to war profits, the capitalists’ power had increased. Such a disheartening letdown gave rise to romantic, remote utopias through which one repudiated actual reality. And so the postwar generation withered into a race of neutralized aesthetes. After the war the petite bourgeoisie, in need of old, cheap illusions, succumbed to a political messianism. A bourgeois romantic politics took the place of political criticism. Now those parties peddling archaic utopias gained a thunderous following. Demagogues heroicized strengths long revered; the economic and social structure remained untouched. A romantic, nationalistic nurturing of a political chiliasm occurred in western Europe and assumed a pathetically philistine character. In the west the most reactionary class, namely the petite bourgeoisie, was initially victorious in the “revolution.” This group, which loafed about on the dung heap of a stagnant culture, could have only an unproductive and destructive effect. As a substitute for political change the petite bourgeoisie offered moldy adages; they enforced the cultural reaction to which the intellectuals cravenly subjugated themselves in unprecedented fashion. Understandable, since the liberal intellectuals had never grasped or developed an ideology of actuality. These artistes had long since been neutralized politically as well as socially. Only in theory or imagination did intellectuals satisfy their need for revolution. This was the crime of these amiable weaklings. They babbled on about new art, believing such a thing could exist or be effective despite its being warehoused in an antiquated reactionary milieu (later we will examine how this escape into the imagination was marked by a profound regression). At first the war generation wished to shield itself from the reality that had caused it such horrible suffering. This escape and such forgetting of the real had to have a primitivizing effect. Already in the war one had been trained to be relentless in neutralizing vital psychological capacities, and those who returned home preserved this habit. Modern artists were mostly sons of the bourgeoisie. The petite bourgeoisie hoped to solve a social crisis with moralistic slogans. Their progeny believed— aestheticism is a phenomenon that rests on a long-accustomed class-based distancing— to conjure forth a new reality by imagination and pictorial magic. These sons of the bourgeoisie— aimlessly impassioned liberals— were obsessed with the utopia of the free inner person. They expanded the contemplative reserves of their personalities, inventing the private person they hoped to become by regression into the unconscious or by dreamy hallucination. Now, out of curiosity, the old cabinets of romanticism were once more unlocked. The flight from checks and controls characterizes the

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attitude of this postwar generation. No longer could one see or speak for a community. At first this art met with success because the ruling minority had need of stronger means for setting itself apart. It sought to resist the swelling tide of massification that exploded after the war. Accordingly, stronger means were deployed to defend the fiction of a special individuality. It’s symptomatic that those individuals able to hold their own only with difficulty escaped into regression, into primitivization. The success of individualistic intellectuals was linked to the preservation of a minority that initially had sufficient financial means to permit itself as much distance as it desired. The proletarians soon realized the intellectuals’ reactionary position and darkly sensed their permanent betrayal by them. Yet in their idealism the intellectuals maintained that reality could be changed by imaginative constructs. Bolstered by this claim, self-indulgent aesthetes demanded the role of intellectual leadership and broad privileges. . . .43

The now senescent avant-garde hobbled along belatedly behind the masses. Despite all the privileges enjoyed by intellectuals the proletariat was now superior to them. It lived and worked in a reality that was inescapable and faced an unambiguous destiny. This shaped the proletariat’s thinking, which was based not on subjective speculation but grounded in the living conditions of the working class. But in those conditions the intellectuals missed the necessary richness of nuance, wrongly concluding that the collective was altogether intellectually unproductive. The superannuated elite collapsed in crisis. The intellectuals lost their clients and now sought a connection to the masses. The artistes, however, were not prepared to renounce their spiritual preserve. Every one of the mediocre literati felt destined to lead. To the writers one thing in particular seemed the bitterest fate and tormented them worse than the fear of death: anonymity, the loss of their exceptionalism and their fame. Communism might perhaps attract these overweening individualists as long as they sought compensation for their isolating individualization. Intellectuals had split themselves off from the masses and tirelessly pursued the propertied class, even as they silently despised their clients. Yet those who were feeding them now began to go hungry themselves. The moderns had triumphed virtually without resistance. Their elite consumers consisted mostly of upstarts who were either faceless or with no opinions of their own. The parvenus nimbly adjusted as they pleased. The intellectuals adopted a pose of aloof solitude, yet had cleverly organized their own commercial success. The artists offered crasser means for distinction so as to attract their upwardly mobile clients. In the end paranoia, or its

Primitive and ancient man saw in ecstatic states and dreams the defining expression of the collective. Oracles, prophetic states, every form of trance, dreams, and madness were considered direct revelations or inspirations of the gods. The sick and the insane were regarded as holy and gifted. The raptures of the primitives and the ancients were integrated into strict religious conventions. People of today revived the same states, but as a means of escaping the conventional world. Poetic ecstasy enabled escape from one’s milieu and obligations of community. The social function of these powers had a different value, shifting to its opposite. The creations of the primitives had a collective emphasis; the primitivism [die Primitive]45 of, for example, today’s painters is intended to isolate the individual. Modern primitivism has a subjective emphasis; its figurations do

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pedantic and rhetorical imitation, was regarded as the ultimate watchword. Their overrefined individualism perished in their pathogenic attitude. The aesthetic autosuggestion of pathological conditions produced in the intellectuals a fear of their own persons. Now they escaped from overrefined aestheticism into collective programs. Intellectuals had long said “no” to commitment and community; now they wanted to forget their overcultivated personalities in the anonymity of the masses, to overcome their isolating liberal skepticism through belief in a political doctrine. Intellectuals had lived comfortably as rentiers of social apartness. Now they wished to secure their collapsing personhood. The more progressive groups among them sought a connection to the Communist Party. Yet they refused to give up their old intellectual prerogatives, which are possible only within a society organized along feudal-capitalistic lines. The proletarians, on the other hand, couldn’t appreciate these virtuosos of divisiveness since their art promoted social fissures. Otherwise the proletarians would have had to deny their own collective orientation and forfeit their own reality. The intellectual feudalists sought a connection to the party in order to abandon or compensate for their skepticism and isolation, which was barely still profitable. Through their imaginative art and metaphorical poetry they had taken a position strongly opposed to all that was factually real. They had shunted off too much reality and forfeited countless opportunities. Soon these imaginative intellectuals had lost their capacity to astonish. The public was on to their tricks. Instances of surprise, astonishing in the beginning, had fizzled. The sterility of the late liberal avant- garde, whose basis was subjective vision, had become obvious. Now intellectuals masked their individualistic attitude by outward acceptance of the collective program and counted on the prospect of a likely social upheaval. . . .44

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not correspond to any commonly experienced reality. Modern art became imaginative as a consequence of the impoverishment of reality, of the constriction of subjective experience. Aesthetes escaping the world sought in the imagination a compensation for their vacuum. The gods, who dwell in the firmament and are the supreme powers in a collective society, no longer respond to the raptures of our poets. Our monological hallucinations fade away, unheeded. These specialized parables degenerate into ineffectual aestheticisms, they pale into private fictions. The ancient primitives were realists; corresponding to their poetry was a mythical world, an object of collective belief. The sensations of ancient man were shared by the group; there were scarcely any individuals, their characteristics were those of types. Ancient artists went beyond natural depiction, for their reality lay in the shadow of the gods and was rooted in imagination. Ancient art was primarily conditioned by a religiously and imaginatively defined reality. These artists, working in what from today’s perspective was an antinaturalistic manner, subordinated themselves to the strongest binding reality, namely that of the gods, which burst the limits of the humanly possible and imposed on the believer the tragic utopia of a higher world. The orientation of archaic art is, despite its antinaturalism, realistic in the deepest sense of the word. The artist emphasized the defining features, the divinely otherworldly and the collectively typical, which determined the real and fulfilled a collective reality. Despite a related orientation the modern primitivist serves diametrically opposed tendencies. He is negatively disposed toward the collective and in his hallucinations forgets reality. . . .46

Perhaps the history of modern art is merely the chronicle of an unbridled egotism, of an overbred vanity. The artists of circa 1910 belong to a generation that had grown up with the utopia of divinely ordained progress. They believed that by means of intellectual formulations they could magically conjure up paradises. The aesthetes sensed that the classical bourgeois tradition had come to an end; the objects and motifs of bourgeois idealization either no longer inspired belief or had disappeared; yet they failed to see that their own art was rooted in liberal bourgeois subjectivism. The painters and poets combated tradition, but only with respect to form. They hardly contested the reality happening beyond their pictures. They believed moreover that facts could be refuted with images. Here lay the limits of art. The moderns fought against tradition because it limited individual freedom. Their artistic revolt remained without consequence. Vaguely, one felt oneself to be on the left; yet the individualists feared the rise of the masses; if it succeeded then aesthetic subjectivism and individual

A society and its basic idea fall into decay when its leading figures awaken forces and work with material that transports them back into strata of time having no relation to the present. A mindset is done for when one draws on material from a social structure that contradicts one’s own. This is the case with the moderns. To maintain the desired individualistic stance [distance],48 they worked with antiquated collective material and believed it was sufficient to reinterpret it aesthetically. Intellectuals reacted against the

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distinction were done for. In many European countries the workers’ uprisings were put down. Now the avant- garde fled more desperately into the imaginary realm and concealed its indecisiveness beneath lyrical metaphors and a private ethos. Soon thereafter intellectuals were threatened by the reaction of the petite bourgeoisie; now they tried another gambit. They offered shares in illusion. They preached that this modern art, these lyrically rendered poems, contain a vision and conditions for the future. Out of naïveté or cleverness they concealed that these were in fact archaisms. Having lost a connection to reality and to the present, one pursued an art of the imagination. One performed the fantastical comedy of metamorphoses since one no longer grasped concrete facts. The intellectuals had revolted in symbols; they had long since forfeited any sense for the primacy of facts. This imaginative art contained no expansion of reality but rather its exclusion. The intellectuals had simply constructed impracticable utopias. Tragicomic. We develop ideas, spin fairy tales, or paint pictures, yet we’re the first to be duped by our works. The generation of 1910 attempted to avoid being thus blinded and becoming captives of its own dreams by pursuing a continual change of form. Haunted, they fled their own shadows. Primitive regression was sustained only with forms of resistance. The exotic artist succumbs to his canon or to an effective art ritual. For these are guarantees of magical success. Today’s individualist seeks to prevent being hypnotized by his own work by dialectically destroying it. Forces such as visions, et cetera, that had once produced magical cultures and formed centers for a collective had now become instruments of asocial separation and individual isolation. Modern art shows the breathless escape of aesthetes remote from life, theoretical types. Here one observes persons who have long been incapable of stepping beyond the realms of contemplation to link an experience with general conditions. For this reason no practical consequences can be gained from artistic achievements and every effort ends ineffectually. The tragedy of today’s spinners of fairy tales is that they no longer achieve any practical fact or effect. The myths are so sharply zoned off that they become encapsulated into ends in themselves and ice up, sterile. . . .47

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technological disposition of the period by embracing myth in order to preserve their exceptionalism. One misjudged the power of archaisms, which soon destroyed these individualistic goals. The defeat of modern individualism is marked by the activation of psychic automatism, which defines modern art. Self-obsessed artists activated the ancient primitive posture and archaized by means of a dead collective heritage in order to defend their original status. Yet they were overpowered by this paradoxical inheritance. Poets and painters wanted to expand the narrow domains of subjectivity. They fell back on old repressions in order to avoid conventional reality. As a result the present did not exist for them, one succumbed to a factually impoverished mentality, one primitivized. One was condemned to total passivity. An exaggerated individuality effected the destruction of the conscious, desiring person. The egocentric moderns had roused those psychic strata that pose the greatest danger to the individual— dream, mediumistic ecstasy, et cetera. Now the ultimate in modernity and “original” apartness are challenged by ancient collective material. This historical paradox is made evident by the mixed series of tokens and disparate forms that characterize modern poems and pictures. A paradoxical eclecticism— Céz[anne]— classicism and primitivism— Pic[asso]— a split in painting[,] see double style.—.49 The contradictory character of modernism was defined by its narrow contemporaneity and strongly regressive attitude. One wishes to speak and draw in a very personal way; yet in the same breath one lapses into symbols and collective forms of experience that are obsolete. One wanted to avoid socialization; yet curiously enough these romantics escaped into a past marked by collective feeling. One wanted to escape the growing trend toward collectivization, toward standardization, and lost one’s way in a selective ancient posture. The desperate defense of the individual’s intellectual privileges led to his destruction. . . .50

FROM BOOK 5 With the piling up of fictions persons grew ever more violently deformed in each other’s eyes. The image of man was distorted into a monstrous caricature. Everyone saw from the perspective of fictions; as a result humans and things became monstrous and grotesque. The historically decisive ideologies were created collectively and remained anonymous. Intellectuals refined the available significant achievements and, almost as a matter of principle, gave them an asocial character so that they themselves would strike others as unique individuals. By means of the ideologies of fictions one wished to divorce oneself from the social whole

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so as not to be tested and absorbed by facts and society. Fiction functioned for the individual as self-preservation. Every instance of independence and overcultivation of the imagination reveals the decay of a reality, assuming that the phantasms have not been formed collectively. Fictions can have an energizing impact only if the collective reality asserts itself as historically dominant. The intellectuals’ crime was that they ensured themselves all the privileges of creation, just as capitalist entrepreneurs arrogated to themselves a monopoly in production. Both groups positioned themselves outside of collective actualities and communal action. They comported themselves with aristocratic exclusivity. They regarded history and the masses as helpless second-class objects and secured all prerogatives of valuation and organization for themselves. Intellectuals were idealistically oriented and therefore felt themselves freed of any responsibility. In this way they avoided exposing themselves to any risk. The moderns felt themselves to be revolutionaries because they tirelessly altered and reclassified their fictions. In reality intellectuals merely continued the discussion about phantoms, that is, the old talk of God. Subjective and individualistic fictions now supplanted the gods that had been the objects of collective belief. In actual fact intellectuals were the only ones who were backward enough to persist in this discussion about phantoms, admiring them as primary forces. It was due to this orientation that they pursued the relentless devaluation of the real. Again and again we observe the rigid inflexibility of all minds. In spite of this fact intellectuals claimed to be designing and shaping the future. Yet what they believed the future to hold was only a rusty antiquity. The intellectual enterprise had to serve the individual and yield a maximum of personal freedom. But with the crisis the era of the jeux de mots came to an end. The legend of the superiority of intellectuals is finished. Literature and art can continue to exist only as collaboration with the collective. If we are to set strong social goals then idealistic liberalism, which makes it impossible to endow history with any unified meaning, must come to an end. Individuals who have become abnormal as a consequence of fictions must become normalized and absorbed within the masses. Disillusionment with humanity, which intellectuals have overloaded with fictions thanks to their cult of phantoms, is necessary. Dualistic intellectuals teetered continually between naturalism and imagination. They failed to understand that the only meaning of history is the creation of new facts that make possible the activation of maximal social energy. A new style of mind is possible only after a revolution that creates altered

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social conditions and would generate new human types. Intellectuals must once again acquire a sense for useful collaborative work and abandon the utopia of the aesthetically perfect but pointless act. Artistic conventions are only secondary consequences of a determining social consensus. This is what gives them meaning. Intellectuality has meaning only when it is linked with a large social process and integrated with it. In order that one may achieve an active intellectuality, a different society must first be created, one that no longer suppresses but increases the energy of the masses. The legend of the superiority of mind is finished. What matters now is not to seek out exceptions but to create representative types. This is admittedly difficult, since one has grown accustomed to negative feelings toward society. What is needed now is to destroy the dictatorship of individual fictions and to establish the primacy of action and of processes based on fact. The idealism of individualism has come to an end, the productive forces have long since shifted to the collective. What matters is not, as intellectuals believed, to reject reality, but to reshape it collectively. Within this labor art can again find its place if it cooperates modestly in the production of a new reality. For that reason intellectuals must forgo their claims of exceptionalism or artistic superiority. What is now at stake is no longer the refashioning of a fiction or the imitation of a given circumstance, but collaboration in the reshaping of social facts. Alienated intellectuals must again become socially integrated and must renounce their special utopia. Mind can henceforth only be understood as a coordinated power. Monological poetry is finished. Intellectuals must be cured of their isolation- induced manias and become normalized. They must again acquire a sense for actual creation.51

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book originated over two decades ago in a conversation with Edward Dimendberg, then with the University of California Press. It was he, with help from Anton Kaes and Martin Jay, who persuaded me to take on this project. The goal was twofold: to make a representative selection of Carl Einstein’s art theory and criticism available to an Anglophone audience, and to present it framed by a critical apparatus that assessed it within the reception history of African art and European modernism. At the time I had no inkling of how daunting the challenge of translating Einstein would be, or that it would take over twenty years— with many interruptions— to complete this book. Needless to say, during this long gestation I accumulated many debts. My most obvious debt is to the authors cited in the notes and bibliography. Although Einstein was relatively unknown in the Anglophone world when I began this undertaking, he had for several decades been a subject for German and French scholars, and their work provided a solid foundation for my own research. Among these, several deserve special mention. Klaus H. Kiefer, the doyen of Einstein scholars, enthusiastically supported this project from the beginning, and his unstinting encouragement was critical for sustaining my own commitment to it. His numerous comments and suggestions on the first draft of the manuscript resulted in many improvements. At an early stage Sebastian Zeidler invited my participation in a special Einstein issue of October magazine, for which I prepared my first translations— two of them, on which he collaborated, are included in this book. His scholarship has been a constant companion, repeatedly and pro-

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ductively challenging my own thinking, inducing me to read and reread Einstein more closely and analytically. I was well into the project when I met Maria Stavrinaki, whose work on her own Einstein book overlapped with mine, and she became a valued interlocutor. Her invitation to contribute an essay on the politics of Einstein’s art criticism to a special issue of Gradhiva turned out to be the catalyst for the narrative shape of this volume. My completion of this book is also due in no small measure to the encouragement of other colleagues who commented on my work as it evolved. Annie Bourneuf, Emmelyn Butterfield- Rosen, and Joyce Cheng generously took the time to read the first draft of the manuscript and offered many helpful criticisms and suggestions. Additionally, through discussion and critical feedback on individual chapters, others have refined my thinking and shaped the substance of my introductions to the individual texts in countless ways both large and small: Irene Albers, Suzanne Blier, Nicola Creighton, Edward Dimendberg, Isabelle Kalinowski, Pepe Karmel, Luise Mahler, Camran Mani, Marilyn McCully, Andreas Michel, Keith Moxey, Chika Okeke- Agulu, Charles Palermo, Spyros Papapetros, David Quigley, Michael Raeburn, Rainer Rumold, Sherwin Simmons, and Natasha Staller. The late Nicole Desrosiers offered advice on my translation from the French of Einstein’s essay on André Masson. Bavand Behpour, Sandra Gianfreda, and Avinoam Shalem generously assisted me in my efforts to procure an elusive image. During my years preparing this book I have benefited from the opportunity to present portions of it at various venues, and I am grateful to Uwe Fleckner, Anselm Franke, Tom Holert, Joseph Imorde, Pepe Karmel, Rainer Rumold, and Ralph Ubl for those invitations and the productive discussions they occasioned. Especially fruitful were the stimulating triennial conferences of the Carl Einstein Gesellschaft— in Paris, London, Berne, and Karlsruhe— where I was able to present my work and benefit from exchanges with other Einstein scholars. I would never have completed this book were it not for financial support that afforded me the luxury of generous spans of time to devote to it. A Fulbright Senior Scholar Award enabled me to launch the project with a six-month stay in Berlin, where I systematically read through Einstein’s papers in the Carl- Einstein- Archiv of the Akademie der Künste. I was able to take a major step forward with the task of translation in 2002, during a residency at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Thereafter three mini-sabbatical grants from Williams College enabled further progress, and faculty research funds partially supported the cost of publication. At every stage I have been especially fortunate to have this project guided by the exceptionally capable hands of Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the University of Chicago Press. Throughout the process she has been patient,

335 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

enthusiastic, and unwavering in her commitment to bringing this selection of Einstein’s art criticism to an Anglophone readership. She offered decisive input on the selection of certain texts, and at a key moment her strongly held views about the parameters of the book expedited my finally bringing it to the finish line. James Toftness, assistant editor at the press, helped with navigating permissions and many other issues in the preparation of the manuscript. The manuscript received its final polish under the exacting and judicious eye of its copyeditor, Joann Hoy, who was responsible for many improvements, not least in details of the translation of African Sculpture, for which her efforts bordered on the heroic. Senior Production Editor Christine Schwab’s eagle eye caught a number of errors and inconsistencies before the manuscript went to press, and she steered the book through its final stages into print. Finally, I wish to thank Lauren Michelle Smith for her elegant design and an inspired cover exemplifying what Einstein called the “hopeless chasm” between word and image. I started work on this book just as I began to share my life with Linda Schwalen. Over these many years she has patiently tolerated Einstein’s vicarious and sometimes irritating presence in our household and, more importantly, has been an indispensable source of critique, encouragement, strength, and wisdom throughout the long process of research, writing, and multiple revisions. This book is gratefully dedicated to her.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (London: Eland, 2006), 211–12, diary entry dated July 15, 1940. Einstein did not cut his wrists in the internment camp (at Bassens near Bordeaux) but after he had been released with the other internees and left to survive on his own as the German armies advanced through France. See Ruiz, “De Paris au camp de Bassens,” 81–87. 2. Marianne Kröger uses this formulation as the title for the introductory chapter of her Individuum als Fossil, 13. 3. The most definitive, though not complete, edition of Einstein’s writings is Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar, 5 vols. (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992–96). Hereafter cited as BA. 4. Unless otherwise noted, throughout the book all translations are my own, including in cases where published translations by others exist. 5. As Einstein put it in his notes for the uncompleted “La traité de la vision” (The treatise on vision), “imagined complexes and forces as primary reality. The imagined as origin of the real.” BA 4, 240. 6. Einstein, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” BA 3, 19. See also Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 3rd edition (1931), edited with commentary by Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 134. Hereafter the first, second, and third editions of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts are cited, respectively, as K1, K2, and K3.

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7. David Quigley offers the most developed examination of this issue in Carl Einstein. See also my article, “Art, agentivité et collectivité,” 78–99. 8. The passage appears on a slip in an envelope of which two such slips are dated to the first two months of 1934. “Bebuquin II,” Akademie der Künste Berlin, Carl- Einstein- Archiv, 43, slip 21, https://archiv.adk.de/bigobjekt/7062. Hereafter cited as CEA. 9. Sebastiá Gasch, “Einige sensationelle Erklärungen von Carl Einstein: Miró und Dalí— Revolutionäre Kunst— die Rolle der Intellektuellen,” BA 3, 643. 10. Einstein, Gesammelte Werke. “Half-forgotten” is how Einstein was described by Helmut Heißenbüttel in a review of Gesammelte Werke in Deutsche Zeitung, December 15/16, 1962, reprinted as “Ein Halbvergessener: Carl Einstein,” in Heißenbüttel, Über Literatur: Aufsätze und Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Munich: DTV, 1970), 36–41. 11. Nef, “Vorwort,” in Einstein, Gesammelte Werke, 5. 12. Klaus Herding, “‘Immer auf der Flucht von einem bindenden Milieu’: Carl Einstein,” Merkur 46 (1992): 717. 13. Einstein, Werke Band 1, Werke Band 2, and Werke Band 3, all in the Medusa Verlag edition; BA 4. 14. See Grube, Carl Einstein: Eine Bibliographie, 59–61. Moreover, Grube (69– 89) lists 294 articles published between 1962 and 1991 that were either on Einstein or included his work in broader discussions. Two years after Herding’s article appeared, Einstein scholarship received a major boost with the publication of the first thorough, comprehensive study of his work and thought, by the literary scholar Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins (1994). It remains the standard work on Einstein to this day. A revised version (2015) is available online at https://archive.org /details/KlausKiefer -DiskurswandelImWerkCarlEinsteins2015. 15. Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. Einstein did receive three paragraphs in a fundamental catalog essay by Jean- Louis Paudrat, who credited Negro Sculpture as being “a book of prime importance, not only for its priority in the history of ideas about the arts of Africa but also for the relevance of its analyses and the breadth of the illustrations it contains.” Paudrat, “From Africa,” 151. 16. On the exhibition and its unconventional hanging, see the introduction to text 10. 17. See the introduction to text 13. 18. See Kropmanns and Fleckner, “Von kontinentaler Bedeutung,” 347– 407, which includes a catalog compiled by Fleckner of Reber’s collection of modern art. On Einstein and Reber, see also Kosinski, “G. F. Reber,” 522–26. Einstein dedicated the cubism chapter of the 1928 and 1931 editions of The Art of the 20th Century to Reber. 19. The conference was organized by the French Einstein scholar Liliane Meffre, who through her many publications and translations has been primarily responsible for raising awareness of Einstein in France. A selection of the papers, seven by art historians, was published in Études germaniques 53, no. 1 (1998).

339 NOTES TO PAGES 4–6

20. Einstein, K3. 21. Didi- Huberman, Devant le temps, 159–232. 22. “Carl Einstein: A Special Issue,” ed. Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004), with essays by Zeidler, Charles. W. Haxthausen, Laurie Monahan, and Rainer Rumold. 23. Zeidler, “Defense of the Real.” Zeidler has since published a second, major study of Einstein, Form as Revolt (2016). 24. Fleckner, Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. 25. The most notable example is Charles Palermo’s Fixed Ecstasy (2008), which took its title from a phrase in Negro Sculpture. Two others in which more than one text by Einstein is considered are Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), and Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005). 26. For Einstein’s biography the major sources are Penkert, Beiträge, and Liliane Meffre, Itinéraires. 27. Meffre, Itinéraires, 20. 28. Penkert, Beiträge, 44–45. Einstein mentions having attended lectures by Cassirer in a letter to Fritz Saxl, February 7, 1929, in Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 233. 29. A letter from Frieda Oppler to her friend Emilie Borchardt, February 20, 1907, as quoted by Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 73. 30. In this version, the work, published in the journal Die Opale, bore the title “Herr Giorgio Bebuquin.” BA 1, 15–23. The completed novella is in BA 1, 92–132; English edition, including the original German text: Bebuquin, or the Dilettantes of the Miracle, trans. Patrick Healy (Amsterdam: November Editions, 2017). 31. In 1914 Pfemfert became Einstein’s brother-in- law, when Einstein married the Russian Maria Ramm, the sister of Pfemfert’s wife. The marriage ended in divorce in 1923. 32. The most detailed account of Einstein during the war years is in Meffre, Itinéraires, 58–79. 33. In 1918 Einstein published Der unentwegte Platoniker (The unswerving Platonist), consisting of three stories, parts of which had been published in Die Aktion before the war (BA 1, 292– 368). In 1921 his drama Die schlimme Botschaft: Zwanzig Szenen (The bad message: twenty scenes) appeared, which caused a scandal on the right and led to Einstein’s being charged and fined for blasphemy (BA 2, 146–99). 34. Nevertheless, at the end of the year Einstein seemed intent on getting out of “bloody scribbling on art” (verfluchte Kunstschreiberei) after he completed the book. Einstein to Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, December 1922, in Einstein and Kahnweiler, Correspondance, 1921–1939, 132. Hereafter cited as EKC. 35. On this uncompleted novel, see Kröger, Individuum als Fossil. 36. Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, undated letter (probably spring 1929), Ewald Wasmuth Papers, Deutsches Literatur- Archiv, Schiller Nationalmuseum, Marbach, letters 9, 11, 12, 14. Hereafter cited as EWP.

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37. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (third version), Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 264–65. On Einstein and Benjamin see my article “Reproduction/Repetition.” 38. Einstein to Kahnweiler, December 1922, EKC, 132. 39. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 239; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:176, A 121. 40. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 231, 232; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:166, A 105. 41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 238; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:174, A 118. 42. According to Kant, “no representation [Vorstellung] pertains to the object immediately [unmittelbar] except intuition alone, a concept is thus never immediately related to the object, but is always related to some other representation of it.” Critique of Pure Reason, 205; see also ibid., 156; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:69–70, B 34–35 / A 20–21, and 1:109–10, B 93 / A 68. 43. “Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns . . . ,” untitled (BA 4, 195, 203), an important fragment from the early 1930s; English translation: “Gestalt and Concept,” 171, 173. 44. See Zeidler, “Defense of the Real,” 118–19, on Nietzsche’s essay. 45. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 249, 250, 254 (modified translation); German: “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” in Sämtliche Werke, 1:879–80, 886. 46. This is another difference between Einstein and Benjamin. For a comparative discussion of Einstein and Benjamin on language, see Haxthausen, “Reproduction/Repetition,” 63–69. 47. “Bebuquin II,” CEA 7, p. 60 [54]. The numbers in brackets refer to Einstein’s own pagination where this differs from the numbering of the digitized pages. 48. Einstein to Kahnweiler, January 6, 1939, EKC, 106, 107. 49. An extensive selection of fragments and notes is published in BA 4, 301–447. Einstein also prepared a nine- page English- language outline for the project under the title “Manual of History of Art,” CEA 222. 50. BA 4, 370–71, CEA 242 (emphasis in the original). This notebook contains an advertisement for L’Album Nestlé for 1938, so it postdates Einstein’s departure for Spain in 1936 and most likely follows his return to Paris in early 1939. 51. As recounted in the letter of the abbot Father Denis Buzy, superior general of the Priests of the Sacred Heart at Lestelle- Bétharram, to Einstein’s brother-inlaw, Gabriel Guévrékian. The letter is published in full in Penkert, Beiträge, 127–30. On this episode see Ruiz, “De Paris au camp de Bassens,” 85–92. 52. See Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, 117 (hereafter cited as FF), where Einstein writes of how photography increasingly captured contemporary visual experiences. “As a result of photography the possibilities for art thus became limited or altered.” In 1938, while still in Spain, Einstein had begun making a film, about which we know almost nothing. He mentioned it in two letters to Kahnweiler from that year (EKC, 94, 97, 99). 53. Wartofsky, “Sight, Symbol, and Society: Towards a History of Visual Perception,” Philosophic Exchange 3 (1981): 28.

CHAPTER ONE “Anmerkungen zur neueren französischen Malerei,” published in Neue Blätter 1, no. 3 (1912): 19–22. BA 1, 134–39.

341 NOTES TO PAGES 13–16

54. Four of Einstein’s shorter texts on German painters have been translated elsewhere. Short articles on Wassily Kandinsky and George Grosz as well his text on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner for The Art of the 20th Century can be found in Smith, Expressionist Turn, 305–16. An article on Otto Dix was translated for The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 490–91. 55. These are “Methodological Aphorisms,” “Nightingale” (from the magazine’s feature “Critical Dictionary”), “The Etchings of Hercules Seghers,” and “Notes on Cubism,” October 107 (2004): 146–68. 56. Einstein, “Handbook of Art,” 22–33. 57. Rubin, Picasso and Braque, 55n23, in a remark nonetheless praising Einstein’s Georges Braque for “some brilliant insights.” 58. Didi- Huberman, Devant le temps, 160. Côté, citing this passage, also offers some trenchant remarks of his own on Einstein’s “stylistic opacity.” Côté, “Discours ethnologique et dissidence,” 67–69. 59. Leiris, “From the Impossible Bataille,” 246. 60. Yet Einstein was not always consistent in his usage of “gestalt.” He sometimes applied the term to the existing world as known by visual habit. To be sure, all gestalten are brain- born, but some are dynamic, while the world as most normally experience it is dominated by static, frozen gestalten. Einstein wanted art, in a state of continual metamorphosis, to create a visual world that is unceasingly dynamic, revealing that human subjects are free to create their visual world. 61. In this regard a comparison of Kahnweiler’s Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920) with Einstein’s chapter on cubism from the 1926 edition of The Art of the 20th Century yields a striking statistic: where Kahnweiler uses the word Gemälde, painting, in singular or plural form forty-eight times in his short book when referring to cubist pictures, the term appears not once in Einstein’s cubism chapter and only nine times in the entire first edition of The Art of the 20th Century, and in two of those instances the word appears in a quotation. Instead he prefers the non-medium-specific term Bild, or image. 62. In German gerunds are formed simply by capitalizing the infinitive form, making it a noun. 63. On this distinction in Einstein’s theory see Hoffmann, “Sehen und Wahrnehmen,” 171–86. 64. In his later, unpublished projects, the “Handbook of art” and “The treatise on vision,” Einstein would, however, distinguish between Sehen and Schauen. The former is identified with optical perception, the latter with vision as an inner seeing, imagination, hallucination, and the transvisual. On this see Weixler, Poetik des Transvisuellen, 25–28.

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1. Einstein’s presence in Paris in February 1912 is documented by an entry in Andre Gide’s diary, which records a visit by him on the twenty-second of that month (Meffre, Itinéraires, 40). The Paris exhibition of the futurists, mentioned in the present article, took place during that month at the Galerie Bernheim- Jeune. 2. “Arnold Waldschmidt” (1910), BA 1, 45–51; and “Schmitt- Reute [sic],” BA 1, 57–62. On these essays, and for illustrations of the artists’ works, see Fleckner, Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 15–28. 3. It is noteworthy that Einstein does not yet include African art in this group. 4. “Süddeutsche Ausstellungen” and “Sezession,” BA 1, 62–70. 5. See Einstein, “Ausstellung der Sezession in Berlin” (1913), BA 1, 179. 6. On the German connection to the Steins, see Drewes, “Max Raphael und Carl Einstein,” 141–43. In The Art of the 20th Century Einstein would write that the first picture he saw by Léger was Nu dans le fôret at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910. This work, however, was shown at the Indépendants only in 1911. If Einstein’s recollection was correct, this would mean that he was in Paris in spring 1911, where the cubists (minus Braque and Picasso) exhibited for the first time as a group and caused a major scandal. This may have been his first meaningful exposure to cubism. 7. “Bemerkungen zum heutigen Kunstbetrieb,” BA 1, 140. 8. Ibid. 9. Einstein, “Ausstellung der Sezession in Berlin,” BA 1, 179. 10. The reference is to Adolphe- William Bouguereau (1825–1905), the traditionalist painter who painted classical themes in a hypernaturalistic style. 11. Die Scholle (The soil) was a Munich- based artists’ association that existed from 1899 to 1911. It embraced individual subjective responses to the visual world, representative of Naturlyrismus (nature lyricism). 12. The Munich magazine “for art and life,” founded in 1896, which gave its name to Jugendstil. 13. Fritz Erler (1868–1940), a member of Die Scholle. 14. This phrase comes from the text “The exhibitors to their public,” published on the occasion of the Bernheim- Jeune exhibition in February 1912.

CHAPTER TWO “Totality” was first published in 1914 as a series of three separate essays, each with a different title, appearing over a span of three months in Die Aktion: “Anmerkungen,” March 28, 1914, col. 277–79; “Totalität,” April 18, 1914, col. 345–47; “Totalität: Psychologische Anwendung,” May 30, 1914, col. 476– 78. Two years later Einstein combined them, with some slight revisions, into a single essay titled “Totalität” for his collection Anmerkungen, 32–40. The original versions of the texts are reprinted in BA 1, 214–21. In the lightly revised 1916 version translated here, Einstein eliminated the titles of the separate installments. Parts 1 and 2 were originally published under the title “Anmerkungen” (Notes); parts 3 and 4 under the title “Totalität” (Totality), and part 5 as “Totalität: Psychologi-

1. As Moritz Baßler has put it in a brilliant commentary, “[E]ither the text is simply bad or it executes a demonstrative break with the conventions of discursive-argumentative writing.” Baßler, Entdeckung der Textur, 160–62. For a concise account of the theoretical complexities of Einstein’s essay, see Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 82–90. 2. For a useful survey of this tradition, see Jay, Marxism and Totality. 3. As Dirck de Pol has written in a helpful article exploring this issue, “In his essay ‘Totality’ Einstein recombines and estranges Kant’s theorems and integrates them into the aesthetic concept he develops there.” De Pol, “Totalität,” 117–40. See also Quigley, Carl Einstein, 133–38. 4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 26–27, 30–33, 49–50 et passim. 5. Einstein, untitled early manuscript, BA 4, 126. 6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 188– 89; B 66 / A 49; Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 55–56. 7. Einstein, untitled early manuscript, BA 4, 267. 8. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 217; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:124, B 115 (emphasis in the original). 9. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 212, 215; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1:118, 122, B 106, B 111. 10. In an earlier fragment, Einstein wrote, “Nowhere does nature present a totality— in her we grasp the manifold— immeasurability— and it never ceases. Totality, by contrast, is fundamentally limited.” BA 4, 125. 11. In an earlier manuscript, begun in April 1910, Einstein wrote, “[L]aw and totality are necessary correlates.” BA 4, 124. In an unpublished part of that same manuscript he equated totality with a “will to form.” CEA 297, p. 3 [2]. 12. For a brilliant discussion of the text itself as an exemplification of totality, see Baßler, Entdeckung der Textur, 160–62. 13. “Kant sagte: Zeit: Raum sind Formen der Wahrnehmung etc.— nein sind Formen des Wahrgenommenen.” This is a rare instance in which Einstein uses Wahrnehmung in a neutral sense. This passage is quoted by Penkert, Beiträge, 46, who claims it is part of the fragment, “Das Problem des Anfangs,” but it is not found in the fragment under that title in the CEA. 14. Einstein, untitled catalog foreword, Neue Galerie, Berlin (1913), BA 1, 174–75. 15. “Picasso,” CEA 296, p. 1. The manuscript varies only slightly from the first published version. 16. Fiedler, Schriften zur Kunst, 2:262. Fiedler’s influence on Einstein’s thinking has been noted since the earliest scholarship, beginning with Penkert and Oehm. Yet his name does not appear in Einstein’s surviving written corpus until Georges Braque. The recently published documentation regarding Einstein’s close friendship with Hedwig Fechheimer, with whom he had an

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sche Anwendung” (Totality: psychological application). The present translation was first published in October 107 (Winter 2004) and benefited from the collaboration of Sebastian Zeidler. It is reprinted here with minor modifications and with his permission and that of MIT Press.

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

intense intellectual exchange, indicates her engagement with Fiedler’s writings at this time, which had been reprinted in two volumes in 1913–14. On this see Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 143–45. Among recent authors, Weixler offers an extended discussion of Fiedler’s importance for Einstein. Weixler, Poetik des Transvisuellen, 69–75. Fiedler, Schriften zur Kunst, 1:47. BA 1, 245; see text 3. While Einstein persisted in believing in art’s power to determine human seeing, he ceased to identify artistic creation with Erkenntnis, and in his later writings explicitly rejected cognition as an “escape from the concrete.” It was, “like every form of arrest, a symptom of fatigue, a stoppage of function, and termination of action.” BA 4, 198, 200. Fiedler, Schriften zur Kunst, 1:34. On the importance of Bergson’s Time and Free Will for the “Totality” essay, see Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 84–86. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1913), 232. Ibid., 226–34. Einstein returned to the issue of qualitative time in his letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (text 6). In “Bebuquin II,” his uncompleted novel, Einstein would write, “I know of nothing deader than time; it, especially, has died since it became measured. It is measured since it became space and is represented spatially. With that, time is no longer quality but number. Intensive time is disturbed in favor of the exclusively measurable.” CEA 46, p. 3. Einstein is using Erkenntnis in two senses in a single sentence! By Kunsterkenntnis he means understanding of art, but in treating artistic creation as an Erkenntnisakt he means it in Fiedler’s sense as cognition. In the version of 1914, “so-called antinomies of reason.” BA 1, 216. The phrase, “which in fact can begin at any moment,” was added to the sentence in this 1916 version. This last clause, “and time is the synonym for quality,” appears only in this 1916 version of the essay.

CHAPTER THREE Originally published as Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915); reprinted in BA 1, 234–52. The present translation is a revised version of one on which I collaborated with Sebastian Zeidler, which appeared in October 107 (2004): 122–38, reprinted here with his permission. 1. Seventeen early reviews have been reprinted in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 85–133. Among the reviewers were the philosopher Ernst Bloch, the novelist Hermann Hesse, and the art historian Hans Tietze. 2. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, 2nd ed. (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920). A letter of May 19, 1919, to Einstein from Kurt Wolff, the publisher of the second edition, reveals that the first edition comprised “around 1,200 copies” and that by this time it had nearly sold out. YCGL MSS 3, box 2, folder 52, Kurt Wolff

4.

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6.

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8.

9.

10.

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Archive, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. I am grateful to Klaus H. Kiefer for sharing this information. For a survey of the early encounters of German anthropologists, ethnologists, and art historians with African art, see the dissertation by Manuela Husemann, “Approaching Africa.” Frobenius, Bildende Kunst der Afrikaner, 6. In a book published the following year (1898), on African masks and their role in secret societies, Frobenius devoted a section to an “art-critical comparison” (kunstkritischer Vergleich) of the masks in attempting to outline their formal development. See Frobenius, Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas, 201–13. Luschan, “Altherthümer von Benin,” 150. “Technically these bronzes simply stand at the highest summit of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini couldn’t have cast them better nor anyone before or after him, up to today.” At the time Luschan was assistant to Adolf Bastian, director of the Berlin’s Royal Museum for Ethnology, and became director of the museum’s African and Oceanic collections in 1905. For more on Luschan and his views on African subjects, progressive for their time, see Husemann, “Approaching Africa,” 174–82. Woermann, Die Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker, 1:72. Drawing exclusively on the ethnographic literature, Woermann appears to have been the first art historian to discuss African artifacts as art, devoting eight pages to the art and architecture of Africa in this first edition of his book. On Woermann and his engagement with Africa, see Husemann, “Approaching Africa,” 140–62. On the discovery and early reception of African art, see Paudrat, “From Africa,” especially 137– 53. For a thorough account of the early European market in African art, see Biro, “Transformation de l’objet ethnographique africain.” On Brummer’s activities as a dealer, see Biro, “Transformation de l’objet ethnographique africain,” 71– 188. For a more concise account, see her “African Arts between Curios, Antiquities, and Avant-garde.” See also Purrmann, Leben und Meinungen, 71, 133–34. He recalls Einstein and Brummer coming to Café du Dôme together. Einstein to Luschan, August 18, 1913, in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 136. This is the earliest known documentation from Einstein’s own hand of his interest in African art. Although the book was published in spring 1915, Einstein must have finished the manuscript no later than the summer of 1914, since he volunteered for the army on August 8. See his manuscript “Eine der schwierigen Aufgaben des Militärs . . . ,” untitled, BA 4, 77–78. The Latvian artist V. I. Matvejs, under the name Vladimir Markov, completed a book manuscript, Iskusstvo negrov (Negro art), in Russian on African art shortly before his death at age thirty-six in May 1914, but it wasn’t published until 1919 and remained unknown in the West until many years later. For an English translation and commentary, see Howard et al., Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism, 217–52. For a comparative discussion of Einstein and

NOTES TO PAGES 33–35

346 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

Markov, see Neumeister, “Ethnographic Turn,” 172–85; and Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 8–21. In a draft manuscript of an undated letter in French to an unknown recipient, written in the 1920s, Einstein suggested that circumstances accounted for the lack of documentation in Negro Sculpture. “My first little book is only a torso because the publisher issued it while I lay in a military hospital.” Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 142. It has generally been assumed that he was referring to the absence of captions. Some have suggested that this omission was intentional. See, for example, Baßler, “Das Bild, die Schrift, und die Differenz,” 139–42, 152–53. Captions were also absent from the book’s second edition. As noted above, Frobenius attempted to do just this with a stylistic analysis of African masks as early as 1898. See his Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas, 201–13. Since Einstein provides no information whatsoever on the illustrations, this is the only African culture mentioned in the entire book! Moreover, although the Benin people are mentioned in the text, no Benin works are illustrated. For a list of the illustrated sculptures and, to the extent that it is known, their provenance, see Bassani and Paudrat, “Liste des œuvres illustrés,” 153–63. Reprinted in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 95. Ibid., 100. Victor Wallerstein (1917), ibid., 122. Undated letter of 1921, EKC, 121. Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form. Citations here and below are from the 1901 edition in my own translation. On Einstein and Hildebrand see Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 121–32; Neundorfer, Kritik an Anschauung, 82–85; Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 15–46; Rumold, Archaeologies of Modernity, 151– 54, 156. Prior to his discovery of African sculpture and cubism, Einstein had been strongly influenced by Hildebrand. On this see Drewes, “Max Raphael und Carl Einstein,” 129–32. See also Einstein’s comment on Hildebrand in a 1912 review: “To fix Hildebrand one must either accept or reject his method. I choose the latter; it’s completely wrong about a lot of things and especially about what is good in older sculpture; often his guiding thought seems to be: how can I get by without the properly sculptural.” BA 1, 67. Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form, 89, 91–92. Zeidler gives a helpful account of the stakes in Form as Revolt, 69–73. As noted above, Einstein never relates these observations to any of the illustrated sculptures. Zeidler (Form as Revolt, 82–89) and Cheng (“Immanence out of Sight,” 92–94) are among the few of Negro Sculpture’s many commentators to do so. Fechheimer, Plastik der Ägypter. See Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 59– 86, 132–51. In 1907 the two friends apparently visited Paris together, and in 1910 Einstein accompanied Fechheimer on an extended research trip to Egypt. The complete text is quoted in Neundorfer, Kritik an Anschauung, 46n84. (Fechheimer in turn reviewed Negro Sculpture for Kunst und Künstler,

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

347 NOTES TO PAGES 35–38

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reprinted in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 112–15.) Kiefer has suggested that Fechheimer’s book was the “igniting spark” for Negro Sculpture, and that Einstein wrote it quickly— he goes so far as to characterize it as a “paraphrase” of Fechheimer, “a positive parody, in a certain sense. . . . What is said of Egyptian sculpture is also said mutatis mutandis of Negro sculpture.” Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 165, 168. For the most detailed discussion of the relation between the two books, see Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 132–51. Fechheimer, Plastik der Ägypter, 26. Ibid., 35. See also 40, 48. Six years later, in his second book on African sculpture, Einstein wrote, “African sculpture displays cubic solutions of rare purity and consistency. It pursues the problems of spatial relations and concentration; in this respect Egyptian sculpture comes closest to it.” Einstein, Afrikanische Plastik, 8; see text 5. Fechheimer, Plastik der Ägypter, 51. Ibid., 52. An additional full- length sculpture shown in two views, plates 86– 87, was not African but Oceanic, from the Marquesa Islands. Zeidler, using a single Chokwe sculpture (plate 67) in Einstein’s book, has gone further than anyone else in seeking to demonstrate the accuracy of Einstein’s analysis. Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 82–89. A point made by Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 134–35. Advertisement reproduced in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 112. While Einstein never explicitly mentions cubism in Negro Sculpture, he acknowledged the connection six years later in his African Sculpture: “As cubism was in its beginnings, we investigated African artworks and found consummate examples” (text 5). Kiefer has remarked that “in effect Negro Sculpture represents nothing other than a poetics or ‘immanent’ aesthetics of cubism” applied to African sculpture. Kiefer, “Fonctions de l’art africain,” 153. Elsewhere he has characterized Negro Sculpture as a “cubist manifesto.” Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 185. A brief note in the exhibition’s catalog explained, “It is neither caprice nor coincidence that we have combined a choice collection of older Negro sculptures with the Picasso exhibition. Picasso was one of the first to recognize the high artistic value of these works, which previously one had regarded only with a superior smile as ethnographic curiosities.” The illustration on the cover of the catalog, above the title Picasso * Negerplastik, was the head from a Baule statuette, a provocative choice, since there was no illustration for Picasso. The most informative account of the exhibition and its rare catalog is found in Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 179–80. A review by Adolf Behne suggests that the Picassos and the African works were shown in separate spaces of the gallery, as discrete exhibitions (Behne, “Pablo Picasso,” 98). The catalog cover is illustrated in Yaëlle Biro, “Picasso et les maîtres: Exposer et juxtaposer Picasso et les arts africains,” Colloque Revoir Picasso (Paris: Musée national Picasso, 2015), 2, http://revoirpicasso.fr/wp -content/uploads/2016/03/RevoirPicasso -2015_J2_Y.Biro_.pdf. Einstein had written the catalog introduction for the

NOTES TO PAGES 38–40

348

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36.

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40. 41. 42.

immediately preceding, inaugural exhibition at the gallery (BA 1, 174–75). Neumeister (“Ethnographic Turn,” 174–75) has suggested, without evidence, that he was likely the one who organized “Picasso— Negerplastik.” I am deeply grateful to Luise Mahler for generously sharing her research on this exhibition, and to Sherwin Simmons for bringing Behne’s review to my attention and providing me with a copy of it. See Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 179–80. Thirty-nine or forty of the paintings were lent by Kahnweiler, as established from his records. On this see Richardson, Picasso: 1907–1917, 317nn61–62. We aren’t so fortunate with the African sculptures. Two of them, however, were reproduced in the review by Behne (“Pablo Picasso”) and a third on the cover of the catalog. All three of them were subsequently illustrated in Einstein’s Negro Sculpture (plates 13, 56, and 70). A few years later another emergent Africanist, Eckart von Sydow, made this point: “The manner in which the possessions of ethnographic museums are displayed makes their study so painful and fruitless— amid the plethora of myriad objects piled up jungle- like the individual piece becomes invisible.” Sydow, “Grundzüge der Negerplastik: Ein kunstwissenschaftlicher Versuch,” Die Gäste 1 (1921): 82. On the “museum chaos” of Wilhelmine- era ethnographic institutions, see Penny, Objects of Culture, 163–214. For example, the show included a small oil study for the mask-like head of the lower right figure in Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Daix/Rosselet 46); Tête de femme (Daix/Rosselet 34); Tête d’homme (Daix/Rosselet 49); Torse de femme (Daix/Rosselet 109); the monumental Nu debout (Daix/Rosselet 116); and a gouache study for the definitive version of Picasso’s major painting of 1908, Trois femmes (Daix/Rosselet 124). This is Kiefer’s conclusion (Diskurswandel, 185). Strother offers a similar assessment: “There is no evidence that Einstein was reading or thinking deeply about Africa. . . . There are not many traces of Africa in Negerplastik.” Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 14. She offers by far the most thorough discussion of Einstein’s knowledge of Africa at this time and the probable sources for the ideas presented in Negro Sculpture. In this regard it differs strikingly from the contemporaneous study by Markov, Iskusstvo negrov (see note 11). Markov, whose first language was German, had traveled extensively in Europe in 1912–13, visiting ethnographic collections in twelve cities, and quotes from the literature, most notably Frobenius. Ankermann, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Ethnographie,” 241– 86. Ankermann was on the curatorial staff of the Museum for Ethnology in Berlin. Frobenius, Und Afrika sprach. An English translation appeared the following year: The Voice of Africa. Frobenius, Voice of Africa, 1:186– 291. Frobenius was cited extensively by Markov. The most extensive study of African religion available at the time was by Carl Meinhof, a scholar in comparative religious studies. His Afrikanische Religionen (1912) gives a synthetic overview of the state of knowledge concerning traditional African religions. However, he has almost nothing to say

44.

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47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

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about art. He does warn, however, about the dangers of generalizing, as Einstein would do, about the religious practices of “the African.” “Strictly speaking,” he writes, “one could approach the material only in such a manner as to treat the religion of every individual people separately” (28). Strother writes of Einstein’s section on African art and religion that it “could not have stemmed from Frobenius, nor indeed any respected contemporary work of scholarship.” Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 15. Frobenius, in his lengthy eye-witness account of Yoruba religious practices, writes that “the figures and other figments and symbols are never actual representations of the gods, but rather of priests and others engaged in sacrificial or other ceremonial in honour of some particular deity. I know but few images which really depict the God in person.” Frobenius, Voice of Africa, 1:196. See also Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 16, where she quotes the Notes analytiques sur les collections ethnographiques from the Musée du Congo in Tervuren (1906): “The black man never prostrates himself before a fetish. . . . They do not adore it like an idol, like a god.” Which did not prevent him from claiming that he had been there! Thea Sternheim, who with her husband Carl and Einstein was part of the German war colony in Belgium, recorded in her diary (April 13, 1916) that Einstein had been in Africa, and told stories about “the Congo and Egypt.” Quoted by Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 213, from the manuscript in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. Einstein had traveled with Fechheimer in Egypt in 1910, but there is no evidence that he ever visited sub- Saharan Africa. At least none of them is identified as such by Bassani and Paudrat in “Liste des œuvres illustrés,” 153–63. As noted above, Frobenius made the point that, at least in Yoruba culture, representations of gods were extremely rare. Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 185. On Einstein’s mostly overlooked Maillol essay, see Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 59–62. “Maillol,” reprinted in full in Andreas Kramer, “Zwischen Klassik und Avantgarde: Zwei unbekannte Texte Carl Einsteins 1913– 1914,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft 43 (1999): 41–45. On the complex subject of Einstein’s attitude toward religion during these years, see Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 74–88. Fleckner (Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 87–91) argues plausibly that this polished text was the one Einstein intended for the almanac Der Blaue Reiter, which was published in May 1912. Franz Marc reported to Kandinsky in February 1912 that it was “very interesting, really full of riches and skill.” The manuscript was held in reserve for a planned second volume, which never appeared. For an illuminating discussion of the relationship of this text to Negro Sculpture and its commonalities with Fechheimer’s Plastik der Ägypter, see Peuckert, Hedwig Fechheimer, 141– 43. The dating is supported by the absence of any mention of African art, although Einstein makes points about Egyptian art that anticipate his argument in Negro Sculpture. Einstein, untitled catalog foreword, 1913, BA 1, 174–75.

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53. Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” BA 1, 143–46. On the relation between Einstein’s early political views and Negro Sculpture, see Stavrinaki, Contraindre à la liberté, 17–50. 54. Strother sees this as one of the most truly original insights in Einstein’s text. She notes that at the time Africans did not occupy a central place in the literature on tattooing. Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 17–19. 55. Strother (ibid., 18) plausibly suggests that Einstein’s source for this passage came not from anything in African ethnography but from the 1903 paper by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification,” in Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. and ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). See in particular pp. 5–7. 56. Einstein, quoted in Neundorfer, Kritik an Anschauung, 47. 57. Einstein to Tony Simon- Wolfskehl, undated (1923), CEA 412. 58. Markov’s Iskusstvo negrov had more plates, 123, but reproduced fewer works, 72. The largest ethnographic source, with over 700 illustrations of artifacts, was Notes analytiques sur les collections ethnographiques du Musée du Congo, Annales du Musées du Congo (Brussels: Musée du Congo, 1906). On Negro Sculpture’s importance for German artists, see Lloyd, German Expressionism, 71–72. 59. Sydow, Kunst der Naturvölker, 7. 60. The German title of this section is “Das Malerische,” usually translated as “painterly,” as it is in the case of Heinrich Wölfflin’s “linear” and “painterly.” But as is clear from the text, Einstein is referring not to “painterliness” in Wölfflin’s sense, but is contrasting “das Malerische” with “das Plastische,” the pictorial with the sculptural, i.e., an essentially two-dimensional mode of vision and of representation with a three-dimensional, sculptural one. Hence, “pictorial” seems to convey more effectively his meaning, and avoids conflation with the usual connotations of “painterly.” 61. Here Einstein used the French word. 62. Clearly, in this passage Einstein is referring to the cubists, a connection he will make explicit in African Sculpture. 63. Bewegungsvorstellung, a term Einstein takes from Hildebrand, is a compound noun for which there is no simple English equivalent. Vorstellung as Hildebrand and Einstein use it here denotes envisagement, the formation of an image in the mind; Bewegung, “movement” or “motion,” refers not to the motion of an object but to that of the eyes around a three-dimensional object, apprehending its volume in space. A Bewegungsvorstellung, then, is an image formed by the eye in motion, gazing upon an object up close, so that it cannot apprehend it as a whole, focusing on one point or area at a time. The mobile eye engages in a virtual palpation of the object, looking at it from different vantage points, cumulatively acquiring a sense of its plastic form through a temporal sequence of discrete images. According to Einstein the African sculptor unifies these discrete perceptions unfolding in time and space into a single “cubic” form.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. On the arts and the German revolution, see Weinstein, End of Expressionism. 2. Einstein, “Anmerkungen,” “Politische Anmerkungen” (both 1912), “Der Arme” (1913), and “Die Sozialdemokratie” (1914), all published in Die Aktion, reprinted in BA 1, 142–46, 156–59, 241. On these early political texts, see Stavrinaki, Contraindre à la liberté, 17–50; and Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 44–52. 3. On Einstein’s revolutionary involvement in Belgium, see Kiefer, “Revolutionary Soldiers’ Councils,” 97–112. 4. On Einstein’s political activities during the German revolution of 1918–19, see Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung,” 41–77. 5. On this collaboration, see Haxthausen, “Bloody Serious,” 105–18. 6. Symptomatic of his disillusionment is that for his collection Anmerkungen (1916) the only piece of art criticism Einstein included was the last he had published, in the July/August 1914 issue of Die weißen Blätter. Titled “KunstAusstellungen” (Art exhibitions), it was a trenchantly negative assessment of the sorry state of the art world generally. BA 1, 230–32. 7. Andreas Michel offers a helpful discussion of both aspects of Einstein’s “figuration of the primitive” and of “On Primitive Art” in his “Formalism to Psychoanalysis,” 141–61. Einstein’s theory of primitivism is explored in depth by David Pan in his Primitive Renaissance, 121–46. 8. As we have seen in “Totality,” the “immediate” is identified with the spontaneity and singularity of intuition and is opposed to the abstraction of the generalizing concept. Einstein’s adoption of the term may have been inspired by Bergson’s Time and Free Will, in which it is identified with the experience of time as immeasurable quality. The book’s subtitle was Essai sur les données immédiate de la conscience. In the German edition of 1911, Zeit und Freiheit, “immédiate” was translated as “unmittelbar.” 9. “Erste Tagung des Rätebundes,” Räte Zeitung 1, no. 13 (May 17, 1919), as quoted in Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung,” 49. 10. Einstein included the essay in his collection Anmerkungen, 53–56. 11. Einstein developed these ideas further in a manuscript from 1921 intended for publication in Russia, “Revolution Smashes Through,” 139–45. 12. George Grosz and John Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump” (1919/20), in Uwe Schneede, ed., Die Zwanziger Jahre: Manifeste und Dokumente deutscher Künstler (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 54. 13. Einstein, “Revolution Smashes Through,” 140, 145. 14. Reflecting on this period a decade and half later in notes for his autobiographical novel “Bebuquin II,” Einstein, referring to himself as his alter ego BEB,

NOTES TO PAGES 60–63

First published as “Zur primitiven kunst,” in Ludwig Rubiner, ed., Die Gemeinschaft: Dokumente der geistigen Weltwende (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1919), 175–76. An earlier translation and portions of the introduction previously appeared in my article “Bloody Serious,” 105–23.

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wrote that he had joined the revolution “in order to destroy his person” and out of “disgust with everything theoretical and imaginative.” He wanted “to save himself in the primitivism (die Primitive) of the worker and in the strongest most unimaginative reality; this as salvation, as antidote.” CEA 43, slips 6, 8. 15. See “Lettres de Carl Einstein à Moïse Kisling (1920–1924),” 74–123 (hereafter cited as LEK); 74–123; EKC, 121–33.

CHAPTER FIVE Afrikanische Plastik (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1921); reprinted in BA 2, 61–145. This text is not to be confused with a translation of Negro Sculpture that was misleadingly titled “African Sculpture” in Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and TwentiethCentury Art, 77–91. 1. See Baacke, “Carl Einstein— Kunstagent,” in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 9–26. 2. The piece was a gloomy essay on Rudolf Schlichter in Das Kunstblatt (1920), BA 2, 57–60. It is surely no coincidence that Einstein’s letters to Kisling— the only substantive source from this time that conveys a sense of his state of mind while at work on African Sculpture, reveal a man who has gone distinctly sour on the contemporary art scene. In these letters he seems at pains to dissociate himself from it: “I assure my good Kiki,” he insists, “I am not modern, and if I am so much the worse.” Einstein to Kisling, June 1921, LEK, 94. 3. For a chronological review of Einstein’s movements during the war years, see Meffre, Itinéraires, 58–79. See also Einstein’s unpublished manuscript, probably dating from 1914, “Eine der schwierigen Aufgaben des Militärs . . . ,” untitled, BA 4, 77– 78, and Christoph Braun’s discussion of Einstein’s war years in his Carl Einstein, 164–69. 4. The exact nature of the position is not known. 5. Although the official name of the museum at this time was Musée du Congo Belge, and it was located in Tervuren outside of Brussels, in his captions Einstein identified the three works from this collection as “Brussels, Congo Museum.” 6. “Ich negriere hier gänzlich. Ein afrikanischer Excess.” Einstein to Blei, undated, in Baacke, Einstein: Materialien, 138. An immediate fruit of this immersion was renderings of African songs and legends culled from the ethnographic literature, which he published in German magazines. These are Einstein’s “Nachdichtungen,” or renderings as poems (“Drei Negerlieder,” “Neger- Gebet,” “Negerlieder,” BA 1, 256–58, 270–71), and “Negermythen: Bakuba Legenden,” BA 1, 275–91. 7. Einstein to Kisling, December 11, 1920, LEK, 81. 8. Einstein to Kisling, February 1922, LEK, 86. 9. Einstein to Kisling, November 21, 1921, LEK, 101. 10. Einstein to Kisling, March 1921, LEK, 88. The collection, comprising eighty-

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four texts, finally appeared four years later under the title Afrikanische Legenden. See Williams, “Primitivism in the Works of Carl Einstein,” 250, on this project and some of Einstein’s sources. As Wolfgang Struck has remarked, in contrast to Negro Sculpture, in African Sculpture there is no longer any suggestion of hope that these works “can become the prehistory of a new European art.” Struck, Eroberung der Phantasie, 185. Notably Einstein did not write individual commentaries when he produced a second volume for the series, published the following year, on the early Japanese woodcut: Der frühere japanische Holzschnitt (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1922; BA 2, 257–328). Strother, “Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 14. Bernhard Ankermann had produced a founding text of this approach, “Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Afrika” (1905), 54–84. For an excellent discussion of the context of this development, see Zimmerman, “Science and Schaulust,” 65–88, particularly 83–87. See Bassani, “Les œuvres illustrés dans Negerplastik,” 99– 121. For Negro Sculpture, Bassani lists only nine works as belonging to museum collections at the time: seven from the Berlin Museum for Ethnology and two from the British Museum. In African Sculpture seven of the works were from Einstein’s private collection, second only to the Berlin Museum for Ethnology as a source. In her translation of the text into Portuguese, Elena O’Neill provides the most extensive annotation of Einstein’s ethnographic references to be found in any edition to date. Conduru and O’Neill, Carl Einstein e a arte da África, 79– 138. The book comprises all of Einstein’s texts on African art. This according to Bassani and Paudrat, “Liste des œuvres illustrés,” 153–63. Wölfflin famously wrote, “[P]eople will always see things the way they want to, but this does not preclude the possibility of there being some constant law at work throughout the change. Identifying this law would be a central problem, perhaps the central problem of art history.” Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 99. Kasfir, “One Tribe, One Style,” 166. She elaborates: “Thus, while a recent bibliography includes 3488 entries on the Yoruba, with important studies of the style, functions, distribution, typology, and symbolism of Yoruba art, there is as yet no real history of Yoruba art to include. The same can be said, with few exceptions, for virtually all African art, which has been the object of scholarly investigation by either art historians or anthropologists. Indeed, it would appear that art history in the conventional sense is a discipline which in Africa has been left almost entirely to archeologists.” Kasfir does not refer to Einstein in her article. Ibid., 169. Here, again, to establish the historiographic and methodological significance of Einstein’s asking such questions, I cite Kasfir: “where Africanists have taken up the study of types . . . they have concentrated primarily on their spatial dis-

NOTES TO PAGES 68–75

354 22. 23.

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25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

tribution. While clearly the most accessible dimension, this ignores the difficult questions of origin and diffusion.” Kasfir, “One Tribe, One Style,” 170. The phrase is from Einstein’s essay “Totality” (text 2). Joyce was the coauthor, with Emil Torday, of two of the works cited in the bibliography for African Sculpture: the major book, Notes ethnographiques sur les peuples communément appelés Bakuba, ainsi que sur les peuplades apparentées—les Bushongo (1910), and the journal article, “Notes on the Ethnography of the Ba- Huana” (1906). Einstein to Ewald and Günther Wasmuth and Sophia Kindsthaler, spring 1925, in Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 195. In a fundamental article on the collaboration, Heike Neumeister has reconstructed this unfinished project by means of the letters to Kindsthaler and the Wasmuths and Einstein’s correspondence with Joyce. See Neumeister, “Masks and Shadow Souls,” 135–69. Einstein to Ewald and Günther Wasmuth and Sophia Kindsthaler, spring 1925, in Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 196. As Neumeister writes (“Masks and Shadow Souls,” 135), had the book been completed, “it might have constituted the first comprehensive history of African art and culture.” Yet it should be noted that neither Einstein nor Joyce had ever set foot in sub- Saharan Africa— and for that matter Felix von Luschan, author of the magisterial Die Altertümer von Benin (1919), had never been in Benin. See Peter M. Roese, “Felix von Luschan (1854–1924) und Benin,” Tribus 48 (1999): 173–74, who comments, “It is amazing how this man who never visited Benin personally realised important correlations and drew his conclusions.” Here I have taken the liberty of translating the feminine noun die Primitive as “primivitism,” in German Primitivismus, a word Einstein never used in this text or any other. The adjectival noun die Primitive appears to be Einstein’s invention. As Irene Albers has helpfully suggested to me in an email, Einstein perhaps wanted to coin an analogue to die Moderne, a term used at the time by him and others to refer to modern tendencies in the arts, a word that by 1915 was current enough to be included in Duden’s orthographic dictionary. Email communications from Irene Albers, July 20 and August 3, 2018. Which is precisely what Einstein did in Negro Sculpture! Negro Sculpture; a second edition appeared one year before African Sculpture. Pitt Rivers, Antique Works of Art from Benin. The British explorer and ethnologist Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–90). Captain H. L. Galloway, who visited Benin in 1892. Figure numbers correspond to the original plate numbers, i.e., figure 5.2 was plate 2. All captions are those originally printed in the book, and are therefore enclosed by quotation marks. Within the book these captions are inconsistent in format and the types of information included, as well as being marred by misspellings. Jean- Louis Paudrat has provided further information on the illustrations and, when known, information on the subsequent provenance in Einstein, Les arts de l’Afrique, 269–76. Where I have found additional information, I have cited it in the notes.

355 NOTES TO PAGES 75–101

34. The object is described in a catalog as the “side part of a Yoruba chair, Nigeria.” The material is “dark brown natural wood, partially weathered, iron pegs. H: 46 cm; W: 32 cm.” Kay Heymer and Michael Heinrich Vignold, Die Afrika-Sammlungen der Essener Museen (Essen: Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, 1985), 29, 30. 35. The online catalog of the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum makes no mention of Shango or Oya. The object is described simply as a house post with a sculptural group, a “Reiter- Pferd- Motif,” a horse-and-rider motif. The height is given as 144 cm. (Today the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin contains the collections of the former Museum for Ethnology.) 36. Einstein is referring to figs. 5.20 (from Cameroon) and 5.31 and 5.32 (from Urua). 37. Ankermann, “Totenkult und Seelenglaube,” 89–153. 38. Henry Callaway (1817–1890), a Church of England missionary in southern Africa. The passage from Callaway is quoted by Ankermann, “Totenkult und Seelenglaube,” 94. 39. J. J. Dannholz, as quoted by Ankermann, “Totenkult und Seelenglaube,” 100. 40. The Dutch merchant D. van Nyendael, who visited Benin City in 1699, as quoted by Roth, Great Benin, 52. 41. Einstein mistakenly attributes this statement to Olfert Dapper, Dutch author of an ethnographic study of Africa published in 1668. He is evidently paraphrasing a statement Roth cites from D. van Nyendael, ibid., 51. 42. Shamba Bolongongo was king of the Bushongo people around 1600. 43. The online catalog of the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, identifies it not as a child but as the “head of a court dwarf” (http://www.smb -digital.de). The head is cast not in bronze, as indicated by Einstein’s caption, but in brass. 44. The piece is identified merely as a “human head” in the online catalog of the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum (http://www.smb -digital.de). It is cast not in bronze, as per Einstein’s caption, but in brass. 45. Figure 5.9 shows two leopards, cast in brass, dated to the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries; figure 5.10 is an aquamanile in the form of a leopard, also cast in brass, dated to the seventeenth century. Online catalog, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, http://www.smb -digital.de. 46. Today the mask is in the collection of the Rietberg Museum, Zurich (Inv.- Nr. RAF 721). It is identified as the work of a sculptor of the Bamileke people, from Bamendjo in the Batcham region in Cameroon, and dating from the nineteenth century. 47. Herbert von Garvens (1883–1953), a major collector of contemporary art. 48. Einstein does not discuss figure 5.20. 49. Here and below Einstein writes “Fan” and “Mpangwe.” 50. Alfred Schachtzabel, a member of the curatorial staff of the African department of Berlin Museum for Ethnology. In 1924 he would succeed Bernhard Ankermann as curator. 51. I have found no reference to any spirit to match this term. To judge from his reference to a mirror box, Einstein must have in mind a Nkisi figure.

NOTES TO PAGES 103–136

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52. Hermann von Wißmann (1853–1905), German explorer of Africa and colonial administrator. He, along with Ludwig Wolf, Curt von François, and Hans Mueller, is one of the contributors to Im Innern Afrikas: Die Erforschung des Kassai während der Jahre 1883, 1884 und 1885, an account of a German expedition to explore the Kasai River basin. The book includes a chapter on the Baluba. 53. According to the online catalog of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, the original owner was Ludwig Heinrich Wolf, not “Wolff” (http://www.smb -digital.de). 54. Einstein’s description is based on the account of Ludwig Wolf in Wißmann et al., Im Innern Afrikas, 266–67. The figure is identified simply as a “leopard chief” (Leopardenhäuptling) in the online catalog of the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum (http://www.smb -digital.de). 55. Einstein later published his rendering of this in Afrikanische Legenden (1925), 198–99. 56. Einstein does not discuss figure 5.26. 57. The two stories were included in Afrikanische Legenden, 163–66. 58. Einstein’s bibliography was skimpy and inconsistent in the information provided. Sometime he includes first names, sometimes not. He gives no publication dates, and the arrangement of sources follows no discernible order. The entries have been supplemented with full bibliographic information in Einstein, Les arts de l’Afrique, 219–20.

CHAPTER SIX The letter is undated, but can be reliably placed in June 1923, since it was a response to a letter from Kahnweiler dated May 30, EKC, 137– 38. (On the circumstances of the exchange, see below, note 17.) Einstein developed the theoretical core of the letter in a separate typescript (BA 4, 153–61; CEA 282), presented here. The full text of the letter, which incorporated the draft virtually unchanged, is published in EKC, 138–48. Several handwritten inserts, identified in this translation by enclosure within brackets, were added to the draft but do not appear in the actual letter, and were probably added later, as Einstein might have considered publishing the text as an open letter or converting it into an essay. Einstein also prepared two sheets of notes for the letter. See “Zum Kahnweilerbrief,” BA 4, 161–62. 1. Kahnweiler and Crémieux, My Galleries and Painters, 41–42. On this exhibition and its place in the genealogy of the term “cubism,” see Jack Flam, “The Birth of Cubism: Braque’s Early Landscapes and the 1908 Galerie Kahnweiler Exhibition,” in Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, ed. Emily Braun and Rebecca Rabinow (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 22–27. 2. For a concise account of Kahnweiler and his gallery in prewar Paris, see Cottington, Cubism and Its Histories, 14–17. See also Assouline, Artful Life, 27– 117.

357 NOTES TO PAGE 136

3. In his Juan Gris, published in French in 1946 and in English translation a year later, Kahnweiler recalled Einstein’s 1940 suicide, adding “we were friends for thirty-five years” (129n4), which would date the beginning of their friendship back to around 1905, two years before Kahnweiler opened his first gallery. Given that there is no evidence in Einstein’s writing of any awareness of the Paris avant-garde before 1912 (see text 1), this seems highly implausible. On this question see Meffre’s introductory remarks to EKC, 15–16. The most substantive discussion of the intellectual relationship between Einstein and Kahnweiler is by Fabiani, Kahnweiler, 137–60. 4. Einstein is documented in Paris in February 1912, and for a longer stay of three months, beginning in November (see text 1, note 1). See Penkert, Beiträge, 54n41; and Purrmann, Leben und Meinungen, 70–71. 5. Assouline, Artful Life, 90–93, 191–92. 6. Assouline states that Kahnweiler and Léontine Alexandrine Godon, known as Lucie, were married on November 5, 1904. However, in a recent paper Luise Mahler related her discovery of a certificate of marriage dated July 2, 1919, when the couple was living in Berne. (I thank her for sharing her unpublished paper, “Puzzles and Riddles: The Early Reception of Cubism in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; or a Double- Portrait of Heinrich Kahnweiler,” presented April 20, 2018 at the Spring Fellows Symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) Perhaps Kahnweiler had earlier spread the falsehood of their marriage to appease his puritanical father, who, Assouline writes, “was scandalized by the relationship and refused to meet her until she and his son were legally married” (Assouline, Artful Life, 21). 7. Ibid., 114–17, 121. The French government sequestered Kahnweiler’s gallery stock and archives as enemy property. After five-and- a- half years in Berne, Kahnweiler was finally allowed to return to Paris in February 1920, after the German Reichstag ratified the Versailles treaty. By September 1 he had opened a new gallery at a new location, under the name Galerie Simon. This hardly meant a return to business as usual, however—over the next three years the French state auctioned off his entire previously sequestered gallery stock in four auctions at the Hôtel Drouot, claiming the proceeds as reparations for the French war debt. (See Isabelle Monod- Fontaine, “Chronologie et documents,” in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: Marchand, Éditeur, Écrivain, exhibition catalog, ed. Monod- Fontaine and Claude Laugier [Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 1984], 130–33, 135–36, 138; Assouline, Artful Life, 155–89.) This flooding of the market through the auction sales depressed the prices for cubist works, provoking claims that cubism was irrelevant or even dead. Through a syndicate formed by a circle of his friends, Kahnweiler was able to buy back some of the works at auction, but the loss was nonetheless devastating. On this see Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, 49– 68, particularly 62. 8. Kahnweiler and Crémieux, My Galleries and Painters, 51. 9. Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, Gegenstand der Ästhetik. 10. These were chapters 15 to 18 of Gegenstand der Ästhetik, 55– 73. Slightly revised, chapters 15–17 were published by Kahnweiler in 1916 in Die weißen

NOTES TO PAGES 136–144

358

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

Blätter under the name Daniel Henry and titled “Der Kubismus.” This essay was then expanded into Der Weg zum Kubismus, also published under the name Daniel Henry, in 1920. An English translation of the book, The Rise of Cubism, appeared in 1949. Einstein, “Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers” (1923), BA 2, 334. Since Kahnweiler hadn’t lived in Germany since 1907, Einstein should have said “writing in German.” There had been many and diverse descriptions and explanations in Germany of cubism at the time Einstein wrote this. Neundorfer offers a helpful survey of this literature in Kritik an Anschauung, 226–47. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 3. Ibid., 26 (modified translation). Here Einstein introduces the idea of objects as “symptoms” of our sensory and mental experiences, which he would develop in the cubism chapter of The Art of the 20th Century. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, 119. Kahnweiler seems here to be recalling a passage in Einstein’s June 1923 letter: “I don’t believe that cubism is a merely optical specialty; were that the case, then it would be false, because without foundation.” The text exists as a typescript (CEA 282). Here and throughout, all words and passages rendered in italics, unless noted otherwise, were underlined by Einstein in blue pencil. These emphases are not incorporated into the published text in BA 4, 153–61. “The stupid situation” was an angry response by Kahnweiler to Einstein’s failure to inform him, as Juan Gris’s close friend and dealer, about a planned publication with illustrations by Gris. Kahnweiler and Einstein had been corresponding for the preceding half year about Einstein’s plan for a short book on Gris, with large-format reproductions and texts by the artist on his own art. This he proposed to publish with the Propyläen- Verlag, to which he was under contract for The Art of the 20th Century. Kahnweiler enthusiastically supported the project. Then he learned to his astonishment that Einstein, without so much as a word to him or Gris, had signed a contract with QuerschnittVerlag to publish a book that was to include four original lithographs by Gris. The long letter to Kahnweiler was obviously in part an attempt by Einstein to clear things up and change the subject. See the exchange of letters in EKC, 133–38. Handwritten insert above the line extending to the right margin. Einstein has crossed out “einfachsten” (simplest) with a pencil and written “dringlichsten” (most pressing) above it. In June 1923, the exchange rate of the reichsmark went from 57,000 to 193,500 to one dollar. See Harold Marcuse, “Historical Dollar-to- Marks Conversion Page,” http:// www .history .ucsb .edu /faculty /marcuse /projects /currency.htm. In the right margin of this line Einstein wrote a question mark in blue pencil. Here Einstein has underlined “one” (eine) with the typewriter. Handwritten insert in French above the typed line. Handwritten insertion on the margin.

CHAPTER SEVEN “Der Kubismus,” in Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Propyläen- Verlag, 1926), 56–86. 1. Why he was commissioned to write it remains a mystery— for the previous seven years, from 1915 through 1921, he had published only two short pieces on contemporary art; when he signed the contract in March 1922, his most substantive art writing had been his two short books on African sculpture. Einstein would have seemed the obvious choice for a book dealing with African sculpture, as the first volume in the Propyläen series would do. But that book, Die Kunst der Naturvölker und der Vorzeit (The art of natural peoples and prehistory, 1923), was written by Eckart von Sydow, who, paradoxically, had written less on that subject and much more on modern art than Einstein. Perhaps the publisher was wary of authors recycling already published material— Einstein’s African Sculpture had appeared shortly before he signed the contract. 2. Although the book was published with the title Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, the first page of each of its sixteen-page signatures is identified with the original title, “Einstein, Expressionismus.” To be sure, during the first two decades of the twentieth century “expressionism” was used as a generic term, embracing the whole of contemporary art, including cubism. On this, see Haxthausen, “Critical Illusion,” 169–91. 3. On this issue see Haxthausen, “Einstein and Expressionism,” 273–303. 4. At 12,400 words it was also the second longest in French or German, surpassed in those languages only by Paul Erich Küppers’s Der Kubismus (1920), which was around 14,000. Kahnweiler’s book Der Weg zum Kubismus was around 7,000 words. By the third edition Einstein’s chapter had grown to over 24,000 words. However, the longest, at roughly 30,000 words, and by far the most developed and substantive account of cubism from this period was in Czech, Vincenc Kramárˇ’s Kubismus (Brno: Moravsko- slezská Revue, 1921; German translation “Der Kubismus”). Kramárˇ, an art historian and important collector of cubism, took Kahnweiler’s “little book” as a point of departure for his own fine-grained analysis, which took the form of a critique of Kahnweiler and a richly nuanced alternative explanation of cubism’s development (see “Der Kubismus,” 211, 218, 242–44). See also Yve- Alain Bois’s preface to the French translation of Kramárˇ’s text, Le cubisme, ed. Hélène Klein and Erika Abrams, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beauxarts, 2002), ix–xxi. 5. To cite one recent example, in David Cottington’s study of the literature on cubism, Cubism and Its Histories, which includes a close analysis of some of

359 NOTES TO PAGES 144–146

25. Handwritten addendum at the end of the page, “surrealiste” [sic] crossed out and replaced by “spirituelle.” The reference to surrealism suggests that these addenda may postdate the publication of the first surrealist manifesto, in October 1924.

NOTES TO PAGES 146–149

360

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

the most influential early writing on the movement, Einstein gets fewer than two pages, and true to what has been a pattern, the text cited is “Notes sur le cubisme,” a short essay from 1929, published in the journal Documents; The Art of the 20th Century is not even mentioned. Einstein gets better treatment from Christopher Green in his Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005), although here, too, the texts he cites were all published in Documents. Green does not consider Einstein’s long Picasso sections from the second and third editions of The Art of the 20th Century, which would have been especially pertinent to the issues in his book. Zeidler offers the most thorough, concrete discussion of Einstein and cubism in “Defense of the Real,” 107–247. See also his Form as Revolt, 91–156. Neundorfer (Kritik an Anschauung, 221–74) offers an especially interesting discussion of Einstein’s writing on cubism in relation to the broader German reception of this art. See also Fleckner, Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 215–89. Albert Dreyfus, “Deux études allemandes sur l’art contemporain,” Cahiers d’art 8 (1926): 214. Reprinted in K3, 841. Einstein to Kahnweiler, undated letters of 1922, EKC, 130, 133. Here we may recognize an aspect of Einstein’s critique of Hildebrand and of Western sculpture in his Negro Sculpture. Einstein’s only text from the war years with any relation to modern art is the poem “Gedenken des André Derain” (Remembrance of André Derain), published in Die Aktion in 1917 (BA 1, 266–69). He wrote the poem in response to an erroneous report that Derain had fallen in combat. See his letter of December 11, 1920, to Moïse Kisling, LEK, 82. Assouline, Artful Life, 169–70. This had also been the case in Kahnweiler’s 1916 article, “Der Kubismus.” He hailed Braque and Picasso as “the first and greatest of the ‘cubists’” (211) and did not mention either Gris or Léger. He would include a separate chapter on Léger in Der Weg zum Kubismus. The prewar texts are collected in Antliff and Leighten, Cubism Reader. For a summary of the argument and a convenient representative sample from the early criticism, see J. M. Nash, “The Nature of Cubism: A Study of Conflicting Interpretations,” Art History 3 (1980): 35–36. On the persistence of this idea in the subsequent literature, see also Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 59–60. Maurice Raynal, “Conception and Vision” (1912), in Antliff and Leighten, Cubism Reader, 319–20. Roger Allard, “At the Autumn Salon of Paris” (1911), in Antliff and Leighten, Cubism Reader, 85. In contrast to “Totality,” where he had defined artistic creation as a “cognitive act” (Erkenntnisakt). Yve- Alain Bois has hailed Kahnweiler as the only early commentator “to give an intelligent account of cubism, after he had been a privileged witness to its beginnings.” It is “one that remains in many respects unequaled today.” Bois,

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

361 NOTES TO PAGES 149–151

18. 19. 20.

“Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 65–66, 67. Kahnweiler, Weg zum Kubismus, 30; English translation, Rise of Cubism, 11. Kahnweiler, Weg zum Kubismus, 8; Rise of Cubism, 1. Kahnweiler, Weg zum Kubismus, 18–19; Rise of Cubism, 7 (modified translation). Kahnweiler, Weg zum Kubismus, 36, 39. In Rise of Cubism, 19, Tektonik is misleadingly translated as “applied art.” Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 206. Elena O’Neill offers a useful account of the applications of the term in Einstein’s writing, with a focus on African sculpture and cubism: “A tectônica (africana) de Carl Einstein,” in Conduru and O’Neill, Carl Einstein e a arte da África, 229–242. On this, see my article “Carl Einstein, Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, Cubism, and the Visual Brain.” Portions of the current text are based on that article. Kahnweiler, Weg zum Kubismus, 39, 40. I have translated das feste Gerüst literally— in The Rise of Cubism (14) it is translated as “solid structure,” which weakens Kahnweiler’s meaning. Similarly, Urformen, which Kahnweiler sets off with quotation marks and which more effectively conveys the “a priori” status of these forms, is weakened to “basic forms.” Kahnweiler, Rise of Cubism, 14. Ibid., 10, 12. Kramárˇ (“Der Kubismus,” 224– 25) explicitly rejected Kahnweiler’s account of the reasons for Braque’s and Picasso’s rejection of the closed form. They were not disturbed by “deformation,” which they regarded as a “welcome expressive means.” Rather it was their desire to rid painting of the last vestiges of illusionism that led them to this step. Ibid., 12. Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” BA 3, 37; English translation, “Notes on Cubism,” 165. It’s important to note a distinction here between two kinds of memory— the biological memory formed by long-term perceptual experience, i.e., the kind that Kahnweiler has in mind when he refers to Erinnerungsbilder and what I would call instantaneous short-term memory that accompanies a single event of perception as it unfolds in space and time. This latter form of memory is encompassed within what Einstein refers to with the term simultané, which he described as “an intensification and enrichment of memory.” Einstein deployed the adjectival cognate of the French simultanéité (the German is Simultaneität), a buzzword that became associated with this feature of cubist painting. See Cottington, Cubism and Its Histories, 85–104, on the pervasiveness of this notion in cubist circles. Here Einstein’s account stands in strong contrast with Kramárˇ’s remarkable earlier study, in which he writes, “Whoever is more intimately familiar with Picasso’s work can as it were date individual works down to the month” (“Der Kubismus,” 235), and in the following pages he proceeded to offer a nuanced analysis of the distinct phases in the artist’s treatment of line and color. It is highly unlikely that at this time Einstein would have been familiar with the

NOTES TO PAGES 152–158

362

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

contents of Kramárˇ’s book, which was not translated into French or German until the twenty-first century. His first contact with the Czech collector and art historian came only at the end of the 1920s. See Claverie et al., Vincenc Kramárˇ, 259, 321. Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 159–60. Einstein, “Notes on Cubism,” 168. Einstein, “Die Bildung kunstgeschichtlicher Gesetze . . . ,” untitled, BA 4, 267. In the same manuscript he writes, “The consummate describer sees the transposed object and otherwise nothing.” Ibid. Neundorfer offers the most concrete discussion of Einstein’s use of language in the cubism chapter. See his Kritik an Anschauung, 256–60. Zeidler is especially good on what he calls the “oscillation between discourse and writing” in Einstein, which “animates every page Einstein ever wrote. . . . In Einstein we will never encounter sheer discourse any more than sheer writing; instead, we will find them locked in a struggle for dominance.” Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 21. On the prose style of The Art of the 20th Century and Einstein’s other art criticism, see Fleckner, Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 257–89. Zeidler, in Form as Revolt, 97, translates Bildgegenstand as “image-object,” and claims this notion is central to Einstein’s aesthetics. Cubism replaced “the illusionistic object” of the Renaissance with the “image- object” (Bildgegenstand). He is correct about Einstein’s position on the autonomous status of the object in cubist painting, but not about the prominence of the Bildgegenstand as a notion in his vocabulary. The term appears only twice in the cubism chapter, at the beginning and in the section on Picasso. Einstein’s reference to a critique of Anschauung is confusing here, inconsistent with how he uses the term elsewhere, including in this paragraph. Here he seems to be using Anschauung in the sense in which Whitney Davis has defined visuality, as vision mediated by culture, as the “culturality of vision” (A General Theory of Visual Culture [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011], 8). So when Einstein writes that an effective art should be a “Kritik an Anschauung,” he presumably means a critique of historically and culturally mediated seeing, of lazy, generalized seeing predetermined by visual memory, association, and concepts, whereas the Anschauung of cubism is an intuition that is immediate, unfettered by visual memory, freed from the deadening habitual patterns of perception. Zeidler sees an erotic connotation in the term Bildkörper, which he translates as “image-body.” He explains, “It emerges from a foundational contrast that is specifically erotic. An image-body formalizes a relation between man and a woman in which the full range of amorous passion, from tenderness through delirium to shamelessness, is released onto canvas.” Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 98. Yet Einstein does not deploy Bildkörper in such a specific way, nor does he limit its application to works comprising the human figure. Generally he uses it to differentiate the object or objects formed within the painting to the

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

363 NOTES TO PAGES 159–180

38.

objects in nature. The present passage is an example. The word Körper evokes the effect of volume that the cubists achieved in a two-dimensional structure. Das vorstellende Sehen is not easily rendered in English. “Envisaging seeing” may seem redundant. But Einstein consistently uses Vorstellung to refer to representations or images created in the mind. The Oxford English Dictionary defines envisage as “to obtain a mental view of, to set before the mind’s eye . . . chiefly, to regard under a particular aspect.” With this Einstein is stressing the primacy of the mental images that arise from visual activity over purely optical ones. On Bewegungsvorstellung, a term Einstein adapts from Hildebrand, see text 3, note 63. In the printed text the word is not “Autismus” but “Artismus,” a curious neologism even for Einstein! In the second edition the word has been changed to “Autismus” (K2, 60), which I take to be Einstein’s intended meaning, and I have rendered it here accordingly. Kahnweiler used Verformung in its usual sense, as “deformation.” Einstein uses Deformation for that purpose, and Verformung in its less common meaning, as synonymous with Umformung, transformation, or re-forming. As Klaus H Kiefer has pointed out, Einstein here slightly misquotes a statement by Picasso (“L’art nègre? Connais pas.”) published in an article, “Opinions sur l’art nègre,” Action, no. 3 (April 1920), in response to a questionnaire concerning the influence of African art. Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 339– 40. I have noted (text 3) that at the time of its publication Negro Sculpture was advertised as a book based on “fundamentally cubistic intuitions.” Yet, strikingly, now that Einstein writes in depth on cubism, there is no reference to African art, save this quotation from Picasso, rejecting any suggestion of its influence. The Horta paintings date from 1909, not 1913; Einstein apparently overlooked the intervening date following his previous reference to 1909. He corrected the error in the third edition (text 10). This is one of Einstein’s witty verbal inventions, a reference to the manner of Lothar Meggendorf (1847–1925), a German painter and illustrator and editor of the Meggendorfer Blätter, an illustrated humor magazine. Einstein here is referring to Picasso’s landscapes at La Rue-des- Bois. Braque did indeed show six paintings at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, but they were not yet cubist. See “Documentary Chronology” in Rubin, Picasso and Braque, 343. Einstein is referring to Braque’s Large Nude, painted in spring 1908. Einstein could be careless about the consistency of titles and dates between text and plates, and even with plate numbers. In the German text the plate number (299) for Woman with Mandolin is linked to Braque’s Little Harbor in Normandy. Moreover there is no Woman with Mandolin by Braque from 1912, and my figure 7.6, which he must have in mind here, is reproduced with the title Bildnis (Portrait) and dated 1911. Here I am translating the title given by Einstein (Mädchen mit Fruchtkorb) for the painting now known as Caryatid (Canéphore).

NOTES TO PAGES 185–195

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50. The painting was exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants of 1911, not that of 1910, where it was number 6713 in the catalog. Neundorfer rightly doubts the veracity of this recounting. He notes that the passage, with its reference to “Tubisme” and the Indépendants 1910, recalls a passage in Kahnweiler’s Weg zum Kubismus (47), where the author also erroneously states that the picture was exhibited in the 1910 Indépendants and relates the “Tubisme” anecdote. Neundorfer, Kritik an Anschauung, 260–61. 51. Here I have taken the liberty of translating Anschauung as “visuality” in a way that contradicts its meaning in Einstein’s vocabulary. According to that sense “existing intuition” (vorhandenden Anschauung) would be an oxymoron. See my remarks in the introduction, pp. 9–10, and note 36 above. 52. Considering the high esteem in which he held Gris (“who seems to me the best mind” [text 6]), Einstein has surprisingly little concrete to say about his art. 53. The original German reads, “Das visuell Imaginative ist ein Prozeß, aus dem der Künstler Formergebnisse ausscheidet, welche die häufigsten subjektiv visuellen Vorgangstypen enthält [sic].” Ausscheidet would normally mean “to eliminate” or “to exclude.” Yet in the in the 1928 edition, Einstein has replaced the verb ausscheidet with gewinnt, meaning “gains,” so I have translated ausscheidet accordingly as “extract,” in the sense of separating out. 54. In the 1926 edition there is a typographical error, “Verstellens” (misplace or obstruct). In the 1928 edition it has been corrected to “Vorstellens,” and my translation is based on that corrected text.

CHAPTER EIGHT Originally published as “Das Berliner Völkerkunde-Museum: Anläßlich der Neuordnung,” Der Querschnitt 6 (1926): 588–92, reprinted in BA 2, 446–50. 1. On the reorganization of the Berlin State Museums, see Kratz- Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik, 401–33. 2. Zimmerman, “Science and Schaulust,” 74. 3. Anonymous, Die ethnologischen Abteilungen, 16th ed. (Berlin: Georg Reimer Verlag, 1914), 5. 4. Or Schmerzenskind, as Karl Scheffler put it. “Umbau im Völkerkundemuseum,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 92 (February 24, 1925), Unterhaltungsblatt, 13. 5. Viola König, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (Munich: Prestel, 2003), 16. To cite one example, by 1926 the collection of artifacts from the Americas numbered 150,000. Preuss, “Die Neuaufteilung des Museums für Völkerkunde,” 70. His article offers a brief history of the growth of the ethnological collections (68–69). 6. See Generaldirektor Wilhelm von Bode’s remarks about the resistance to using electric light in the museums: Bode, “Probleme des modernen Museums,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 425 (August 28, 1920): 2. 7. See the discussion, with diagram, in Zimmerman, “Science and Schaulust,” 71–74.

365 NOTES TO PAGES 195–200

8. Karl Scheffler, Berliner Museumskrieg (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), 20. 9. Ibid., 21–22. 10. This attitude began to change around 1900, due largely to the younger curators. See Zimmerman, “Science and Schaulust,” 79–80, 82–83. For an excellent discussion of the collecting and display policies of German ethnological museums during the Wilhelmine era, see Penny, Objects of Culture, 163–214. 11. Kratz- Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik, 419–20. 12. Quoted in ibid., 419. 13. This was a project initiated by Bode. A shortage of funds led to the abandonment of that plan. For a report on the reorganization plan for the state museums, see Grosse, “Zur Neuverteilung,” 591–95. 14. P. W. [Paul Westheim], “Zeitlupe,” Das Kunstblatt 10 (1926): 371. 15. Karl Scheffler, “Das umgebaute Museum für Völkerkunde,” Kunst und Künstler 24 (1926): 386. 16. Kratz- Kessemeier, who provides a richly documented discussion of the critical debates surrounding the Museum for Ethnology and the critical response to the reinstallation, makes no mention of Einstein. Kratz- Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik, 414–20. The most extensive discussion of Einstein’s review is in Fleckner, Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 293–307. See also Struck, Eroberung der Phantasie, 165–90. 17. Valéry, “Problem of Museums,” 202–6. Valéry’s essay dates from 1923. 18. Ibid., 203. 19. See Neumeister, “Masks and Shadow Souls,” 135–69. 20. On this matter Einstein echoes concerns voiced by previous authors. See, for example, Grosse, “Zur Neuverteilung,” 591–92; and Preuss (curator of the Central and North American collections), “Die Neuaufteilung des Museums für Völkerkunde,” 69. 21. Yet in the short passage in the present article referring directly to Africa, Einstein alludes to the formalist claims in Negro Sculpture, citing the “passionately cubic character of these severe sculptures.” 22. “Schausammlung und Forschungsinstitut: Noch ein Wort zum neuen Völkerkundemuseum” (Display collection and research institute: a further word on the new Museum for Ethnology), which followed the present article by two issues in Der Querschnitt, reprinted in BA 2, 452. 23. And yet, especially in his companion essay, Einstein himself strongly advocates “scholarly art-historical method.” 24. Paul Thumann (1834– 1908) was a popular German illustrator of literary works; Eduard von Grützner (1846–1925) was best known for his genre paintings of smiling, tippling monks. 25. This statement anticipates a broader, anthropological turn in Einstein’s thinking that will emerge in Georges Braque. There he writes, “The tectonic form is the expression of the house-bound settler. Now one builds, secludes oneself, is less bound by the forms of nature.” BA 3, 346.

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366

CHAPTER NINE Originally published in Documents 1, no. 2 (May 1929): 93–102, as “André Masson: Étude ethnologique,” reprinted in BA 3, 25–30. The Carl- Einstein- Archiv at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin possesses no French manuscripts for Einstein’s Documents contributions. His colleague Michel Leiris recalled Einstein’s “difficult and just about untranslatable language” (“From the Impossible Bataille,” 246). On Leiris’s recollection of his interventions in rendering Einstein’s idiosyncratic texts in “accessible French,” see Meffre, Itinéraires, 237. 1. For a review and assessment of the evidence concerning the founding of the magazine and its profile, see Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 32–43. See also Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 385–90, and his indispensable “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses,” 90–103. For an excellent, detailed discussion of Documents, including a focused consideration of Einstein’s role in it, see Albers, Der diskrete Charme der Anthropologie, 221–308. 2. Hollier, “La valeur d’usage de l’impossible,” vii; English translation, “UseValue of the Impossible,” 4. 3. Leiris, “From the Impossible Bataille,” 241. On Einstein and Leiris, see Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy, 3, 140–48. See also Rumold, Archaeologies of Modernity, 119–38, 165–82. 4. Hollier, “Use- Value of the Impossible,” 4. 5. Bataille, Absence of Myth, 31. 6. In subsequent issues only Bataille, as “secrétaire général,” was named. With Documents 2, no. 5, a long list of collaborators (avec la collaboration de) was introduced and continued over the next two issues, but Einstein’s name was omitted from the list in nos. 5 and 6, although he contributed to the first of these issues. He was listed in no. 7. The list of collaborators did not appear in the eighth, final issue. The mystery surrounding the internal workings of Documents is due primarily to the loss of the magazine’s archives. 7. See Kiefer, “Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses,” 92– 97, in which he introduced previously unknown documentation regarding Einstein’s role in the creation of the magazine. A key document is Einstein’s letter to the art collector G. F. Reber. Eight months before publication of the first number, Einstein summarized in a letter to him an extensive, ambitious program of topics for the first ten issues of the as yet unnamed periodical. He had, he reported, presented this to the journal’s publisher, the art dealer Georges Wildenstein. “The Wildensteins were very taken with our summaries. They accepted them without reservations. I hope the magazine will be more or less as we conceived it.” Shortly before its first issue, Einstein referred to it in a letter to his friend Ewald Wasmuth as “my magazine.” Ibid., 92. 8. For the first three issues the magazine bore the subtitle Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie. Beginning with the fourth issue Doctrines was dropped, and Variétés was added as a fourth term and with it was launched a new, subversive direction for the magazine, one well beyond the concept

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

367 NOTES TO PAGES 204–205

9.

Einstein had presented to Reber. On this see Albers, Der diskrete Charme der Anthropologie, 227. See especially the article by the recently installed director of the Musée Trocadéro, Paul Rivet, “L’Étude des civilisations matérielles: Ethnographie, archéologie, préhistoire,” Documents 1, no. 3 ( June 1929): 130–34. See also Georges Henri Rivière, “La Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro,” Documents 1, no. 1 (April 1929): 54–58; and André Schaeffner, “Des instruments de musique dans un musée d’ethnographie,” Documents 1, no. 5 (October 1929): 248– 54. Hollier argues that the journal was based on an anti-aesthetic platform (“UseValue of the Impossible,” 5). The list of collaborateurs was included in issues 2– 5 during the first year of publication. Joyce has reproduced letters that Einstein sent to Saxl, Hamann, and the Islamic curator Friedrich Sarre, inviting them to submit articles to Documents. Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 230–45. On Einstein and the Warburg circle, see Papapetros, “Einstein and Saxl Correspond,” 77–96. Leiris, “From the Impossible Bataille,” 241 (my emphasis, modified translation). See also Surya, Georges Bataille, 116– 25. Although Leiris here retrospectively portrays Einstein as a relative conservative on the Documents editorial team, his diaries from those years suggest that his thinking was significantly influenced by Einstein. On this see Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy, 140–48. The precise number of Einstein’s contributions to the magazine is disputed. Twenty- three articles or short notices are signed; as many as fifteen anonymous pieces have been attributed to him. On this issue see Côté (“Discours ethnologique et dissidence,” 55–58, 271–72), who also summarizes the views of other scholars. Documents 1:6, 289–302. See Leiris’s account of the growing radicalism of Bataille’s articles in the early issues, “From the Impossible Bataille,” 242–44. See also Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 76–80. Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 354–58n405, makes the case for evidence of Bataille’s “hatred.” Albers suggests that at this time Einstein began, certainly unwillingly, to function as a conservative foil to the radically transgressive material associated with Bataille. Albers, Der diskrete Charme der Anthropologie, 227. Einstein doesn’t explicitly identify Masson with surrealism, and by this time the artist had split with Breton and his circle. On Einstein’s essay on Masson, see Clark V. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 66–71 et passim; Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 222; and Albers, Der diskrete Charme der Anthropologie, 245–47. Einstein to Kahnweiler, April 26, 1926, EKC, 157. Einstein to Kahnweiler, late May or early June 1927, EKC, 161. Kiefer, “Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses,” 92. He traces the beginnings of this ethnological turn to African Sculpture. In the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century, Einstein had generally identified ecstatic states with artists he found formally weak. Of Marc and Kan-

NOTES TO PAGES 205–211

368 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

dinsky, for example, he wrote, “[E]cstatic vacuity conceals crude, feeble form” (K1, 132). Einstein, “Methodological Aphorisms,” 147. In the French article in Documents, what I am here translating as “psychic processes” is processus psychologiques (BA 3, 13), which in 2004 I translated literally. But following a comment by Joyce Cheng on an earlier draft and my own review of Einstein’s writings from this period, I have concluded that “psychological” must have been an imprecise rendering of seelisch, pertaining to the soul or the psyche, a term that appears often in Einstein’s writings of this period, most notably in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century, including thirty-three times in the surrealism chapter alone. The formulation “psychologische Prozesse,” on the other hand, is extremely rare in his work. Accordingly, throughout the Masson text I have translated the adjective psychologique in the original Documents article as “psychic.” It is important to recognize a distinction in Einstein’s writing between the psychic (seelisch or psychisch— he uses both terms) and the psychological (psychologisch). Two years later, in the surrealism chapter of The Art of the 20th Century, he will define psychology as “the exploration of psychic functions” (see below, text 11). He generally has nothing good to say about what he regarded as psychologically motivated art, which he mostly identified with the attempt to render conscious states of feeling. See, for example, his remarks on Kandinsky, Kokoschka, and Grosz, K1, 136, 144, 146, 149. As an example see his remarks on Kokoschka, K1, 146. See my introduction to text 12. On the question of the influence of Freud and Jung on Einstein during these years, see my introduction to text 10. To be sure, the notion of art as inspired by hallucination was briefly broached in the first edition, in Einstein’s discussions of Maurice Utrillo and Paul Klee, but as an idiosyncratic feature (K1, 54, 55, 140). For more on the importance of hallucination to Einstein’s later art theory, see my introduction to text 10, and Quigley, Carl Einstein, 166–87. In a fragment from his incomplete novel project, “Bebuquin II,” Einstein defined hallucination this way: “By hallucination I understand a compulsive staring that includes an annihilation of the stable sphere of the ego and its reality along with it.” CEA 33, p. 1. On this passage, see Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy, 142– 44; and Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 222. “Au lieu de parier leur tête, les écrivains croyaient à la langue.” Here Einstein is playing on the double meaning of langue, namely “tongue” and “language.” “Écriture spontanée” in the French text. These paragraphs on totemic identification suggest his reading of Lucien LévyBruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910). It’s a phenomenon that Lévy- Bruhl calls “mystic participation” (participation mystique). See his How Natives Think (the English translation of Les fonctions mentales), 97–104. It is also possible that Einstein’s reception of this idea may

CHAPTER TEN From the chapter “Der Kubismus,” in K3, 110–35. 1. See Rubin’s still useful discussion of the subject in his Dada and Surrealist Art, 279– 309. Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, who like Rubin knew the artist personally, writes that “Picasso had no time for automatism; he held it against the surrealists and never incorporated it into his work. The nearest he came to it was accidents that occurred in the course of the work.” Richardson, Picasso . . . 1917–1932, 243. 2. Breton, Manifestoes, 27n. 3. First published as “La surréalisme et la peinture,” in La révolution surréaliste, no. 4 ( July 15, 1925), 26–30, 29–30. English translation in Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 9. Nico Rost, a friend of Einstein, recalled years later that he saw copies of La révolution surréaliste in Einstein’s apartment (Penkert, Beiträge, 95). 4. Breton’s article was illustrated by the prewar cubist Head of a Man with a Mustache (Daix/Rosselet 759) and the postwar cubistic paintings Schoolgirl (1920) and Harlequin Musician (1924). This association of the cubist Picasso with surrealism was a striking feature of the early issues of the magazine. In the first issue of La révolution surréaliste, Picasso’s cubist painted sheet metal Guitar (1924) was illustrated on the first page of Pierre Reverdy’s essay “The Dreamer among the Walls”; in the fourth Les demoiselles d’Avignon was reproduced beneath a dream recounted by Michel Leiris. 5. Zeidler, “Life and Death from Babylon to Picasso,” 27n44. 6. On the Picasso section of the 1931 edition, see Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 185– 206. 7. Einstein, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” Documents 1, no. 2 (April 1929): 35–47, in BA 3, 17–24; “Picasso,” Documents 2, no. 3 (March 1930): 155–57, in BA 3, 118–20. 8. On Einstein’s differences with Freud see Quigley, Carl Einstein, 178–83. 9. Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 16. Einstein wrote to Freud on March 8, 1930, inviting him to contribute a “few lines” to the planned special issue of Documents on Picasso. It is not known whether he received a response. Einstein’s letter is in the Freud Archives in London. I am grateful to Klaus H. Kiefer for this information.

369 NOTES TO PAGES 212–214

have come through his reading of Jung’s Psychological Types, in which the author refers to Lévy- Bruhl’s account of “mystic participation” a dozen times, and concisely summarizes his ideas in terms that appear more closely related to Einstein’s formulations. It “consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. . . . Participation mystique is a vestige of the primitive condition.” Jung, Psychological Types, 436. For more on Einstein and Jung, see my introduction to text 10.

NOTES TO PAGES 214–215

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10. Letter to Ewald Wasmuth, November 10, 1923, published in full in Kiefer, Avantgarde, Weltkrieg, Exil, 60– 61. Einstein gives an extended account of his thinking about psychic processes. This letter probably predates his serious engagement with psychoanalysis. 11. The earliest mention of Freud, and a superficial one at that, occurs in 1926, in the Grosz and Beckmann sections of K1, 149, 154. 12. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 43; Traumdeutung, 34. 13. It is noteworthy that although Breton, in the first surrealist manifesto, pays homage to Freud for revealing the importance of dreams, he makes no mention of hallucination. 14. The source is Karl Albert Scherner’s Das Leben des Traums (The life of the dream; 1861). 15. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 71; Traumdeutung, 59 (emphasis in the original). Freud’s clear distinction between the dream image and the Begriffssprache would most likely have found a sympathetic reader in Einstein, given his critique of the deadening effect of the concept. See above, pp. 8–10, 24–26. 16. Einstein had delivered a similar critique of Freud in an essay on Picasso published in the first issue of Documents (“Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928”): “With him [Picasso] we leave behind the fixed and fatalistic hallucination theorized by Freud, a limited formula in which the unconscious is represented, in a metaphysical manner, as though it were a constant substance.” (BA 3, 18). On Freud and Einstein see Michel, “Zur Bedeutung des Tektonischen,” 267. For the most extensive treatment of Einstein and Freud, see Zeidler, “Defense of the Real,” 271–78 et passim; see also Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 160–61. 17. Zeidler (Form as Revolt, 217–21) has some helpful pages on Einstein’s understanding of myth in these years. 18. In the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century Einstein reproduced the first example of a minotaur in Picasso’s oeuvre, the huge collage of 1928 (although he makes no mention of it in his text). Picasso did not begin to work in earnest on the minotaur theme until 1933. The etchings for Ovid, published by Skira in 1931, probably appeared too late for Einstein to have known them. 19. What Einstein hailed as individual “revolt” in the quest for creating a “new mythical reality” was for Freud symptomatic of neurosis. For him “neuroses . . . show a striking and far reaching correspondence with the great social productions of art, religion, and philosophy, while again they seem like distortions of them. . . . Neuroses are asocial formations; they seek to accomplish by private means what arose in society through collective labour.” Freud, Totem and Taboo, 122–23. 20. From the section on Klee, K3, 260; see text 12. 21. “Créatures d’une mythologie des formes” was the formulation Einstein used in his first Picasso article in Documents, BA 3, 19. Yet in his contemporaneous review article on the exhibition of African and Oceanic art held at the Pigalle Theater Gallery in 1930, Einstein notably writes of African myths as récits, as stories. BA 3, 99.

371 NOTES TO PAGES 216–219

22. For a trenchant discussion of these works, see T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 147–90. 23. Einstein had introduced the term in the Picasso section of the second edition, K2, 72, 73, 77, 78. 24. Freud, affirming the view of the philosopher G. T. Fechner that the “the arena of dreams [der Schauplatz der Träume] is a different one from that where our ideas are generated in waking life,” refers to dreams as occurring in a “psychical locality.” “No other assumption will enable us to understand the peculiar characteristics of the dream life” (emphasis in the original, modified translation). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 349; Traumdeutung, 314. 25. Michel (“Zur Bedeutung des Tektonischen,” 269) makes the plausible suggestion that Einstein’s coinage of Formschutz, protection from hallucinations by means of tectonic form, may have been inspired by Freud’s coinage of Reizschutz from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by which he was referring to the psyche’s protective shield against powerful stimuli. See Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 24–29; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 21–22. 26. This function of the tectonic was already suggested in Einstein’s section on Léger in the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century, that his highly tectonic, machine-inspired art was “a fortress against death.” See text 7. 27. Einstein, “Notes on Cubism,” 165. 28. Jung, “Structure of the Psyche,” 151, 152. It was originally part of a longer essay, “Die Erdbedingtheit der Psyche,” published in Hermann Graf von Keyserling’s anthology, Mensch und Erde (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1927), 83–137. Jung revised and republished it as a separate essay in two parts under the title “Die Struktur der Seele,” in Europäische Revue 4, nos. 1 and 2 (1928): 27– 37, 125–35. Strother (“Einstein’s Negerplastik,” 19) writes that “[b]y 1930, Einstein was influenced by a Jungian critique of Freud to argue that the unconscious should be considered a creative, progressive force.” Oehm had briefly suggested the possible influence of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious on Einstein: Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins, 49, 168. More recently, two other scholars have made this connection: Berning, in Einstein und das neue Sehen, 131–40; and Stavrinaki, in Contraindre à la liberté, 176. 29. Einstein referred to Jung in an article published in Documents in April of the previous year: “Léger: Œuvres récentes,” BA 3, 125. In that piece his reference to the “introverted” and “extroverted” type makes it virtually certain that he had been reading Jung’s Psychologische Typen. In the first sentence Einstein writes, “One formerly distinguished between the psychics and the hyliques, as today one distinguishes the introverted type and the extraverted type (see C. G. Jung).” Most of the Jungian ideas present in Einstein can be found in this 700page book. 30. Jung, Psychologische Typen, 596–603; Psychological Types, 442–47. 31. Jung, Psychological Types, 442–47. 32. Richardson (Picasso . . . 1917–1932, 349– 50) gives a summary of Picasso’s various dismissive comments on automatism during these years.

NOTES TO PAGES 220–228

372

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

Ibid., 349. Leiris, “Toiles récentes de Picasso,” 62, 64. All italics in the original. Einstein, “Picasso: Quelques tableaux,” BA 3, 17, 18. It was an instance of “the myth of myth,” as Stavrinaki writes in her discussion of Einstein and myth. Stavrinaki, Contraindre à la liberté, 170–92. On the critique of Picasso’s simultaneous practice of several styles, especially of cubist and neoclassical styles, after 1914, see Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon, 2002), 9–31. Einstein, “De l’Allemagne,” BA 2, 202. On the German obsession with unified period style, see my article “Problem of Style,” 47–67. For illustrations of the installation, see, for example, Simonetta Fraquelli, “Picasso’s Retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris 1932: A Response to Matisse,” in Picasso: His First Museum Exhibition 1932, ed. Tobia Bezzola (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 77–101. We owe this discovery to Uwe Fleckner, who cites a letter of March 25, 1933, from Einstein to Maja Hoffmann- Stehlin concerning the time that would be required to install the Braque retrospective, for which Einstein served as curator, at the Kunsthalle Basel. Concerned that three days would be insufficient for the task, Einstein wrote, “We needed at least six days for the Picasso exhibition, and that was with highly trained assistants.” Fleckner, “Joy of Hallucination,” 68n44. A further letter from Einstein to Paul Klee, January 5, 1933, has since come to light that confirms that it was indeed the Paris exhibition (see Okuda, “Verwandlung und Neubildung,” 137). To be sure, it would be incautious to attribute the unusual installation of the exhibition entirely to Einstein’s involvement. Christopher Green has noted that it reflected Picasso’s hanging of works in his living spaces. He “insistently broke up all sense of chronology on every wall of the gallery. . . . For the principle of continuity and cohesion was substituted a principle of discontinuity and contradiction. Picasso showed his work not as the links in an unbroken chain of relationships (a development), but as a succession of unpredictable shocks created by confrontations of very different works from very different moments in his thirty and more years of activity.” Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 7– 8. Picasso’s conception of his work, however, fully coincides with Einstein’s in his text on Picasso. Einstein, “Anmerkung,” originally published in Cahiers d’art, nos. 3/4 (1932), in BA 3, 220. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 270. Baßler, writing on prewar texts by Einstein, has aptly characterized them as “a cluster of apodictic facets” in place of discursive argumentation. Baßler, Entdeckung der Textur, 162. Einstein, “Methodological Aphorisms,” 147 (modified translation). The reference is to Nietzsche’s famous distinction in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The birth of tragedy) between the Apollonian, identified with sculpture and the dream, and the Dionysian, identified with music, intoxication, and possession. These he described as “getrennten Kunstwelten,” separate artistic worlds (Sämtliche Werke, 1:25–27). For Nietzsche it was the latter state in which the

CHAPTER ELEVEN From the chapter “Die romantische Generation,” in K3, 156–69. 1. With the exception of the index to K3, 801, which, under the term “Surrealismus,” gives the pages for the chapter “Die romantische Generation.” Whether the index was the work of Einstein or someone at Propyläen- Verlag is unknown. I thank Klaus H. Kiefer for bringing this to my attention. For the most thorough discussion of Einstein and surrealism, see Kiefer’s articles “Einsteins ‘Surrealismus,’” 49–83, and “Einstein et le surréalisme.” 2. Einstein mentioned surrealism by name in only one other publication, Georges Braque, where he dismissively associates the word surreal with “failed idealism” (GB, 324). On Einstein and surrealism and his use and nonuse of the word, see Kiefer, “Einsteins ‘Surrealismus,’” 73n93. See Einstein’s comment in a fragment from “Bebuquin II”: “The SURR[ealists] who always concern themselves with themselves, with their occult life. Romantics therefore, since one had time for the analysis of mysteries.” CEA 40, slip 2. 3. Einstein sent Breton a copy of the second edition of Negro Sculpture, with the dedication “À André Breton— confrère courageux et qui conduit bien loin ses amis.” http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100586090. On Breton and Einstein, see Kiefer, “Einstein et le surréalisme,” 56n36. 4. The most likely reason for Roux’s being mentioned at all is that he had made five lithographs illustrating Einstein’s poem Entwurf einer Landschaft (Paris: Éditions de la Galerie Simon, 1930). 5. Not because Einstein was unaware of Dalí at this time—he had harsh things to say about him in his review in Documents of the collage exhibition at the Galerie Goemans (BA 3, 140).

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“subject vanishes into complete self-forgetting” (1:29). Einstein, on the other hand, tends to use “dream” synonymously with “hallucination”; both are states of self-loss. Yet in his theory the tectonic and hallucinatory do roughly correspond, respectively, to Apollonian and Dionysian, and for him and Nietzsche these two psychic states are ultimately reconciled in the artwork. Both look back to archaic cultures as a model for a restoration of myth, which in his time Nietzsche initially found in the operas of Richard Wagner (ibid., 135–36). 46. Here Einstein is mistaken: the first papiers collés date from the autumn of 1912. 47. See text 7, note 44. 48. Einstein does not refer to any specific illustrations here, and none of the paintings he reproduces is captioned “Studio” (Atelier). In his Documents article on Picasso’s paintings of 1928 (see note 7 above), one of the illustrations was captioned “Atelier,” but that work is not reproduced here. The Painter and His Model (fig. 10.2) was reproduced in the special Picasso issue of Documents in March 1930 as Atelier du peintre, but here in The Art of the 20th Century Einstein titled it Komposition. “Studio II,” the only other illustrated Picasso of a studio situation, is presumably Painter and Model (fig. 10.3).

NOTES TO PAGES 248–261

374

6. Arp was, however, the subject of an article Einstein published in Documents in 1930: “L’enfance néolithique” (Neolithic childhood), BA 4, 170–74. 7. Einstein wasn’t the first German critic to view surrealism as a romantic tendency. See, for example, Paul Westheim, “Paris im Frühjahr 1925: Romantik, Expressionismus, Surrealismus,” Das Kunstblatt 9, no. 5 (1925): 200–203; and Hans Heilmaier, who characterized it as “a new romanticism” in his article “Surrealismus,” Das Kunstblatt 12, no. 4 (1928): 111. 8. See Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930),” in Manifestoes, 180– 86, for his attack on Bataille and other dissidents. Bataille’s contribution to Un cadavre was “The Castrated Lion” (Absence of Myth, 28–29). For an excellent account of the incident, see Surya, Georges Bataille, 126– 39. Surya has colorfully described Documents as “the abscess burst each month from surrealism: what the latter had not dared be, what its violence would have been if it had not been prevented, in extremis,” by Breton. Yet, he adds, “[i]t is . . . remarkable that in the fifteen issues of Documents he [Bataille] did not once cite the name of André Breton” (121–22). 9. Bataille, Absence of Myth, 28. See also his “Notes on the Publication of ‘Un Cadavre,’” ibid., 30–33. 10. It seems that Masson never felt comfortable being identified with the movement. In May 1928, when Kahnweiler wrote to inform him that Christian Zervos, editor of Cahiers d’art, was interested in doing an article on him, Masson wrote back responding that if he did so, there must be “not a word about surrealism. . . . I belong to no school, as you know very well.” Masson, Les années surréalistes, 141. 11. See Palermo, Fixed Ecstasy, 189–90n1. 12. Einstein to Kahnweiler, April 26, 1926, EKC, 157. 13. Breton, Manifestoes, 26. 14. Einstein applies the term “romantic” to Klee but, in the long cubism chapter in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century, not to Braque or Picasso. Yet in a lecture he delivered in Berlin in February 1931 he cited Picasso three times as representative of this romantic turn. See “Probleme heutiger Malerei,” in Einstein, Werke, 1929–1940, ed. Marion Schmid and Liliane Meffre, 578, 579. Further, in Georges Braque he several times designates the artist’s later work as “romantic.” This suggests that Einstein wrote the surrealism chapter and the Klee text after the revised Picasso text. 15. Breton, “Automatic Message,” 105. 16. Einstein, “Joan Miró (Papiers collés à la galerie Pierre),” published in Documents 2, no. 4 (1930), in BA 3, 134–35; on Arp, “L’enfance néolithique,” in Documents 2, no. 8 (1930), in BA 3, 170–74. 17. Presumably Einstein has in mind Kunstwollen, a critical concept in the writings of Alois Riegl, beginning with his Stilfragen of 1893. 18. Here, as in his earlier Masson essay, Einstein is focusing on a practice in contemporary European art that according to the anthropologist Lucien LévyBruhl defined the “primitive mentality.” He called it “the law of participation,” a mystical totemic identification by humans with an object or a creature

CHAPTER TWELVE From the chapter “Der Blaue Reiter,” in K3, 241– 44, 259–69. Parts of the current text were first published in my article “Die erheblichste Persönlichkeit unter den deutschen Künstlern.” 1. Although Einstein here writes dismissively of the Bauhaus, he did include other Bauhaus masters in his book. Lyonel Feininger, who was active at the Bauhaus throughout its fourteen-year existence, is briefly treated in the chapter on the Germans, without any reference to the Bauhaus. Two other artists who previously taught there, László Moholy- Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, are included in the plate section but not in the text. It should be noted that Einstein had sought a position at this “craft school” in 1923, hoping to free himself from financial dependence on freelance publishing. He had proposed offering seminars and lectures to small groups of students. The Bauhaus Meisterrat (council of masters) met on May 26, 1923, and decided for the time being to offer him only an invitation to lecture at the time of the large Bauhaus exhibition. On this see Volker Wahl, ed., Die Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar: 1919 bis 1925 (Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), 305–6. On this episode see also Defoort, Een Dochter van Duitsland, 118–20. 2. Einstein had singled out the group’s emphasis on the “process of inner seeing” in the book’s first edition. Now, after the “turn to romanticism,” this assumed greater historical significance. See K1, 128. 3. See Einstein’s “De l’Allemagne,” BA 2, 202, published in the French journal Action in 1921. 4. On Einstein’s collaboration with Grosz, see my “Bloody Serious,” 105. 5. For an English translation of Einstein’s Kirchner text from the 1926 edition, see Smith, Expressionist Turn, 305–8. On this text, see also my article “Einstein and Expressionism,” in ibid., 273–303. 6. Einstein was notably gentler with German sculptors, but the medium received short shrift in his book. He covers the whole of modern European sculpture in a single short chapter, no more than twelve pages in the first edition. K1, 163–74. 7. On Einstein’s writing on Klee, see Christine Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall

375 NOTES TO PAGES 261–267

of another species. “They can,” for example, “be both the human beings they are and the birds of scarlet plumage at the same time.” Lévy- Bruhl, How Natives Think, 76– 77. In effect, Einstein’s claim of a “primitivization” of Europe is negating an essentializing distinction Lévy- Bruhl made between “primitive” and “civilized” peoples. 19. Figure 11.1, Battle of the Fishes, wasn’t reproduced in The Art of the 20th Century, but Einstein must have had that work in mind with this reference. He had listed it in an appendix to his 1929 article in Documents (text 9) among “some important paintings by Masson.” It is number 28 on the list. Documents 1, no. 2 (May 1929): 104.

NOTES TO PAGES 268–269

376

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland, 1905–1960 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1989), 82–86; Dahm, Blick des Hermaphroditen, 139–50; and, especially, Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 207–51. Already in the first edition Einstein had compared Kandinsky unfavorably with Klee (K1, 141, 142). On the occasion of Kandinsky’s sixtieth birthday in that same year, he penned a negative assessment of his art for Das Kunstblatt (BA 2, 454– 55). For an English translation see Smith, Expressionist Turn, 309–10. Draft of a letter from Klee to Einstein, undated, in Kain et al., Klee in Jena, 280. It is not known whether Klee sent the letter. See Dieter Scholz, “‘Berlin kann alles’: Paul Klee, Berlin und die Nationalgalerie,” in Das Universum Klee, ed. Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson, exhibition catalog (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008), 55–57. No catalog was published. In 1929, in a letter to Klee, Einstein referred to the exhibition and his unfulfilled plan to have Propyläen- Verlag photograph a “mass of Klees,” presumably for The Art of the 20th Century. Not one of the works exhibited made it into the book. Kain et al., Klee in Jena, 268. It is dated Weimar, April 9, 1923. For the full text see Okuda, “Nach der Einteilung,” 350. Einstein to Tony Simon- Wolfskehl, February 22, 1923, CEA 387, p. 4, and an undated letter, CEA 383, p. 1. Einstein to Klee, undated (1924), October 20, 1924, and December 1, 1924, in Kain et al., Klee in Jena, 218, 224. The latter two letters were on stationery from the publisher Die Schmiede. It isn’t clear whether this is the same book Einstein claimed to have “started” in February 1923. Earlier, in “De l’Allemagne,” Einstein had written that rarely had an expressionist painter ever shown any grasp of “an important spatial problem.” BA 2, 202. Here I differ with Zeidler, who detects reservations in both of Einstein’s texts on Klee (Form as Revolt, 243–51). For example, with reference to Klee’s German contemporaries (K1, 112, 117–18). See Breton, Manifestoes, 11–14. Propyläen- Verlag acknowledged the receipt of “the last manuscript pages” of Einstein’s text on March 28, 1925 (K3, 825). It’s possible that Einstein may have encountered surrealist ideas earlier, for example, in the pages of Littérature. In an article of November 1922 Breton identified surrealism with “a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the state of the dream.” Breton, “Entrée des médiums,” 1–2. Breton, Manifestoes, 27n. In a catalog preface for a 1928 solo exhibition, Klee’s dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, went further, claiming him to be “der eigentliche Schöpfer des Surrealismus” (the true creator of surrealism). Flechtheim, Paul Klee, exhibition catalog (Berlin: Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, 1928), 4. On Klee’s reception among those in the surrealist circle, see Okuda, “Chronologie,” 40– 65, and the extensive collection of reviews and correspondence in

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

377 NOTES TO PAGES 269–271

19. 20. 21.

Wittwer, Klee et les surréalistes. See also Baumgartner, “Klee und die Surrealisten,” 37n31, who also gives a detailed survey of the scholarship on the topic. Breton, Manifestoes, 26. Ibid. Another commonality between Breton and Einstein’s first Klee essay is the valorization of the imaginative world of the child and the fairy tale. Breton writes, “At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales. No matter how charming they may be, a grown man would think he were reverting to childhood by nourishing himself on fairy tales. . . . But the faculties do not change radically. . . . There are fairy tales to be written for adults” (Manifestoes, 15–16). Einstein writes that “[t]he intelligent technique of a refined, highly conscious child matches Klee’s fairy-tale world” (K1, 143). As Kiefer has remarked, in Einstein’s early writings and correspondence the term “romanticism” (Romantik) appears only occasionally, and then “usually pejoratively or at least ambivalently” (Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 367). The latter is evident in an undated letter from 1923 to Tony Simon- Wolfskehl, in which he characterized Klee as a “fairytale boy” (Märchenknabe) whom he rated superior to Kandinsky, although both were “romantics with a checkered flower and with a strong flair for fashion, or at least for the agreeable” (CEA 399, p. 1). After Einstein’s inscription in Klee’s copy of Negerplastik, such sentiments come as a shock. But a few sentences earlier Einstein reports that he will not be going “to the transcendentals in Weimar. Wherever metaphysics begins I feel sick.” This indicates that he wrote the letter after his proposal for a regular teaching appointment at the Bauhaus was turned down. It was probably sour grapes, a rationalization, since at the time Einstein was still planning two books on Klee, a project he continued to pursue into 1924. Diaries of Paul Klee, no. 951, p. 313 (1915). Einstein was hardly the first to designate Klee a “romantic,” or to claim that art and intellectual life were taking a “romantic turn.” See, for example, Waldemar Jollos, “Paul Klee,” Das Kunstblatt 3, no. 8 (1919): 228. His take on Klee’s romanticism isn’t so far from Einstein’s: “The spiritual world picture from which Klee is driven to create is that of today’s romanticism, which is not content with the harmless fairy tales of the old romanticism; it wants to overcome the rationalism of the preceding epochs, but it cannot deny having passed through it.” With reference to Masson, Picasso, and the “romantic generation.” See above, text 11. In a sole reference, Einstein directs the reader to all twenty-five illustrations by number— twenty-three black-and-white figures and two color plates. Here again is an example of the phenomenon Lévy- Bruhl saw as a defining characteristic of primitive cultures, namely participation mystique. See text 9, note 29. Strikingly, the word does not appear in either the Picasso section or the surrealism chapter, but will become pervasive in Georges Braque. On metamorphosis in Einstein’s theory, see Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 411–22.

NOTES TO PAGES 272–282

378

28. For his theoretical essays published during his lifetime, see Klee, Schriften zur Kunst, 118– 22, 124– 26, 130– 32. The collected notes from Klee’s Bauhaus teaching are available digitally: Klee, Bildnerische Form- und Gestaltungslehre, http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org /ee/ZPK/Archiv/2011/01/25 /00001/. 29. Klee, On Modern Art, 47. Einstein, in his chapter on the “romantic generation” (text 11) writes that “one no longer accepts the world as something finished but as thoroughly provisional.” Klee’s text, a lecture he presented at Kunstverein in Jena on January 26, 1924, was not published until 1945. 30. Ibid., 51 (modified translation). 31. But it appears he did use the term later, if his pupil Petra Petitpierre’s account is accurate. See below, note 34. 32. In The Fabrication of Fictions (text 14) Einstein writes that “the activation of psychic automatism . . . defines modern art.” 33. Klee, Tagebücher, no. 842, p. 282. With one modification I have cited the translation in Klee, Notebooks I, 451. It should be noted that as it has come down to us, this entry does not date from 1908— it is from a redacted version of the diary dating from 1918 to 1920, in any case before the emergence of surrealism. On the dating see the afterword by Kersten in Tagebücher, 589–90. See also Baumgartner, “Klee und die Surrealisten,” 12. 34. On this point see Baumgartner, “Klee und die Surrealisten,” 12–15. Osamu Okuda has complicated this issue with his attentive reading of Petra Petitpierre’s published notes on Klee’s teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he was on the faculty at the time that Einstein’s third edition appeared. Here we encounter Einstein’s vocabulary, terms that do not appear previously in Klee’s writings—mediales Niederschreiben, Bildtotalität, halluzinatorisch, metamorphotisch, Tektonik. Most of these appear in a single section of her book with Einstein’s phrase “Verwandlung und Neubildung,” transformation and re-formation, as its heading (Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee, 36). Petitpierre’s original notes have not survived— the typescript for what was to become her book dates from 1940. This raises the question: did Klee actually use these terms, or was Petitpierre’s account of Klee’s teaching embellished by a reading of Einstein’s book? It is noteworthy that when a student asks Klee the meaning of “psychogram,” his understanding of the word, as conveyed by Petitpierre, is not fully consistent with Einstein’s use of it (ibid., 55–56). See Okuda, “Verwandlung und Neubildung,” 137–49. 35. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Kairuan, oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), 114–15. 36. On Klee’s stylistic pluralism see my “Problem of Style,” 47–67. 37. Kain et al., Klee in Jena, 69: Klee, On Modern Art, 55. 38. Klee, Schriften zur Kunst, 122. 39. Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee, 10. 40. Kandinsky actually turned sixty-five in 1931. 41. Here is one of those instances when Einstein, confusingly it seems, uses Gestalten to refer to the world of stable, conventional visual signs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1. When the Persian Guévrékian moved from Paris back to Tehran in 1948, she left the major part of Einstein’s Paris estate with Braque. See Penkert, Beiträge, 18– 19. On Einstein’s friendship with Braque see Alex Danchev, Georges Braque: A Life (New York: Arcade, 2005), 167–71; and Fleckner, “Joy of Hallucination,” 55–56. 2. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–13. 3. Although only two chapters of Georges Braque are presented in this selection, because of the book’s importance in Einstein’s corpus I am here considering it as whole. For detailed studies of the book, see Franke- Gremmelspacher, “Notwendigkeit der Kunst,” 23–84; and Plate, Carl Einsteins Entwurf der Moderne, 179–282. See also Creighton, “Paralysis of ‘Flight or Fight,’” 273– 91; Cheng, “Georges Braque,” 144–61; Fleckner, “Joy of Hallucination,” 52– 73; and Stavrinaki, “Les Braques de Carl Einstein,” 160–69. 4. Einstein to Kahnweiler, undated, December 1922, and June 1923, EKC, 130, 132, 138, 147–48. 5. Einstein, “Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers,” published in Das Kunstblatt (February 1923), in BA 2, 334–41. 6. This is the argument made by Stavrinaki in “Les Braques de Carl Einstein,” 161–62. 7. In a letter to Moïse Kisling from late November/early December 1923, Einstein had confided, “I see the limits of Braque; but all the same, he is a beautiful and strong personality.” LEK, 118. 8. Einstein to E. Wasmuth, undated, EWP, letter 16. My dating to the summer of 1932 is based on a passage that occurs later in the letter: “cursing and moaning I will keep working through to the middle of August,” which suggests that the letter dates from either July or early August. Einstein had apparently finished the book by September, when he reported on September 24, 1932, to Wasmuth that he was working on his novel (EWP, letter 17). Regarding

NOTES TO PAGES 288–290

Georges Braque, trans. M. E. Zipruth (Paris: Éditions des Chroniques du Jour, 1934); original German text (herein cited as GB) in BA 3, 251– 516. As there is no other translation or publication known to be connected to the name “M. E. Zipruth,” the identity of the translator of Einstein’s book remains a mystery. In an email to me from February 2017, David Quigley made the plausible suggestion that the surname of the translator has been misspelled, that the translator of Georges Braque is identical with a certain Edouard Ciprut. This Edouard Ciprut translated into French a book by the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski, Schulverbesserung an dem Verfahren der Forschung über bildende Kunst erörtert: Beiträge zur vergleichenden Kunstforschung (1928), published in 1932 by Gallimard. If this is indeed the translator of Georges Braque, it appears that Einstein himself may have Germanized the spelling of “Ciprut” into “Zipruth,” and that the “M.” was an abbreviation of “monsieur.”

379

NOTES TO PAGES 290–291

380

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

Einstein’s reference to his disgust with the commercialized art world, he could fairly be said to have been an active participant in this “revoltingly mercantile” “genius business.” In 1930 and 1931 he contributed sixteen articles to Die Kunstauktion and its rechristened continuation, Die Weltkunst. Its publisher and editor, Walter Bondy, described the magazine as being “for the collector and dealer what the list of stock prices is for the investor and the banker.” Angelika Enderlein, Der Berliner Kunsthandel in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 8. These were the only articles Einstein published in German-language art publications after 1928. Einstein to Wasmuth, EWP, letter 14. The letter, written on a typewriter from Paris, is dated “28.XV[sic].31”— obviously Einstein absentmindedly entered in the number of his arrondissement rather than the month. But earlier in the letter he makes a reference to the “failure of the Laval trip,” most likely referring to French prime minister Pierre Laval’s visit to the United States from October 22 to 26, in which he came back empty-handed from negotiations on various issues with President Herbert Hoover. Given the reference elsewhere in the letter to snow, the letter probably dates from November or later. The German manuscript, previously available only in editions of Einstein’s collected works, was published by Diaphanes Verlag in 2013 under the title Über Georges Braque und den Kubismus and retains the original seven-chapter structure. According to Maren Horn of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, it is virtually certain that this title, which appears nowhere in the manuscript, did not originate with Einstein but most likely with an archivist. Email communication to the author, February 6, 2018. GB, 352, 392, 400. Einstein seems to have essentially completed work on the book by the end of the summer, yet the first plates of Braque’s Theogony cycle were not printed until October of that year. The incised plasters based on those etchings are the only works after 1931 that are reproduced in Georges Braque. On Braque’s etchings for Hesiod and Einstein’s possible influence on them, see Bowness, “Braque’s Etchings for Hesiod’s ‘Theogony,’” 204–14. See also Stavrinaki, “Les Braques de Carl Einstein,” 165–66. Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, undated (probably spring 1929), EWP, letter 9. The dating of the letter to spring 1929 is based on Einstein’s reference to the imminent appearance (“on the 15th”) of “my magazine,” namely Documents. The first issue appeared in April 1929. Einstein had announced his plan to publish his “Aesthetik” as early as 1923, in a letter to Tony Simon- Wolfskehl from February 22 of that year (CEA 387, p. 1). Einstein to Sophia “Soki” Kindsthaler, EWP, letter 11. My dating of the letter is based on Einstein’s reference to the publication— or imminent publication— of his poem “Entwurf einer Landschaft” (Sketch of a landscape), which appeared in English translation in the June 1930 issue of the magazine Transition and was published in a limited edition in the original German by Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon on July 5, 1930. Einstein to Wasmuth, March 11, 1931, EWP, letter 12. Einstein to Wasmuth, EWP, letter 14.

381 NOTES TO PAGES 291–294

16. Here Einstein, untranslatably, affects a pronunciation of Kunstbuch in the dialect of Baden, where he grew up. I am grateful to Klaus H. Kiefer who, like Einstein, grew up in Karlsruhe, for this information. 17. Einstein to Wasmuth, February 15, 1932, EWP, letter 15. 18. Einstein to Wasmuth, summer 1932, EWP, letter 16. 19. Joyce (Einstein in “Documents,” 199) writes that “[m]uch of it [Georges Braque] was probably written to appear as an aesthetics, then turned into a book on Braque.” Kiefer, on the other hand, observes that “Georges Braque— as is evident not only from the title— isn’t completely identical with Einstein’s ‘Aesthetics,’ but perhaps in its final version took on a different— precisely monographic— direction” (Diskurswandel, 490– 91). FrankeGremmelspacher plausibly surmises that the publisher may have concluded that Einstein’s book would have more market success if offered as a Braque monograph than as the originally planned Réflexions, “which would have suited its contents much better,” and that this motivated them to change the title. Franke- Gremmelspacher, “Notwendigkeit der Kunst,” 25–26. See also Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins, 232n25. 20. Riegl’s major writings had been reprinted in new editions over the previous decade: Stilfragen (1923); Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1927); Gesammelte Aufsätze (1929); and Das holländische Gruppenporträt (1931). In chapters 6 and 7, without mentioning Riegl by name, Einstein explicitly critiques the notion of Kunstwollen. GB, 328, 383. 21. See Nietzsche, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, in Sämtliche Werke, 1: 293–94: “Nur aus der höchsten Kraft der Gegenwart dürft ihr das Vergangene deuten” (emphasis in the original). See also Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 90. “The final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective. . . . Through this historical sense, knowledge is allowed to create its own genealogy in the act of cognition; and wirkliche Historie composes a genealogy of history as the vertical projection of its position.” 22. Zeidler, Form as Revolt, 155–56. 23. Ibid., 155. 24. On Einstein’s involvement in the exhibition, see introduction to text 10. The most plausible explanation for Picasso’s demotion in Georges Braque to the status of the unnamed cubist is that in the summer of 1932, as Einstein was bringing the text to completion, Braque’s relations with Picasso became acutely strained. The Zurich Kunsthaus had planned a joint exhibition of Braque, Léger, and Picasso for that October. But following the Georges Petit exhibition Picasso insisted that he be represented on the same scale in Zurich, which, because of limitations of space (and presumably finances) meant that the three- man exhibition had to be canceled in favor of a solo Picasso retrospective (on this see Christian Geelhaar, “Picasso: The First Zurich Exhibition,” in Picasso: His First Museum Exhibition 1932, ed. Tobia Bezzola [Munich: Prestel, 2010], 27–33). As a compromise the director of the Kunsthaus offered Braque and Léger a joint exhibition for the following spring.

NOTES TO PAGES 294–309

382

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Léger agreed; Braque instead accepted an invitation for a solo exhibition, his first retrospective, at the Kunsthalle Basel. By December 1932 Braque had invited Einstein to curate the exhibition, which at just under two hundred works was nearly as large as Picasso’s had been. The surviving correspondence suggests that Einstein committed himself to the task with great dedication. This may seem odd given what he wrote to Wasmuth about his deep disgust with the art world— we will probably never know what went through his mind as he took this on. Certainly his personal friendship with Braque must have been a factor. Einstein writes of Braque’s development after the war that “the problem of the mythic gestalt, recorded with graphic immediacy, comes to the fore in the cubist works. The hallucinatory now becomes the primary element of vision.” GB, 363–64. This “mythological” turn in Braque’s work may have been influenced by Einstein himself— in statements and interviews of the 1930s the artist began to speak somewhat in Einstein’s language. On this see Bowness, “Braque’s Etchings for Hesiod’s ‘Theogony,’” 212–13. Einstein, “Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers,” BA 2, 334–41. “Schultze” or, more often, “Schulze” appears in numerous Einstein texts as the archetypal parvenu. See his “Schulze,” and “Café Schulze,” first published in Der blutige Ernst in 1919, BA 2, 48–53. In the French edition Einstein added, “une monstrosité.” An obvious interpolation and non sequitur! Clearly Einstein has begun to take a more critical view of totality, now identifying it with a bankrupt aestheticism. Compare text 2. As is evident in The Fabrication of Fictions, within a year of the publication of Georges Braque Einstein had bitterly concluded that his assessment of the “current mentality” was a delusion.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973). 1. The manuscript, housed in the Carl- Einstein- Archiv at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, exists in two versions, an original typescript numbering 480 pages (CEA 131–42), and a carbon copy of that typescript that Einstein extensively edited, with numerous and often extensive corrections and interpolations by hand. The Penkert edition is based on this second version, and she normally identifies Einstein’s handwritten addenda with brackets, which I have omitted in the present selection. On the manuscripts see Penkert’s afterword, “Explikation— Edition— Interpretation,” in FF, 329–43. 2. CEA 4– 53, CEA 219– 48, and CEA 298– 99, respectively. Selections from the notes for “Traité de la vision” and “Handbuch der Kunst” have been published in BA 4, 236–66, 301–447. The extensive notes and fragments for

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

383 NOTES TO PAGES 310–312

3.

“Bebuquin II” remain unpublished. On “Bebuquin II,” on which Einstein began working as early as 1922, see Kröger, Individuum als Fossil. In the order of quotation, Penkert in FF, 334; Fore, Realism after Modernism, 188; Joyce, Einstein in “Documents,” 367n437; Sello, afterword to FF, 345. Creighton, “Vergeblich— Unentbehrlich,” 129. However, as I relate in the introduction to text 13, the utopia of Georges Braque coexists with rumblings of its “imminent collapse.” Einstein writes in Georges Braque on paintings as the prophetic harbinger of a “future reality” (GB, 278, 319, 324, 381). The formulation occurs already in K2, 75. For example, the editors of the Berlin edition of Einstein’s writings argue that, based on comparisons with the manuscript paper and nonspecified “secure datings,” that its origin is contemporaneous with the Braque book and parts of the “Handbook of art,” “about 1930–33” (BA 4, 11). Einstein to Saxl, May 1935, Carl Einstein–Fritz Saxl Correspondence, Warburg Institute Archive, London, General Correspondence. I am grateful to Spyros Papapetros for bringing this letter to my attention. The essay (CEA 192) was apparently never published and remains so to this day. On this essay, which bears an intriguing relationship to The Fabrication of Fictions, see my article “Renaissance Reconsidered,” 121–33. See Claverie et al., Vincenc Kramárˇ, 323. “Einige sensationelle Erklärungen von Carl Einstein: Miró und Dalí— Revolutionäre Kunst— die Rolle der Intellektuellen,” originally published in Catalan in Meridià: Setmanari de literature, art i pólitica, Barcelona, May 6, 1938, in BA 3, 644. Einstein subsequently crossed this subtitle out on the title page of the extensively edited second version of the text. Untitled preface, Exhibition of Bronze Statuettes B.C. (Hittite, Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek) (New York: Stora Art Galleries, 1931), in BA 3, 222– 45. The editors of the Berlin edition of Einstein’s works erroneously dated this text 1933, repeating an error in Penkert, Beiträge, 112n8 (BA 3, 241). The title page of the catalog gives no publication date, but a newspaper review of the exhibition enables us to establish that it was 1931. See Edward Alden Jewell, “Art of the Vintage 2000 B.C.,” New York Times, November 11, 1931, 26. An advertisement for the show, which gives the same title as that of the catalog, appeared in the November 8 edition of the Times. See Einstein’s extended prospectus for the project in BA 4, 301–22; English translation, “Handbook of Art,” 22–33. The passage appears in a text fragment, CEA 43, slip 21, in an envelope of notes and fragments mostly dealing with the German revolution of 1918–19. Two of the slips in the envelope are dated to the first two months of 1934: slip 2, January 21, 1934, and slip 9, February 24, 1934. FF, 48; CEA 169, p. 73. Here and throughout, references to Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen are to the published Penkert edition followed by the revised manuscript in the Carl- Einstein- Archiv.

NOTES TO PAGES 312–317

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16. FF, 122; CEA 173, p. 182. 17. Ibid. 18. Einstein’s unpublished text on the Paris exhibition, De Cimabue à Tiepolo, exactly contemporary with his completion of the draft for The Fabrication of Fictions, suggests that he may have been intrigued by the counterexample of artists’ role in Mussolini’s Italy: “Artists had up to now worked en marge of the society. Opposition was a sport. One demanded boundless individual freedom. Now society once again captures the artists and requires of them integration into particular political systems” (CEA 192). This suggests that in spite of his staunchly leftist politics, he may have momentarily glimpsed in Italian fascism a promising alternative to the hermetic isolation and social ineffectuality of the avant-garde. On this see my article “Renaissance Reconsidered,” 131– 33; see also Roland, “Es muß wieder,” 171–72; and Kiefer, “Primitivismus und Modernismus,” 205–6. 19. FF, 238; CEA 179, p. 330a. This passage appears in a long handwritten insert on page 330 of the typescript. 20. FF, 68; CEA 170, p. 104. 21. FF, 142; CEA 174, p. 212. In a draft for “Bebuquin II,” Einstein writes, “The Pic[asso]s; bourgeois end phenomena that are then finished off by the petite bourgeoisie, which doesn’t want to become infected.” CEA 40, slip 33. 22. There are exceptions in the prewar years: “Anmerkungen” (1912), “Politische Anmerkungen” (1912), “Der Arme”(1913), and “Die Sozialdemokratie”(1914), in BA 1, 142–46, 156–59, 213. 23. CEA 47, on a sheet of paper paginated with two sets of numbers in pencil, 150 and 104. The page is dated “22.I.34” at the top. 24. Einstein, “Bebuquin II,” CEA 47, numbered 188 and 132. 25. Einstein to Kahnweiler, January 6, 1939, EKC, 106–7. 26. Einstein, “Die Kolonne Durruti” (November 1936), BA 3, 520. 27. Ibid. 28. The CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), a confederation of anarchosyndicalist labor unions, advocated revolution and collectivization. 29. As quoted in Penkert, Beiträge, 123. 30. Einstein to Pablo Picasso from Barcelona, January 6, 1939, EKC, 113. 31. In the left margin Einstein has written “romantic history.” 32. Einstein writes “[die] Moderne,” a feminine noun, not “[der] Modernismus” (modernism), a word that in German did not come into common use until much later for denoting the art and literature of modernity. But throughout this selection, where Einstein uses Moderne to characterize what we would today call modernism, I have used that term. In his published writings the terms “modernist” and “modernism” appear only once each, and in French (modernistes, modernisme), applied sarcastically in a critical review of an exhibition of abstract art, “L’exposition de l’art abstrait à Zurich,” Documents 1, no. 6 (November 1929): 342, in BA 3, 66–67. 33. Half a dozen times throughout this selection, Einstein uses Artisten, “artistes,” instead of Künstler, clearly in a demeaning spirit. In German as in English it is

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

385 NOTES TO PAGES 317–332

34. 35. 36. 37.

a word normally applied to variety or circus performers, not to painters and sculptors. It’s a term that was otherwise rare in his corpus. Significantly he applies it only to modern artists. FF, 13–14; CEA 167, pp. 1–3. FF, 16–17; CEA 167, pp. 6–9. FF, 24–25; CEA 167, pp. 23–25. Here and in the first sentence of the paragraph I have translated Anschauung as “visuality,” since Einstein seems to have in mind something more enduring than the immediate apprehension of the visual. FF, 34–35; CEA 168, pp. 45–46. FF, 50; CEA 169, p. 76. Einstein writes “Historiker,” but it is clear from the context that he has art historians in mind. FF, 50–55; CEA 169, pp. 76–85. On the verso (CEA 171, p. 131) Einstein wrote, “Aestheticism of a betrayed, sacrificed yet aimless generation.” FF, 84–88; CEA 171, pp. 129–35. FF, 93–95; CEA 171, pp. 143–46. On Einstein’s use of this term, see above, text 5, note 27. FF, 115–16; CEA 172, pp. 173–75. FF, 128–29; CEA 173, pp. 190–93. Einstein inscribed “Distanzierung” (distance) above “Stellung” (stance) in the typescript without striking through the latter. CEA 174, p. 209. Beginning with “a paradoxical,” this passage is a handwritten insert. “Double style” is in English. FF, 141–42; CEA 174, pp. 209–10. FF, 325–27; CEA 183, pp. 477–80. The manuscript ends here.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Albers, Irene, 354n27, 367n14 anarcho-syndicalism, 2, 11, 315, 384n28 Ankermann, Bernhard, 39, 74, 82, 87, 101, 134, 353n14 Archipenko, Aleksandr, 171, 174, 178, 239, 241 Arp, Jean, 248, 251, 265, 374n6 art history, 5, 7, 14, 68, 136, 145, 146, 147, 183, 193, 204, 275, 298, 310, 311, 319, 328; and African art, 33, 42, 43, 44, 47, 65, 66– 67, 68–69, 70, 74, 200, 353n19, 354n26; Einstein’s critique of, 13, 223, 292, 293, 298, 299, 301, 302, 308; Einstein’s neglect by, 3–4; and ethnology, 69, 70, 71, 204; and “Handbook of Art,” 11, 14, 311; as history of form and style, 69,

70, 292, 302; and modern art, 3, 353n16. See also Woermann, Karl automatism, 233, 319, 324, 330; in Braque, 249, 296; Breton on, 216, 249, 270, 271, 376n17, 378n32; in Klee, 271, 274, 279, 284; in Masson, 251, 271; in the new romanticism, 249–50, 251, 256, 258, 260, 263; Picasso’s dismissal of, 219, 369n1, 371n32. See also psychogram avant-garde, 32, 213, 250, 251–52, 293, 384n18; Einstein’s critique of, 10, 12, 13, 220, 252, 310, 312, 313, 326, 327, 329; Russian, 146, 251 Bakuba (people), 74, 75, 81, 83, 85, 103, 105, 109, 119, 121–22, 134;

INDEX

400

Bakuba (people) (continued) cups, 92, 109, 121, 122; drums, 109; figural sculptures, 100, 122; style, 122 Baluba (people), 100, 103–4, 105, 109, 115, 121, 134; drums, 105, 107–8; figural sculptures, 104, 105; styles, 118 Bashilenge (people), 104, 106 Bassani, Ezio, 346n14, 349n46, 353n15 Baßler, Moritz, 343n1, 343n12, 372n43 Bastian, Adolf, 345n5 Bataille, Georges, 6, 203–5, 248, 367nn13–14, 374n8 Baudelaire, Charles, 252 Bauhaus, 267, 268, 276; Einstein and the, 375n1, 377n22 Beckmann, Max, 277 Behne, Adolf, 347–48nn34–35 Benin: bronze (brass) casting technique, 81–82, 345n5; culture, 34, 44, 70, 73, 74, 81, 87, 97, 109, 119, 134, 346n14, 354n26; figural sculpture, 32–33, 71–72, 75, 81–82, 83, 84–87, 88–90, 89, 91, 92, 105, 122; reliefs, 78, 78, 80, 87, 88; style, 76–77, 81, 82, 93, 100 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 4, 8, 12, 340n46 Bergson, Henri, 25, 26, 140, 141, 351n8 Berlin Museum for Ethnology, 67, 75, 98, 100, 130, 353n15; reinstallation of, 194–98 Berning, Matthias, 371n28 Bewegungsvorstellung, 51, 159, 161, 165; meaning, 350n63 Biro, Yaëlle, 345nn7–8, 347n34 Blaue Reiter, 13, 248, 266–67, 271, 275, 277–78; almanac, 349n51; and hallucination, 267, 269, 276, 277; and new romanticism, 267 Blei, Franz, 65 Bloch, Ernst, 344n1

blutige Ernst, Der (journal), 6, 61, 62, 267, 382n28 Boccioni, Umberto, 171, 239 Böcklin, Arnold, 21 Bode, Wilhelm von, 364n6, 365n13 Bois, Yve-Alain, 359n4, 360n17 Bouguereau, Adolphe-William, 21 Bowness, Sophie, 380n11, 382n26 Braque, Georges, 4, 7, 13, 205, 251, 288, 310, 342n6, 356n1, 360n11, 361n27, 363n46, 374n14, 379n7; in The Art of the 20th Century (first edition), 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 161, 172, 174, 177–84, 185, 269, 289; in The Art of the 20th Century (second edition), 212, 289; in The Art of the 20th Century (third edition), 231–32, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 270, 289, 293, 294; The Bathers, 295, 296; Caryatid/Canéphore (Girl with Fruit Basket), 179–80, 182, 289, 363n49; L’Estaque landscapes, 136, 177, 178, 290; exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (1933), 4, 288, 372n41, 381n24; in Georges Braque, 145, 149, 288–96, 298– 99, 302, 379n3, 380n11, 381n19; Guitar and Bottle of Marc on a Table, 294, 295; Guitar and Pipe (Polka), 181; and hallucination, 294–95; Hesiod’s Theogony (illustrations to), 290, 380n11; Houses at L’Estaque, 152, 172, 179, 290; psychograms, 294; La RocheGuyon landscapes, 290; style, 180, 289, 295–96; Woman with Mandolin, 152, 180, 363n48. See also automatism; Einstein, Carl, works by; myth, mythology; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz; Zeidler, Sebastian Braun, Christoph, 352n3 Breton, André, 213, 216, 248, 249– 50, 260, 269–70, 271, 369n4, 370n13, 373n3, 374n8, 376n17, 377n21. See also automatism

Cameroon, 69, 71, 74, 87, 88, 105, 116, 119, 120; Berlin Museum for Ethnology exhibition room, 196; chairs and stools, 75, 78, 101; dance adornments, 75, 76; door posts, 75, 92, 98, 99–100; figural sculpture, 37, 75, 78, 81, 82, 85, 92, 93–94, 96, 97–98, 97; Grasslands, 74, 75, 76–77, 87–88, 92, 119; headdresses, 83, 87, 90, 91, 93–94, 95; masks, 85, 90, 91, 92, 122; style, 81, 88, 98 capitalism, 60, 61, 63, 153, 317, 318, 319, 325, 327, 331 Cassirer, Ernst, 5, 339n28 causality, 207, 208, 256, 304; Einstein’s rejection of, 8, 26, 30; and historical continuity, 68 Cézanne, Paul, 17–18, 19, 73, 147, 156, 159, 178, 183, 190, 241, 297; and cubism, 20, 170, 172, 238–39, 255 Chagall, Marc, 178, 186 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 183 Cheng, Joyce, 346n22, 368n20, 379n3 Chirico, Giorgio de, 269 Chokwe people, Chokweland, 74; art of the, 98, 100, 122, 347n31 Clark, T. J., 289, 371n22 Claudel, Paul, 61 cognition (Erkenntnis), 9, 12, 24, 25, 27, 28–29, 30, 149, 155, 308, 344n18, 344n23 collectivity, 8, 207, 289, 307, 312, 315. See also hallucination; Jung, Carl Gustav; Léger, Fernand; memory; myth, mythology; politics; sexuality; tectonic communism, 60, 62, 314–15, 326, 327

concept (Begriff), 9–10, 24, 25–26, 46, 53, 214, 351n8, 370n15; in Kant, 9–10, 24, 340n42; and language, 10, 154, 283; in Nietzsche, 10–11. See also Einstein, Carl, as writer; Einstein, Carl, works by; real; visual intuition (Anschauung) Congo, 69, 71, 83, 92, 98, 101, 104, 105, 119, 126, 349n45; Belgian, 100–101, 103, 110, 119, 122, 125, 127, 130–32; French, 74, 102, 129; Museum of (BrusselsTervuren), 6, 65, 81, 122, 349n44, 350n58, 352n5 Côté, Sébastian, 341n58, 367n12 Cottington, David, 356n2, 359n5, 361n29 Cowling, Elizabeth, 372n37 Creighton, Nicola, 310, 379n3, 383n4 Cross River, 69, 87, 133 cubism, 4, 5, 13, 15, 17, 18, 41, 136– 93, 226, 228–29, 230–33, 234, 236–37, 238, 240–41, 242, 248, 293–94, 312; and African art, 37– 38, 73, 91; and hallucination, 206, 212, 232, 259, 292; influence on human visuality, 7–8, 25, 41, 137– 38, 215, 262, 294; the object in, 148–49, 150–51, 152, 153, 155, 157–68, 172, 174, 178, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 218, 231, 234, 263; and the real, 149, 152, 172, 240; salon, 136; and space, 41, 141, 215, 249, 255, 259; and visual function, 151, 215, 229. See also Braque, Georges; Cézanne, Paul; Einstein, Carl, works by; Gris, Juan; hallucination; Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry; Léger, Fernand; Masson, André; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz; realism; revolt; simultaneity; space; tectonic; time; totality; Zeidler, Sebastian Dada, Dadaist, 6, 267 Daix, Pierre, 348n37, 369n4

401 INDEX

Brücke, Die, 267, 277 Brummer, Joseph, 33, 66, 345n8 Burckhardt, Jacob, 219 Bushman painting, 69, 71, 81, 134

INDEX

402

Dalí, Salvador, 247, 248–49, 314, 338n9, 373n5 Danchev, Alex, 379n1 Davis, Whitney, 362n36 Delaunay, Robert, 167, 185, 186 De Pol, Dirck, 343n3 Derain, André, 136, 147, 155, 159, 177, 181, 259, 360n9 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 4, 14 Dix, Otto, 267, 341n54 Documents, 6, 14, 69, 213, 220, 248, 268, 366n1, 366–67nn6–14, 373n48, 374n8, 380n12; Einstein’s role at, 203–5. See also Bataille, Georges; Leiris, Michel Durkheim, Émile, 350n55 Durruti, Buenaventura. See anarchosyndicalism Egypt, 44, 82, 83, 131, 346n24, 349n45; sculpture of, 35–36, 73, 81, 86, 311, 319, 347n28, 349n51. See also Fechheimer, Hedwig Einstein, Carl, as writer: and description, 10, 138, 141, 144, 152, 154, 160, 279, 282, 297, 298, 300; on language, 10, 137, 139–43, 154– 55, 164, 252, 283, 340n46; on metaphor, 48, 61, 139, 140, 141, 144, 232, 297, 318, 327, 329; on paraphrase, 229, 299; prose style, 14, 153–55, 221–22, 362n34, 372n43. See also concept (Begriff); real; repetition; Zeidler, Sebastian Einstein, Carl, works by: Afrikanische Legenden (African legends), 353n10, 356n55; Afrikanische Plastik (African Sculpture), 6, 13, 42, 43, 61, 64–134, 198, 204, 205, 347n33, 352n2, 353n11, 353n15, 367n18; “André Masson: Étude ethnologique” (“André Masson: Ethnological Study”), 13, 69, 203– 11, 271; “Anmerkung” (Note), 221, 372n42; Anmerkungen (Notes), 342, 351n6; “Anmerkun-

gen zur neueren französischen Malerei” (“Notes on Recent French Painting”), 16–22; “Antike und Moderne” (Antiquity and modernity), 41; “Aphorismes méthodiques” (“Methodological Aphorisms”), 205, 222; “À propos de la exposition de la Galerie Pigalle” (Apropos of the exhibition at the Galerie Pigalle), 370n21; “Der Arme” (The pauper), 62; Bebuquin oder die Dilettanten des Wunders (Bebuquin, or the Dilettantes of the Miracle), 5, 6, 7, 17, 139, 142, 339n30; “Bebuquin II,” 10, 309, 311, 314, 344n22, 351n14, 368n25, 373n2, 383n2, 384n21; “Bemerkungen zum heutigen Kunstbetrieb” (Remarks on the contemporary art business), 342n7; “Berliner VölkerkundeMuseum” (“Berlin Museum for Ethnology“), 194–202; De Cimabue à Tiepolo (review of), 310, 384n18; “L’enfance néolithique” (Neolithic childhood), 374n6; “Entwurf einer Landschaft” (Sketch of a landscape), 373n4, 380n13; Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (The Fabrication of Fictions), 10–11, 220, 252, 309–32, 378n32, 382n32, 383n8, 384n8; Der frühere japanische Holzschnitt (The early Japanese woodcut), 353n12; “Gedenken des André Derain” (Remembrance of André Derain), 360n9; Georges Braque, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 145, 148, 149, 150, 214–15, 216, 220, 221, 252, 288–308, 310, 311– 12, 313, 314, 341n57, 343n16, 365n25, 373n2, 377n27, 379, 379n17, 380nn10–11, 381n19, 383nn4–6; “Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers” (Painting saved, pompiers disappointed),

60–63, 153, 251, 351n7. See also Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry Einstein, Daniel, 5 Einstein, Sophie, 5 Ekoi people, 87; Ekoi mask, 87, 90, 92 Ernst, Max, 213, 247, 248–49 ethnography, 65, 70, 204, 350n55; and colonialism, 197 ethnology, 32, 39, 42, 45, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72. See also Ankermann, Bernhard; Berlin Museum for Ethnology; Joyce, Thomas Athol; Luschan, Felix von expressionism, expressionists, 71, 146, 162, 198, 275, 277, 359n2; Einstein’s antipathy toward, 136, 145, 269, 376n14 Fechheimer, Hedwig, 343–44n16, 346n24, 346n25, 349n45, 349n51; Die Plastik der Ägypter, 35–36, 42 Feininger, Lyonel, 375n1 fetish, 44, 72, 104, 105, 108, 109, 114–15, 122, 223, 225, 246, 316, 349n44; Cameroon, 75. See also Bashilenge Fiedler, Konrad, 25–26, 343n16, 344n23 Flechtheim, Alfred, 136; on Klee and surrealism, 376n18 Fleckner, Uwe, 4–5, 338n18, 349n51, 365n16, 372n41, 379n1 Foucault, Michel, 292, 381n21 Franke-Gremmelspacher, Ines, 379n3, 381n19 freedom, art as a chance for, 8, 9, 26, 192, 208, 223, 231, 245, 307, 319, 322 Freud, Sigmund, 205, 214–15, 220, 248, 254, 314, 369n9, 370n13, 370n15; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 214, 371n25; Einstein’s critique of, 214–15, 243, 370n16, 371n28; on hallucination, 214, 219, 243, 370n16, 371n25; The

403 INDEX

358n11; “Gestalt und Begriff” (“Gestalt and Concept”), 340n43; “Handbuch der Kunst” (“Handbook of Art”), 11, 14, 309, 311, 341n64, 383n6; Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the 20th Century), 2, 4, 12, 13, 14, 288, 311, 312, 341n54, 362n34; Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (first edition), 7, 9, 15, 62, 69, 145–93, 205, 250–51, 269–70, 289, 341n61, 358n14, 367n19, 371n26; Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (second edition), 145, 150, 206, 212, 215, 220, 221, 251, 269, 270, 289; Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (third edition), 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 145, 212–87, 289, 293, 294, 312, 314, 359n4, 368n20, 370n18, 374n14; “Maillol,” 40, 242; Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture), 1, 4, 5, 6, 13, 25–26, 32–59, 61, 64, 65, 66–67, 68, 198, 205, 206, 250, 288, 338n15, 346n12, 346n25, 347n33, 348n35, 349n51, 350n53, 353n11, 353n15, 373n3; “Notes sur le cubisme” (“Notes on Cubism”), 4, 151, 153, 218, 361n29; “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928” (Pablo Picasso: Some paintings from 1928), 370n16; “Politische Anmerkungen” (Notes on politics), 61, 350n53; “Probleme heutiger Malerei” (Issues in contemporary painting), 374n14; “Rudolf Schlichter,” 6, 352n2; “Tableaux récents de Georges Braque” (Recent pictures by Georges Braque), 205; “Totalität” (“Totality”), 9, 13, 23–31, 39, 137, 342; “La traité de la vision” (The treatise on vision), 11, 309, 337n5; “Über Paul Claudel” (On Paul Claudel), 61; “Zur primitiven Kunst” (“On Primitive Art”), 13,

INDEX

404

Freud, Sigmund (continued) Interpretation of Dreams, 214, 219, 371n24; Totem and Taboo, 214, 370n19. See also hallucination Frobenius, Leo, 32, 39, 43, 74–75, 345n4, 349nn43–44 futurism, futurists, 21, 136, 140, 167, 172, 178, 185, 186, 239, 249, 342n1; sculpture, 47. See also Boccioni, Umberto; Severini, Gino Galeries Georges Petit, Picasso retrospective (1932), 4, 221, 294, 372n40, 381n24 Gauguin, Paul, 159 Geelhaar, Christian, 381n24 gestalt, gestalten: distinct from object, 157, 159, 160; and hallucination, 15; meaning for Einstein, 14–15, 159, 160; source of, 216, 230–31. See also Einstein, Carl, works by Gide, André, 342n1 Gilot, Françoise, 222 Giotto, 17, 21, 234 God, gods, 44, 195, 199, 255, 286, 300, 316, 328, 331; in African sculpture, 40, 41, 48–50, 54, 57–58, 59, 67, 75, 77, 103, 104, 349n44, 349n46; in ancient and traditional cultures, 227–28, 231, 257, 258, 259, 303, 311, 318, 320–21, 327, 328; and tectonic form, 234 godlessness, of contemporary man, 235, 258, 305 Godon, Léontine Alexandrine (Lucie), 136, 357n6 Gogh, Vincent van, 17, 159, 177 Green, Christopher, 214, 357n7, 360n5, 372n41 Gris, Juan, 4, 7, 136, 137, 142–43, 148, 191–93, 269, 289, 358n17, 360n11, 364n52 Grosz, George, 6, 62, 251, 267, 277, 341n54, 375n4

Grützner, Eduard von, 199 Guévrékian, Gabriel, 340n51 Guévrékian, Lyda, 288, 379n1 hallucination, 205, 207, 211, 214, 228, 229, 313, 320, 325, 328, 341n64, 368nn24–25; and collectivity, 207, 208, 250; defined, 368n25, 370n16, 373n45; distinct from subjectivity, 206, 208; and myth, 15, 206, 216, 226, 233. See also Blaue Reiter; Braque, Georges; cubism; Freud, Sigmund; gestalt, gestalten; hallucinatory interval; Klee, Paul; Masson, André; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz; surrealism; tectonic hallucinatory interval, 208, 222, 226, 232, 233, 259, 313; defined, 216; visionary, 216, 226. See also hallucination Hamann, Richard, 204, 367n10 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 34, 274 Heartfield, John, 6, 62 Heißerer, Dirk, 351n4 Herding, Klaus, 3 Herzfelde, Wieland, 6 Hesse, Hermann, 34 Hildebrand, Adolf von, The Problem of Form in Visual Art, 34–36, 46, 346nn20–21, 350n63, 360n8 history, 61, 62, 277, 306, 312, 314, 316, 322, 331; art and, 317; and dialectics, 301; as perspective, 44, 302; as repetition, 381n21. See also causality Hitler, Adolf, 290, 311 Husemann, Manuela, 345n3 Ifa boards, 74, 75, 77, 80, 82 Ingres, Jean August Dominique, 19, 297 Ingrism, 174, 241 intuition, 9, 25, 37, 140, 156, 167, 231, 245, 256, 257, 289, 319, 362n36, 363n42; cubic (of space),

Jay, Martin, 343n2 Joyce, Conor, 366n1, 367n10, 367n14, 381n19 Joyce, Thomas Athol, 69, 134, 198, 354n26 Jung, Carl Gustav, 205, 219, 220, 369n29, 371nn28–29; theory of the archetype, 219; theory of the collective unconscious, 219 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 4, 8, 11, 13, 63, 146, 219–20, 289, 315, 348n35, 356, 357n6, 360n11, 360n17, 374n10; Einstein draft letter to, 13, 135–44, 152, 154–55, 206, 344n22, 356, 358n1; gallery of, 18, 135–36, 356–57nn2–3, 357n7, 358nn15–17; Der Gegenstand der Ästhetik (The object of aesthetics), 136, 357n10; Juan Gris, 357n3, 358n15; and Masson, 205, 249; on Negro Sculpture, 34; Picasso portrait of, 172, 240; Der Weg zum Kubismus (The Rise of Cubism), 136, 148, 149–51, 152, 341n61, 358n10, 359n4, 361n27, 361n29 Kandinsky, Wassily, 266–67, 268, 275, 276, 278–79, 281–82, 349n51, 376n8, 377n22 Kant, Immanuel: on cognition, 8–9, 23, 24, 343n13; Critique of Pure Reason, 23. See also concept (Begriff) Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, 68, 353n19, 353n21 Kiefer, Klaus H., 205, 338n14, 345n2, 347n25, 347n33, 348n38, 363n42, 366n1, 366n7, 367n18, 377n22, 381n19

Kindsthaler, Sophia (Soki), 291, 311 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 267, 341n54, 375n5 Kisling, Moïse, 63, 65, 69, 352n2 Klee, Paul, 13, 136, 213; in The Art of the 20th Century (first edition), 205, 269, 270; The Art of the 20th Century (third edition), 206, 213, 215, 220, 251, 266– 87; Before the Snow, 271, 272, 274; and the child’s world, 272, 279–80, 282, 284–85, 377n21; and hallucination, 269; Monument in the Fertile Country, 271, 273; and new romanticism, 251, 270, 377n23; and the psychogram, 274, 283, 378n34; theory of art compared with Einstein’s, 272, 274–75. See also automatism; Flechtheim, Alfred; metamorphosis; myth, mythology; surrealism; tectonic Kokoschka, Oskar, 267, 277, 368nn20–21 Kosinski, Dorothy, 338n18 Kramárˇ, Vincenc, 310, 359n4, 361n27, 361n30 Kratz-Kessemeier, Kristina, 364n1, 365n16 Kunstauktion, Die (journal), 380n8 Küppers, Paul Erich, Der Kubismus, 359n4 Lautréamont, Comte de, 252, 263 Léger, Fernand, 4, 7, 136, 148, 153, 184–91; The Card Game, 186, 187; The City, 188, 189; and collective form, 153, 190–91. See also tectonic Leiris, Michel, 6, 14, 203, 204, 366, 367n11, 367n13, 369n4; on Picasso, 220 Leonardo da Vinci, 155 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 368n29, 374n18, 377n26 Lloyd, Jill, 350n58

405 INDEX

34, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 51, 61, 67; in Kant, 8, 9, 25, 340n42; in Nietzsche, 9–10; and totality, 30, 31, 351n8. See also Kant, Immanuel; visual intuition (Anschauung)

INDEX

406

Luschan, Felix von, 32–33, 75, 134, 345n5, 354n26 Mach, Ernst, 137, 142 Mahler, Luise, 348n34, 357n6 Maillol, Aristide, 40, 242 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 186, 252 Malraux, André, 195 Man Ray, 213 Marc, Franz, 266–67, 268, 275–76, 278, 349n51, 367n19 Markov, Vladimir, Iskusstvo negrov, 345n11, 348n39, 348n42, 350n58 Marx, Karl, 276 Marxism, 62, 292, 306 Masson, André, 13, 69, 136, 205– 6, 209, 211, 213, 247, 248–49, 251, 261–62, 263, 264, 270, 271, 367n15, 374n18; The Battle of the Fishes, 262, 375n19; and cubism, 249, 263, 264; and hallucination, 209, 211; and surrealism, 374n10; The Wing (L’Aile), 210. See also automatism; Kahnweiler, DanielHenry; metamorphosis; tectonic Matisse, Henri, 7, 17–18, 19–20, 21, 141, 147, 177, 237, 259 Matvejs, V. I. See Markov, Vladimir Mauss, Marcel, 350n55 Meffre, Liliane, 338n19, 339n26, 339n32, 352n3, 357n3, 366 Meggendorf, Lothar, 174, 240, 363n44 Meinhof, Carl, 348n42 memory, 9, 20, 139, 140, 155, 156, 158, 161, 213, 236, 307, 361n29; archaic, 219, 224, 260; burden of, 26; collective, 219; cultural, 62, 219; of the dead, 104; effacement of, 7, 43, 149, 151, 208, 218– 19; image, 82, 83, 85, 150–51, 163; and qualitative time, 30–31; and simultaneity, 151, 164, 167, 362n36; visual, 149, 150, 190 metamorphosis, 15, 43, 57, 205, 206, 211, 222, 250, 271, 313, 329,

377n27; Klee and, 271, 274, 281, 282, 284, 287, 378n34; Masson and, 209–11; Picasso and, 221, 236. See also totemism Meunier, Constantin, 190 Miró, Joan, 247, 248, 249, 251, 264– 65, 270; Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird, 265, 265; Tilled Field, 264, 264 Moholy-Nagy, László, 375n1 myth, mythology, 2, 15, 34, 141, 214, 229, 233, 237, 263, 269, 279–80, 292, 297, 320, 372n36; African, 41, 50, 58, 65, 66, 70, 72, 75, 98, 370n21; ancient, 318, 322; in Braque, 294, 382nn25–26; collective, 10, 42, 216, 219, 220, 250, 279, 313; Einstein definition of, 215; of forms, 2, 10, 210, 220, 245, 246, 370n21; in Klee, 269, 270, 272, 279, 281; in Picasso, 214, 215–16, 219, 220, 224, 225, 230, 231, 237, 245, 246, 264; primitive, 250, 286, 328; private, 215, 225, 233, 270, 318, 320; and the real, 15, 41, 50, 215, 226, 313; return to, 2, 198, 205, 206, 208, 231, 248, 255, 265, 279, 293, 373n45; as revolt, 215, 270, 279, 281, 370n19; of technology, 187, 188, 304. See also hallucination; real; realism; revolt; tectonic; Yoruba, Yorubaland Nef, Ernst, 3 Neumeister, Heike, 348n34, 354n26 Neundorfer, German, 358n11, 360n5, 362n34, 364n50 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9–10, 208, 228, 248, 253, 254, 292, 314, 372n45, 381n21 Nolde, Emil, 251 object, the: destruction of, 207, 215, 233, 281, 284; as product of visual function, 140, 151, 215, 218;

Palermo, Charles, 339n25, 367n11 Pan, David, 351n7 Panofsky, Erwin, 204 Papapetros, Spyros, 367n10, 383n7 Paudrat, Jean-Louis, 338n15, 354n33 Penkert, Sibylle, 339n26, 343n16, 382n1 Petitpierre, Petra, 378n31, 378n34 Peuckert, Sylvia, 347n34, 349n51 Pfemfert, Franz, 5, 339n31 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz, 4, 7, 12, 13, 17– 18, 19, 20–21, 25, 61, 136, 207, 270, 289, 310, 330; in The Art of the 20th Century (first edition), 148, 150, 151–52, 153, 154, 155, 161, 169–77, 178, 180–81, 183, 184, 185, 190, 191, 269; in The Art of the 20th Century (second edition), 206, 212, 213, 215; The Art of the 20th Century (third edition), 212–46, 251, 263–64, 270, 271, 274, 313; compared with Braque, 289, 293–94; in The Fabrication of Fictions, 312, 314, 330, 384n21; The Fruit Dish, 175; and hallucination, 213, 214, 218, 219–20, 222, 226, 227, 230, 231, 234, 236, 242, 243, 244–45; Olga in an Armchair, 174, 176; The Painter and His Model, 215–16, 218, 373n48; Painter and Model, 215–16, 243, 244, 373n48; The Poet, 152, 172, 173, 237, 240; and psychograms, 216, 219, 224, 235, 245, 289; and the real, 220, 245, 246; styles of, 169, 174,

180, 221, 223, 230, 241, 242–43, 289, 314, 330, 372n37, 372n39; Woman in an Armchair, 215–16, 217; Woman with Pears, 152, 171, 241. See also automatism; Galeries Georges Petit; Kahnweiler, DanielHenry; Leiris, Michel; metamorphosis; myth, mythology; Picasso * Negerplastik; surrealism; tectonic Picasso * Negerplastik (exhibition), 38, 40, 347n34 Pinder, Wilhelm, 204 Pitt Rivers, Augustus, 74, 134 Pleite, Die (journal), 6, 61, 62, 267 Poe, Edgar Allan, 263 Poggi, Christine, 360n13 Poling, Clark, 367n15 politics, 2, 5, 12, 41, 63, 325, 384n18; art and, 1, 2, 60, 61, 62, 153, 314; collective, 2, 153, 208, 262 positivism, 15, 198, 229, 284 Potts, Alex, 339n25 Poussin, Nicolas, 19, 73, 155, 241 prehistory, 11, 43, 63, 66, 195, 359n1, 367 primitivism, 1, 4, 21, 65, 66, 70, 191, 251, 257, 307, 313, 327, 330, 351n7, 354n27 psychic automatism. See automatism psychoanalysis, 214, 310, 370n10. See also Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl Gustav psychogram, 209, 216, 219, 251, 252, 258, 260, 271, 283. See also Braque, Georges; Klee, Paul; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz psychology, 28, 86, 92, 136, 248, 254, 276, 278, 368n20 Purrmann, Hans, 345n8 Querschnitt Verlag, 142, 358n17 Quigley, David, 338n7, 368n24, 369n8, 379 Ramm, Maria, 339n31 rationality, rationalism, 209, 237,

407 INDEX

renewed importance of, 215, 263, 265, 289; subject and, 137, 209; and totality, 24, 25, 30, 31, 68. See also cubism; gestalt, gestalten; Zeidler, Sebastian Oceania, Oceanic art, 11, 66, 73, 74, 195, 196, 201, 347n31, 370n21 Oehm, Heidemarie, 371n28 O’Neill, Elena, 353n16, 361n23

INDEX

408

rationality, rationalism (continued) 250, 252, 253, 254, 259, 262, 278, 297–98, 308; art against, 222, 272, 282, 285, 377n23; counterforces to, 198, 229, 248, 250, 254, 256, 257, 258, 286; vs. psychic processes, 208, 227, 260, 277, 286, 305, 317; and science, 292, 301, 304, 306, 307. See also reason Raynal, Maurice, 4, 148, 191 real, the, 225, 226; art as (re)figuring of, 43, 190, 207, 215, 216, 230, 232, 234; concept and language as enemy of, 9, 10; Einstein’s theory of, 2, 6–7, 149, 172, 207; as human invention, 6, 245, 313. See also cubism; myth, mythology; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz realism, 15, 47, 177, 190, 225, 234, 281, 307, 321; African sculpture as, 41, 48, 50, 55; cubism as, 148– 49, 163, 165, 186; mythic, 215, 237, 294, 303 reason, 243, 249, 250, 270, 272, 278, 285, 287, 307, 323; revolt against, 248, 256, 260, 282. See also Kant, Immanuel; rationality, rationalism Reber, Gottlieb Friedrich, 4, 239, 338n18, 366–67nn7–8 religion, 28, 41, 75, 87, 114–15, 141, 207, 321, 323, 349n50, 370n19; and African sculpture, 34, 36, 39– 40, 41, 48–51, 57, 87, 348n42, 349n43; art as an instrument of, 282, 297 Renaissance, architecture and art, 46, 150, 157, 161, 165, 258, 286, 362n35, 384n18 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 22, 147, 156, 183 repetition, 14, 31, 56, 147, 157, 170, 216, 228, 239, 245, 285; and fear of death, 8, 161, 234; history as, 155–56, 277, 302; language and, 10; as quantitative infinity, 24, 29; and unity, 24, 29, 302

reproduction. See repetition Reverdy, Pierre, 369n4 revolt, 8, 63, 168, 188, 191, 207, 208, 277, 301, 324, 325; art as, 146, 157, 159, 161, 215, 223, 234, 292, 301, 313, 317, 318, 325, 328; cubism as, 232; intellectuals and, 10; the new romanticism and, 248. See also myth, mythology; reason revolution, 2, 61, 62, 63, 184, 188, 226, 248, 276, 302, 311; cubist, 138; German, 60, 311, 314, 315, 351n4, 383n14 revolution surréaliste, La, 369nn3–4 Richardson, John, 369n1, 371n32 Riegl, Alois, 292, 374n17, 381n20 Riehl, Alois, 5 Riemann, Bernhard, 248, 253 Rimbaud, Arthur, 186, 252 Rivière, Georges Henri, 203–4, 367n9 Rodin, Auguste, 17, 46 Romanesque art, 47, 78 romanticism, 69, 252, 270, 323, 374n7, 377n22; turn to, 248, 249, 254, 256, 267, 270, 278, 313–14, 325, 375n2. See also automatism; Blaue Reiter; Klee, Paul; revolt; surrealism Rost, Nico, 315, 369n3 Roth, Henry Ling, 109, 134 Rousseau, Henri (Le Douanier), 21 Roux, Gaston-Louis, 247, 265, 373n4 Rubin, William S., 341n57, 369n1 Rubiner, Ludwig, 60, 351 Rumold, Rainer, 339n22 Sarre, Friedrich, 367n10 Saxl, Fritz, 204, 310, 367n10 Schachtzabel, Alfred, 100, 134, 355n50 Schaeffner, André, 367n9 Schlemmer, Oskar, 375n1 Schlichter, Rudolf, 6 Schmid-Reutte, Ludwig, 16–17 Seurat, Georges, 17, 19, 20 Severini, Gino, 22, 172, 239

African, 82. See also art history; Bakuba; Baluba; Benin; Braque, Georges; Cameroon; Picasso, Pablo Ruiz; Urua region; Yoruba, Yorubaland surrealism, 13, 15, 136, 204, 205, 212–13, 214, 266, 267, 269–70, 289, 293, 310, 312, 314, 368n20, 373nn1–3, 374n8, 376n17; Einstein’s avoidance of term, 214, 219, 247, 248, 359n25, 373n2; and hallucination, 250, 251, 252, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262; Klee and, 378nn33–34; Picasso and, 212–13, 219–21, 369n1; as “The Romantic Generation,” 247–65, 374n7, 374n14. See also Flechtheim, Alfred; Masson, André; revolution surréaliste, La Surya, Michel, 374n8 Sydow, Eckart von, 43, 348n36, 359n1 Tanganyika, 81, 92, 97, 109, 111, 119, 125–26, 127 tectonic, the, 150, 157, 159, 165, 209, 238, 259, 261, 263, 281, 283, 361n23, 365n25; in African sculpture, 55, 58; in ancient art, 17, 280; as collective form, 228, 229, 230, 234, 251, 312; in cubism, 149–50, 152, 153, 161, 172, 230, 231, 232, 234; and hallucination, 216, 219, 220, 224, 230, 243, 245, 251, 258, 260, 371n25, 373n45; in Klee, 271, 274, 281, 283–84; in Léger, 184–85, 186, 189, 371n26; in Masson, 211, 251; meaning of, 216–18, 230; mythic dimensions in, 214; in Picasso, 18, 20, 170, 172, 178, 216, 224, 225, 231, 239, 240, 243, 245; as protective shield, 216, 228, 234, 258, 283, 371n25; in Renaissance art, 150, 165; as sexual symbol, 216–17, 220, 228, 234. See also God, gods

409 INDEX

sexuality, 285; and bodily transformation, 250, 258–59; as collective ground, 205, 208, 252, 262. See also tectonic Shango (Yoruba god of thunder), 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 92, 355n35 Signac, Paul, 17 Simmel, Georg, 5 Simon-Wolfskehl, Tony, 377n22, 380n12 simultaneity (simultané), 143, 165, 211, 230, 307, 361n29; in African sculpture, 35, 36, 52, 54; in cubism, 148, 159, 162, 167–68, 178, 185–86, 190, 212, 229, 231, 232– 33; meaning of, 236; and qualitative time, 26, 30. See also memory space, 25, 70, 137, 147, 148, 226, 254, 255, 259, 261, 262, 264, 269, 271, 274, 350n63, 361n29; in African sculpture, 34, 35, 36– 37, 40, 47, 49; art’s capacity to refigure, 26, 39, 146, 147, 149, 231, 249, 255, 279, 294; Bergson on, 26, 141; cubic intuition of, 34, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51–57, 67; in cubism, 41, 137, 138, 141, 152, 154, 155, 158–59, 161–63, 164–65, 167, 168, 172, 183, 215, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 239, 255; and Kant, 25; qualitative, 42, 137, 138–39. See also cubism; intuition Spanish Civil War, 1, 2, 310, 315 Stavrinaki, Maria, 350n53, 351n2, 372n36, 379n6 Stein, Gertrude, 18, 342n6 Stein, Leo, 18, 342n6 Steinberg, Leo, 152 Sternheim, Thea, 349n45 Strother, Z. S., 66, 348n38, 349nn43– 44, 350n54–55, 371n28 style, 13, 20, 24, 49, 66, 74, 81, 161, 190, 234, 252, 315, 321; and culture, 314, 316, 319, 321, 322; history of, 33, 66, 68, 70, 199; Romanesque-Byzantine, 47; West

INDEX

410

Thumann, Paul, 199, 365n24 Tietze, Hans, 344n1 time, 35, 51, 70, 137, 138–40, 146, 184, 205, 274, 329, 350n63; Bergson on, 26, 141, 351n8, 361n29; in cubism, 148, 155, 167, 232; Kant on, 25, 26; qualitative, 26, 30–31, 42, 137, 138, 141–42, 344n22, 344n26, 351n8. See also simultaneity Torday, Émil, 121–22, 134 totality, 9, 13, 17, 18, 19, 23–31, 35, 40, 61, 68, 144, 209, 281, 342– 43, 343nn10–12, 344n20, 351n8, 360n16, 382n31; in African sculpture, 35, 39, 41, 42, 52, 54, 56; in cubism, 146–47, 149, 151, 152, 154, 158, 169, 224, 237; meaning for Einstein, 7, 8, 24. See also intuition; object totemism, 87, 104, 114–15, 134, 368n29; animals and, 74, 82, 86, 92, 97, 98, 105, 126, 211; and metamorphosis, 206, 209, 211 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 170, 237, 238 Uhde, Wilhelm, 18 Urua region, 74, 100, 104; bow holders, 114, 118; figural sculpture, 85, 110–14, 116, 122, 132; masks, 118; stools, 78, 115–16, 120; style, 118 Valéry, Paul, 197 Vermeer, Jan, 235 Virgil, 253 visual intuition (Anschauung), 9, 10, 42, 45–46, 49, 51, 53, 54, 152, 153, 156–57, 159, 166, 172, 178, 179, 185, 188, 192, 228, 232, 239,

320, 364n51; opposed to concept, 9, 25–26. See also intuition Wagner, Richard, 373n45 Warburg, Aby, 4; Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, 204 Warega people, 125, 127, 132, 134 Wartofsky, Marx, 12–13 Wasmuth, Ewald, 289–90, 291, 310, 311, 382n24 Wasmuth Verlag, 65, 352 Weixler, Antonius, 341n64, 344n16 Weltkunst, Die (journal), 380n8 West Africa, 74, 78, 82, 97–98, 100, 105, 119, 134 Westheim, Paul, 197, 374n7 Weyhe, E. (publisher), 291 Wildenstein, Georges, 203, 366n7 Wißmann, Hermann von, 103–4, 105, 119, 356n52 Woermann, Karl, 33, 345n6 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 5, 68, 150, 298, 350n60, 353n18 Yoruba (people), Yorubaland, 74, 75, 97, 120, 134; art, 71–72, 73, 74, 75, 76–80, 81–82, 83, 92, 105, 119, 129, 353n19, 355n34; mythology, 75; religion, 40, 77, 349n44, 349n46; style, 81. See also Shango Zeidler, Sebastian, 5, 213, 343n1, 344n20, 346n22, 347n31, 360n5, 362n35, 362n37, 370n17, 376n15; on Einstein as writer, 362n34; on Georges Braque, 293; on “image-object,” 362n35 Zimbabwe, 69; sculpture, 72, 74, 130, 133, 134