gradhiva final english version libre

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Art, Agency, and Collectivity

Charles W. Haxthausen

(Published in French translation as Art, agentivit, et collectivit inGradhiva: Revue de lanthropologie

et dhistoire des arts, 14 Dossier Carl Einstein et les primitivismes [November 2011], 78-99)

If Carl Einsteins life may be aptly described as ein Leben zwischen Kunst und Politik, the precise

relation between the two has yet to be adequately examined1. To characterize that life as one between

art and politics already suggests a distance, a tension between the two; and indeed, chronologically

these two poles are mostly identified with mutually discrete episodes. When Einstein was politically

activeduring the ill-fated German Revolution of 1918-19 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39

he published a single short text on art. Conversely, when most actively writing about art, as he was

in 1913-14 and from 1921-33, he wrote almost nothing on politics, at least in any explicit sense 2. Un-

til the mid-1930s Einstein rarely linked these two domains in his writing. The text in which they are

most decisively joined, the book-length manuscript Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, was not pub-

lished in his lifetime3.

Yet we would be mistaken to see Einsteins art writing, even if it is rarely explicitly political,

as divorced from his politics. Perhaps the most telling evidence that he had believed,ardently

believed, in such a relation appears in a devastating self-critique dating from 1934: der ewige

revoluzzer wird voellig steril und bleibt hinter den wechselnden zeitumstaenden hoffnungsloszurueck, da er immer um die gleiche revolutionaere utopiekaempft, die erdurch wechsel der kunstformzu

erreichen sucht (my emphasis). This bitter self-reckoning appears in the notes and fragments for

Einsteins partly autobiographical unfinished novel, in a section dealing with his political activism

1 Marianne Krger uses this formulation as the title for the introductory chapter of her book, Das Individuum

als Fossil Carl Einsteins Romanfragment BEB II : das Verhltnis von Autobiographie, Kunst und Politik in einemAvantgardeprojekt zwischen Weimarer Republik und Exil(Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 2007), 1390.

2 There are exceptions in the pre-War years: Anmerkungen (1912), Politsche Anmerkungen (1912), DerArme (1913), and Die Sozialdemokratie (1914), in Carl Einstein,Werke Band 1. 19071918, ed. HermannHaarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1994), 14246, 15659, 213.

3 Carl Einstein,Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973).Hereafter cited asFF.


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during the failed 1918-19 German revolution4. This harsh verdict, it is clear, is a retrospectivereflection

from 1934; as late as 1932, in his Georges Braque,Einstein was still clinging to a utopian faith in the

radical social agency of artistic form. Cubism, he declared, schuf eine primre Anschauung,

verwandelte die Kraft und Struktur des Sehens und bestimmte von neuem das optische Weltbild; . . .

ber alles sthetische hinaus wurde das menschliche Tun und Geschehen selber verwandelt5. He

offered no evidence for this claim.

Beyond recurrent references to collectivity, Einstein was vague about the precise nature of

the revolutionre utopie that artistic form was to bring about. How exactly might artistic form

achieve that utopia? More precisely, how could artistic formgeneratefor that is what Einstein had

apparently believedparticular social and political forms? Would a collective visuality, shaped by

art and manifest in a unified style, lead to an egalitarian collective society? On these questions he is

equally vague. It is tempting to conclude that this very vagueness is what enabled him to sustain sucha belief, such wishful thinking, over the span of two decades. Clarity came only with the abandon-

ment of that belief. In this short essay I shall plot the major stations of this odyssey.

*****

In December 1913, the recently opened Neue Galerie in Berlin presented what for its time was a

remarkable and provocative exhibition: fifty-three mostly cubist paintings and thirteen drawings by

Pablo Picasso, juxtaposed with nineteen African sculptures. This show was certainly seen and may

even have been organized by Einstein, then twenty-eight years old6. Over the next several months

he wrote two texts for which the Neue Galerie exhibition was undoubtedly a catalyst. The first, pub-

lished in three installments in the leftist literary and political journal Die Aktion, was a dense, hermet-

ic theoretical essay on the principle of what Einstein called Totalitt7. The second, written about

4The passage appears on a correction slip in an envelope of which two such slips are dated to the first twomonths of 1934. Bebuquin II, Carl-Einstein-Archiv (CEA), microform 43, correction strip 21, Akademieder Knste Berlin.

5 Carl Einstein,Georges Braque, in idem,Werke Band 3, 19291940, ed. Hermann Haarmann and KlausSiebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 270. Although not published until 1934, the frontispiece indicates

that the book was completed in 1932.6 John Richardson,A Life of Picasso: Vol II, 19071917, in collaboration with Marilyn McCully (New York:Random House, 1996), 317, n61, 62. Heike Neumeister argues that Einstein was likely the one whoorganized the exhibition. Heike M. Neumeister, Notes on the ethnographic turn of the European avant-garde: Reading Carl EinsteinsNegerplastikand Vladimir MarkovsIskusstvo negrov , Acta Historium Artium49(2008): 17475.

7 Einstein,Werke 1, 21421.


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the same time but not published until 1915, was the landmark bookNegerplastik,the first published

in any language to assess sub-Saharan African sculpture primarily as art 8.

A conspicuous link between these two otherwise quite different texts is the notion of agency

expressed in each. What matters in art, according to Einstein, is not its aesthetic, symbolic, or ex-

pressive dimensions and least of all its subject matter. What matters is its capacity to alter the visuali-

ty of human subjects and in so doing to alter their subjectivity and their construction of reality. This

idea is asserted at the beginning of Totalitt:

ber die spezifisch gesonderte Stellung hinaus bestimmt Kunst das Sehen berhaupt. . . . .

Die Kunst verwandelt das Gesamtsehen, und der Knstler bestimmt die allgemeinen Ge-

sichtsvorstellungen. Daher ist es Ziel der Kunst, jene zu organisieren. . . . Kunst wird wir-

kende Kraft, wie weit sie vermag, das Sehen gesetzmig zu ordnen. . . . Gegenstand der

Kunst sind nicht Objekte, sondern das gestaltete Sehen. . . . Der Erkenntnisakt, d.h. die

Umbildung der Weltvorstellung geschieht weder durch das Schaffen des Kunstwerks oder

das Betrachten, vielmehr durch das Kunstwerk selbst.9

To achieve such radical agency, the artwork had to present the viewer with a totality, a self-

sufficient, formally autonomous whole, foreclosing any active, participatory role of the viewer, pre-

cluding even the operations of visual memory. The first part of the essay, in which these remarks

appear, was published under the title Anmerkungen, but in a handwritten draft Einstein tellingly

entitled it Picasso, although neither he nor any other artist is named in the essay10

. It is clear thathe believed to have found in cubism an art that might satisfy this stringent criterion.

Einstein was acutely aware that with the potential exception of cubism European art of his

time did not meet the ideal he outlined in Totalitt, yet inNegerplastikhe argued that it had been

realized in African art. The African sculpture was ein bedingungsloses, geschlossenes Selbstndi-

ges. It achieved agency through formal and spatial properties that were integrally related to its func-

tion in African religion. For the African beholder, the artwork was not a willkrliche und knstli-

che Schpfung but a mythische Realitt, die an Kraft die natrliche bertrifft. It was experienced

not as a representation but as abeing: Es bedeutet nichts, es symbolisiert nicht; es ist der Gott, der

8 Carl Einstein,Negerplastik(Leipzig: Verlag der weien Bcher, 1915); reprinted in idem, Werke 1, 23452.


10 Carl Einstein, Picasso, CEA, microform 296, p. 1.


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seine abgeschlossene mythische Realitt bewahrt, worein er den Adoranten einbezieht und auch ihn

zu einem Mythischen verwandelt und seine menschliche Existenz aufhebt.11 This idea, that the

artwork effected a transformation of the viewer by negating individual subjectivity would become a

central tenet in Einsteins theory of arts transformative agency.12

Einsteins theory of art has some striking affinities with the work of the late British anthro-

pologist Alfred Gell on art and agency. In formulating an anthropological theory of art Gell ad-

mitted to a refusal to discuss art in terms of symbols and meanings; in place of symbolic commu-

nication, he put all the emphasis onagency, intention, causation, result,andtransformation. He viewed

art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than to encode symbolic propositions

about it.13 Although an art historian and critic, Einstein took a strikingly similar position, declaring

artworks to be of interest lediglich soweit, als sie Mittel enthalten, das Wirkliche, die Struktur des

Menschen und die Weltbilder abzundern14

.I have found Gells book particularly helpful in clarifying the roots of a tensionafateful

tensionin Einsteins theory of arts agency. The animism of African sculpture fits perfectly with

Gells self-described seemingly radical proposition that from an anthropological point of view art

objects arethe equivalent of persons, or, more precisely, social agents15 (my emphasis). Yet he extends

this theory toallart, not merely that produced by peoples with animist beliefs about the agency of

their artefacts. Using the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp as an example of modern secular art, Gell

argues that through his artworks and writings Duchamp becomes a distributed person: his

consciousness, the very flux of his being as an agent, is not just accessible to us but has assumed

this form. Duchamp has simplyturned intothis object, and now rattles around the world, in

innumerable forms, as these detached person-parts, or idols, or skins, or cherished valuables.16This

agency differs from that of native cultures, in which the person who acts through the artwork is not

the artist, but a spirit of an ancestor, a god, etc., and such artefacts are the primary focus of Gells

11 Einstein,Werke 1, 242, 246.

12This idea is clearly articulated in the books final chapter, Maske und Verwandtes. Masks and tattoos,

Einstein proposes, constitute a form of self-abnegation for the sake of the collective. Negerplastik,inWerke 1,250-251.

13 Alfred Gell,Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory(Oxford,/New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6.

14 Einstein,Georges Braque, inWerke Band 3,256.

15 Gell,Art and Agency, 7.

16 Ibid., 250. On the distributed person, see 96-104.


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analysis. What is distinctive about Einsteins theory of agency is that, as we shall see, in the late

1920s and early 1930s he began to apply these animist notions to certain works of European

modernism.

*****

WhenNegerplastikappeared in 1915, Einstein was in uniform, and he spent the greater part of the

War in German-occupied Belgium17. Although he had published several political essays before the

war, it was only in Belgium that he became active in radical politics. In the waning days of the con-

flict, German soldiers and workers, weary of wartime conditions and inspired by the example of the

October Revolution in Russia, set upRte, or councils, throughout Germany and Belgium18. After

returning to Berlin, Einstein became a highly visible member of the communist Rtebewegung, andwas one of a select group of six speakers at the funeral of the partys assassinated co-founder, Rosa

Luxemburg19. In an appeal to Germanys intellectuals, Einstein proclaimed his unequivocal embrace

of the revolution: Eines gilt es: die kommunistische Gemeinschaft zu verwirklichen. . . . Wir gehen

in der Masse, wir sind auf dem Marsch mit den Einfachen, Unbedingten zu einer nahen, ntigen Sa-

che. . . . Der Individualismus ist beendet, die Kameradschaft in der Masse entscheidet20.

Zur primitiven Kunst, Einsteins sole text on art from this revolutionary period and his

first since the publication ofNegerplastik, is consistent with these political sentiments. The primitive

art of this short article is not the art of Africa but a European art emerging from the working class

and in the service of a communist revolution. Primitive was here synonymous with simplicity, di-

17 On Einsteins movements and activities in the German military during the war, see Liliane Meffre, CarlEinstein, 18851940: Itinraires dune pense moderne(Paris: Presses de lUniversit de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), 5879.

18 On Einsteins revolutionary involvement in Belgium, see Klaus H. Kiefer, Carl Einstein and theRevolutionary Soldiers Councils in Brussels, in The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and ArtisticGerman War Colony in Belgium, 19141918, edited by Rainer Rumold and O. K. Werckmeiser (Columbia, SC:

Camden House, 1990), pp. 97112.19 On Einsteins political activities in 1918-19 see Dirk Heierer, Einsteins Verhaftung: Materialien zumScheitern eines revolutionren Programms in Berlin und Bayern, 1919,Archiv fr die Geschichte des Widerstandesund der Arbeit, no. 12 (1992): 4177 ; also Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: ein Beitrag zurTheorie und Geschichte der europischen Avantgarde, Communicatio Bd. 7 (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 23455.

20 An die Geistigen (1919), Carl Einstein, Werke Band 2. 19191928, ed. Hermann Haarmann and KlausSiebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 18.


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rectness, and material poverty uncorrupted by bourgeois culture21. Primitive Kunst meant Ab-

lehnen der kapitalisierten Kunstberlieferung. Modern art Einstein dismissed as a formale Fikti-

on, producing commodities in the service of speculation and snobbism, providing for the innerli-

che Sicherstellung und Strkung des besitzenden Brgers. An artwork was no more than ein Stck

von reaktionrem Snobismus . . . wenn es nicht dem sozialen Umbau sich einordnet, von wo allein

es Sinn erhlt. What was needed was a Kollektivkunst: Nur die soziale Revolution enthlt die

Mglichkeit einer nderung der Kunst, ist ihr Prmisse, bestimmt allein den Wert einer Kunstwand-

lung und stellt dem Knstler seine Aufgabe. . . . Sprengen wir die Ideologie des Kapitalismus, so

finden wir darunter den einzigen wertvollen berrest des zerkrachten Erdteils, die Voraussetzung

jedes Neuen, die einfache Masse, die heute noch im Leiden befangen ist. Sie ist der Knstler 22.

How would this art of the simple masses serve the sozialen Umbau? Einstein doesnt say, but

nothing in his writing supports the idea that it would do so by politically engaged subject matter.23

Itseems probable that by its very production, its very existence as an art by and for the proletariat, it

would constitute radical social change. It also seems likely that African art, with which Einstein was

then intensely engaged, was the unstated model for this primitive art--not formally, but as an art

that emerged from the flow of collective life and was integrated with that life. We will return to this

question below.

Einsteins hopes for revolution were typical of many artists and intellectuals in the heady

atmosphere of 1918-1919, when a radically different social order seemed a possibility, and slogans

calling for an art integrated with the life of the masses were widely heard 24. Moreover, these senti-

ments seem to have been just as short-lived for Einstein as they were for most of the left intelligent-

sia. In any case by 1920 expressions of solidarity with the working class and overt sympathy for left-

ist politics disappeared from his writings for more than a decade. His letters from this period to the

21 Reprinted in Einstein,Werke 2, 27. For an expanded discussion of this text see Charles W. Haxthausen,Bloody Serious: Two Texts by Carl Einstein, October, no. 105 (Summer 2003): 11215.


23 See, for example, his critical comments on Otto Dix: er wagt zeitsachlichen Kitsch, doch Malerei kannsich daran selber leicht banal erweisen; man vertraut zu sehr erregendem Motiv. . . . Villeicht ist man im Her-zen malender Reaktionr am linken Motiv. Einstein,Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts(Berlin: Propylen Verlag,1926), 156-157.

24 See Manfred Schlsser, ed.,Arbeitsrat fr Kunst Berlin, 19181921: Ausstellung mit Dokumentation(Berlin:Akademie der Knste, 1980); Joan Weinstein,The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution inGermany, 191819(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).


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Paris galerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the painter Mose Kisling suggest that a year after writ-

ing Zur primitiven Kunst Einstein, brimming with new writing projects, had made a pragmatic

accommodation with the capitalist art world25.

What had happened? Nothing Einstein wrote at the time, including his surviving letters, of-

fers any clues. Only the aforementioned BEB II fragments dating from 1934, referring to Ein-

steins alter-ego, yield any insight. In the revolution, we read there, BEB erfaehrt zumerstenmal bei den

KOMM [unisten] eine Bindung; . . . ein wissen waechst aus dem gemeinsamen Leben (original empha-

sis). Even so, he was deeply conflicted, fearing eine mechanisierung seiner person und des lebens,

eine hoffnungslose normalisierung, die alle seine erwerbungen an ausserordentlicher person zersto-

eren . Incapable of submerging his individuality in a mass movement, er sucht immer wieder von

den kommunisten wegzukommen. . . der alte anarchist ert(r)aegt kein kommando, keine fertigen pa-

rolen, seine grenzenlose kritik, seine opposition, brechen immer wieder durch26

. His personalitywas schon dermassen kuenstlich gezuechtet und isoliert, dass er nicht mehr in den

KOMM(unismus) hineinpasst. He was, he came to realize, lacking in gemeinschaftsgefhl, das

ueber die frase hinausgeht27.

Two texts from the early 1920s, both unpublished at the time, attest to Einsteins continuing

faith in arts agency in fundamentally altering human perception and reconstituting the visual world.

The first is an untitled essay on the Soviet avantgarde, evidently written in 192128. At first reading it

might suggest a continuation of the line of thinking evident in Zur primitiven Kunst, that he had

found in Soviet Russia an art that effectively engaged in sozialen Umbau, a kollektivkunst work-

ing to bring about a collective society. Yet Einstein is silent about agitprop or the role of artists in

the reorganization of the means of production or any other explicitly political function of their art.

Two years earlier, addressing the still volatile political situation in Germany, Einstein, identifying

himself als Kommunist, had passionately affirmed the viability of a dictatorship of the proletari-

25 See Lettres de Carl Einstein Mose Kisling (19201924), ed. Liliane Meffre, Les Cahiers Du Mnam,no. 62: 74123; Carl Einstein, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: Correspondance, 19211939, ed. and trans. Liliane Meffre(Marseille: A. Dimanche, 1993).

26 Carl Einstein, Bebuquin II, CEA, microform 46, p. 150/104, dated 22.I.1934,

27 Ibid., p. 188/132. For a detailed examination of this material, see Krger,BEB II, 31630.

28 Printed with the title in Carl Einstein,WerkeBand 4: Texte Aus dem Nachla I, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz,1992), 14652. On the dating of this manuscript see my introduction to its English translation, RevolutionSmashes Through History and Tradition,October 107(Winter 2004): 139-140.


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at.29 Now, writing on the successful Revolution in Russia, he hails a dictatorship, not of the proletar-

iat (which he never mentions!) but ofseeing, eine Diktatur des Sehens, die Diktatur des Menschen

gegen erstarrte Gegenstndea dynamic,functionalseeing, seeing not as a passive perception of a

world of stable objects but as a creative phenomenological act, the figuration of a new visual order.

The self was relinquished not through die Kameradschaft in der Masse, the position he had

championed in 1919, but in this act of unmediated, functional seeing, unfettered by memory. Im

Kommunismus, he declares, entsprechen Ichverschwindung und Gegenstandzerstrung30, but

that is all he has to say about communism. The issue now, it appears, is not what art can do for the

sozialen Umbau, as in 1919, but how the revolution can further Einsteins project of refiguring

human vision. His priorities are revealed in his subsequent negative verdict on the Soviet

avantgarde, in whose work he found mehr politische Gesinnung als Malerei; mehr Marxismus als

sonst etwas31

.The notion of Ichverschwindung recurs, now detached from any political context, in a long

letter of June 1923 to Kahnweiler. The topic is cubism. Einstein sees in cubist painting the potenti-

al for eine Umbildung des Sehens, as well as eine Umbildung des sprachlichen Aequivalents und

der Empfindungen. As in the Russian article, he speaks of this active seeing as effecting a tempo-

rary self-forgetting Diese Empfindung macht fr eine bestimmte Spanne Ihr ich verschwin-

den32but there is no reference to its subordination to the collective.

When Einstein first writes on cubism at length, inDie Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, he returns for

the first time since 1919 to the issue of a collective art. It is Fernand Lger whom he singles out as

having achieved such a collective form through the stylization of ein gegenstndliches Kollektiver-

lebnis. The geometry of Lgers forms endows them with kollektive Bedeutung; das gemein-

sam Optische der Dinge ist ihre Geometrie. . . . Zeichen der Stadtkollektivitt ist die Zahl (Fabrik,

Armee, Typenfabrikation, Partei), die Vereinzelung wird beseitigt, das Gemeinschaftliche gewie-

29 Carl Einstein, Dr. Breitscheid und das Rtesystem, published 23.4.1919 inDie Rtezeitung, in Einstein,Werke 2, 2526.

30 Carl Einstein, , inWerke 4, 14652.

31 Einstein,Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts(1926), 160.

32 Letter of June 1923, Einstein/Kahnweiler Correspondance, 139, 142.


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sen33. Yet this collective art is based merely on the commonality of visual experience in modern

capitalist industrial societyit is a Kollektivkunst without a collective politics.

Some have read this as a positive assessment of Lger, and it is true that throughout his writ-

ings Einstein consistently treats his art with a tone of sympathy and respect; later he will describe the

painter, simply and uniquely, as un homme de la collectivit34. Yet if one reads closely, it becomes

clear that Lger, who is stylizing the modern technological object-world and endowing it with collec-

tive meaning, is not engaged in the Objektzerstrung that Einstein demands. His paintings are

allzusehr von einer fremden Form- und Zweckwelt mitbestimmt; man entgeht dem Beschreiben-

den nicht ganz, es wird nur auf bereits konstruierte Gebilde bezogen 35. The painters rationalism,

his devaluation of the psychological and individual, Einstein would later write, explique pourquoi

l'art de Lger est apprci par les russes sovitiques, par les amricains, et par certains groupes l'es-

prit trs industriel36

. Nothing in Einsteins writing suggests that he intended this as praise.InDie Kunst des 20. JahrhundertsEinstein does not yet attribute to Picasso and Braque the

achievement of a collective form, but he offers an alternative view of how that form might be

achieved. Through individual subjective vision, in denen sich das spezifisch Menschliche - man

mchte es das Lyrische nennen - ausspricht, there exists dermaen Gltiges, dass es zu kollektiven

Bildungen, zur Gruppe, anreizt.37 While Lgers forms are de-individualized, there is no transfor-

mation of the seeing subject that occurs during the perceptual act. For Einstein the Herrschaft des

subjektiven Aktes is primary. In ihm liegt, als dem Schpferischen, das Entscheidende des Sehak-

tes, und so meidet man dasVorbestimmende des Gegebenen (my emphasis) that shaped Lgers painting.

A few years later Einstein would return to the notion of Ichverschwindung, a conception of the

artistic process in which the self-identical subject, artist as well as beholder, was momentarily dis-

33 Einstein,Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts(1926),82.

34 Einstein, Lger: uvres rcentes, (1930),Werke 3, 128. On Einstein and Lger see Kiefer,Diskurswandel, 36264. Lger himself had declared, in 1913: Nous arrivons, j'en suis persuad, uneconception d'art aussi vaste que les plus grandes poques prcdentes: mme tendance aux grandesdimensions, mme effort partag par une collectivit. Lger, Les origines de la peinture et sa valeur

representative, (1913), reprinted in: idem,Fonctions de la peinture(Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 16.35 Einstein,K20Jh (1926), 80. Elsewhere Einstein is critical of the focus on the privileging of number, of thequantifiable, that he attributes to Lger: die Zahl ist das Mittel eines retrospektiven Denkens, he wrote inTotalitt,Werke 1, 220.


37 Einstein,K20Jh (1926), 61.


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solved, as though possessed by a spirit38. In other words, he would adapt for modern art an animist

notion of agency first described inNegerplastiik.

Negerplastikwas merely the first fruit of Einsteins engagement with Africa and its art. Per-

haps because of the books fame, in 1916, during his service in occupied Belgium, he was assigned to

a position in the Colonial Ministry in Brussels. From there he had easy access to the major African

collections and library of the Muse du Congo in Tervuren. As he wrote enthusiastically to Franz

Blei, ich negriere hier gnzlich. Ein afrikanischer Excess; he was, he related, planning two more

book on Africa39. A year after the publication of the second edition ofNegerplastik(1920) Einstein

publishedAfrikanische Plastik.40This slender volume offers a more concrete discussion--more schol-

arly than theoretical, more ethnographic than stylisticof African sculpture than its famed prede-

cessor. Einstein relates objects to African myths and rituals, providing that context that was missing

in the first book. At this date no other art historian or art critic had written of African sculpture insuch detail. In 1925 he publishedAfrikanische Legenden, a collection of his renderings of African folk

tales and myths, with an extended bibliography of ethnographic literature 41. That same year he spent

an extended period in London collaborating with Thomas Athol Joyce, keeper of the ethnographic

collections at the British Museum, himself a co-author of a major study of the Bakuba people 42. To-

gether they worked on a book that was to be a comprehensive historical study of the arts of the Af-

rican peoples. But Joyce became busy with other projects and despite several efforts on both sides

38 See, for example, his discussion of Picasso inDie Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts(Berlin: Propylen-Verlag, 1928),68-69, in which he writes of the Preisgabe der Person: Was besagt die Einheit der Person mehr, als imbesten Fall durch die Mannigfaltigkeit der Gesichte zersprengt zu [69] werden; die Seele lebt imexplodierenden Wechsel lebendiger als in der schmalen Gleichheit der Wiederholungen.

39 Rolf-Peter Baake, ed.,Carl Einstein: Materialien. I: Zwischen Bebuquin und Negerplastik(Berlin: Silver &Goldstein, 1990), 138. Baake dates the letter to 1916.

40

Carl Einstein,Afrikanische Plastik(Berlin: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1921).41 Carl Einstein, ed.,Afrikanische Legenden(Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1925).

42 Emil Torday and Thomas Athol Joyce, Notes ethnographiques sur les peuples communment appels Bakuba, ainsi quesur les peuplades apparentes, les Bushongo(Bruxelles: Ministre des colonies : en vente chez Falk fils, 1910). Thecollaboration between Einstein and Joyce is documented by Einsteins letters to Ewald Wasmuth in theDeutsches-Literatur-Archiv Marbach and letters from Einstein to Joyce in the archives of the BritishMuseum.


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to relaunch the project, it was never finished43. This deepening engagement with Africa and its art

was to have a profound impact on Einsteins evolving notions of arts agency.

Even as, during the 1920s, Einstein wrote primarily on modernism, the model of an art inte-

grated with the practice of life, exemplified for him above all by the native cultures of Africa, seems

to have loomed in his consciousness. This comes through in a piece he published in 1926 on the

reinstallation of Berlins Museum fr Vlkerkunde44. The first part of the text reads like a lamenta-

tion for arts lost functionality, for a time when it was integrated with systems of collective belief, a

functionality unimaginable in contemporary secular society. Es vernderte den ganzen Charakter

aller Kunst, da man sie fr sich selbst gelten lie. Sie wurden dem jenseits lebendigen Glaubens ent-

rissen und auf ihre formale Geltung hin untersucht. Die Schnheit eines Altarblatts bestand da-

rin, da es von ngsten, Wnschen und bangenden Schreien nach Gott umringt war, es einer Hand-

lung als bescheidenster Teil diente, da der Schatten des Gottes in ihm wohnte und statt Museums-beamten Priester ihm dienten.45

By 1929, after Einstein had relocated from Berlin to Paris, he apparently believed he had

found an artistic practice through which modern art could recapture something of this lost agency.

That art was Surrealism. In the early 1930s, under the sway of what has been called ethnographic

surrealism46, Einstein believed the gap between the European avant-garde art he championed and

the art practices of native and archaic cultures had narrowed; art was partaking in a process of what

he called Primitivierung, a phenomenon he identified with a return to a collective, mythic

worldview. This becomes clear if one reads his discussions of contemporary art against the back-

ground of his essay on the 1930 Galerie Pigalles major exhibition of African and Oceanic objects 47.

In contrast toNegerplastikEinstein now had little to say about form; he focused overwhelmingly on

the ritual functions of the objects. He stressed more than he had previously the animist character of

African sculpture. It was a dogme fondamental that tout esprit peut habiter dans tout objet.

43 For this information I am indebted to a paper by Heike Neumeister, Masks and Shadow Souls Carl Ein-steins collaboration with Thomas A. Joyce, The British Museum and Documents, in Nicola Creighton and

Andreas Kramer (eds.),Carl Einstein and the European Avant-garde. (forthcoming).

44 Carl Einstein, Das Berliner Vlkerkunde-Museum: Anllich der Neuordnung (1926),Werke 2, 44650.


46 I owe the term to James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism, in his The Predicament of Culture(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117-151.

47 Carl Einstein, A propos de l'Exposition de la Galerie Pigalle (1930), Werke 3, 99107.


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La chose dcisive est moins la statue que le fait qu'elle soit habite par un esprit, et la ressemblance

avec l'esprit ne consiste pas dans une ressemblance individuelle, mais dans la reprsentation des

marques magiques et collectives48. Tellingly, in 1929 he had published inDocumentsan essay on

Andr Masson with the provocative subtitle tude ethnologique. And just as Einstein describes

how in African cultures theitongoor soul can inhabit des pierres, animaux ou plantes 49, he cites

Massons art as a training extatique in which, the moi eclips, one submits to identifications

remarquables . . . avec les plantes, les toiles, les pierres50.

Yet for Einstein it was less the art of the Surrealists themselves than that of Picasso, Braque,

and Paul Klee that best fulfilled this ideal51. This comes through most forcefully in his last major text

on modern art, his book on Braque52. There he attributes to the later paintings of Braque and by

implication, those of Picasso, the agency of indwelling spirits, in the animist sense characteristic of

native cultures. The artwork was born of what Einstein called a halluzinatives Intervall in theprocess of artistic creation, with a resultant temporary self-forgetting, and it ostensibly induced a hal-

lucinative state in the beholder. In the process artworks functioned gleich den alten Idolen, und

somit betrgt man sich selber und glaubt den Kunstwerken wie Geistern der Toten, da sie die

Kraft der gleichen Wiederkehr besitzen. Darum frchtet man hnlich dem Primitiven insgeheim die

Bilder, which leben und sterben als Wirkliches und wirken fragwrdig lebendig53. It was through

this experience, evidently, that Einstein believed that art could achieve that revolutionre Utopie.

Trying to get a fix on what that would have consisted of is a challenge, because Einstein never elab-

orates. During this period it seems to have consisted of nothing more clearly defined than a kollek-

tive, mythic culture. He seems to have believed that an artwork created partly in a transient state of

48 Ibid, 99, 100.

49 Ibid., 99.

50 Carl Einstein, Andr Masson: tude ethnologique, in: Werke 3, 29.

51 See Charles W. Haxthausen, Die erheblichste Persnlichkeit unter den deutschen Knstlern: Einsteinber Klee. in:Die visuelle Wende der Moderne:Carl Einsteins Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Klaus H. Kiefer(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), pp. 131-146.

52 Carl Einstein,Georges Braque(Paris: ditions des Chroniques du Jour 1934), translated from the German, inWerke 3, 251-516.

53 Einstein,Braque,in:Werke 3, 306.


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hallucination could achieve that goal. Paradoxically, what begins as a subjective trance-like experi-

ence of the individual artist ends by inculcating a collective visuality in its viewers.54

Central to this process of fostering a collective visuality is what Einstein called das Tek-

tonische, a central concept for him from his earliest art criticism. Initially it was a quality, an organ-

izing principle, found inpictures. By 1931, however, Einstein had markedly expanded its meaning,

now attributing to it a psycho-anthropological, anachronic dimension. Tectonic forms are a bulwark

against the contingencies of organic life and, ultimately, death; they are identified with archaic sexual

symbols, kollektive Zeichen he calls them, signs of the life force, andthis is the crucial aspect

the tectonic is grounded in the deepest layers of collective memory, in the archaisch kollektiven

Unterschicht des Unbewuten55. It is through these tectonic forms that the artist will create neue

Gegenstnde,56

he will generate cratures d'une mythologie des formes that will have a collectivevalidity57.

It is noteworthy how this process parallels that which Einstein described two years later

when recalling his experience in the 1918-19 revolution. What he could not then achieve through an

act of political will, namely the dissolution of the self into a collectivity, could now, he claimed, be

achieved by the involuntary hallucinative trance induced by the art work that momentarily dissolves

the ego and enables the transformation of the viewing subject. Einstein gives the most detailed ac-

count of this in the fifth chapter ofGeorges Braque:

Gerade dieser Vorgang der Verbeunwutung des Betrachters liefert ihn umso heftiger der

Aktion des Kunstwerks aus, das gegenber der archaisch verunbewuteten Person des Be-

trachters die berlegene Kraft eines Dmons oder Spirits gewinnt. . . . In dieser Fixierung

der seelischen Krfte auf das Kunstwerk verlschen das Ich und das Zeitbewutsein. Das

54 Carl Einstein,Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin:Fannei & Walz, 1996), 116, 122

55 Ibid., 116.

56 Ibid., 119.

57 Einstein, Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928 [1929], inWerke 3, 1724, 19.


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kotzt. . . . Sie sollen den cirkus ohne mich weiterdrehen. . . . ich habe von diesem beschraenkten

geniebetrieb [sic] genug, der so widerlich merkantil ist63. His distance from the ideas expressed in

Georges Braque, published in 1934 after considerable delays, is indicated by the note on the frontis-

piece, dating it to 1931/32. It is at this time that he wrote the note cited at the beginning of the pre-

sent essay, in which he ridiculed himself for clinging to the idea of a revolutionre Utopie, which

he hoped to see realized durch wechsel der kunstform.

After completing the Braque book Einstein did publish one more substantive essay, but not

on modern art. It was a catalog introduction for an exhibition of ancient Hittite, Etruscan, Greek,

and Egyptian statuettes, mounted at a private gallery in New York. It is the only text published in

his lifetime in which he articulated his revised assessment of modern art. Taking a longer historical

view he acknowledges the yawning gap that divides the art of modernity from these cultures. The

works of early antiquity, he writes, were expressions of an important magical world conception,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 life64. 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 con-

temporary artistry (my emphasis)65. This brief passage marks a major revision of Einsteins utopian

claims for arts agency.

Einstein developed this idea at length in Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen. Here at last he

made a sober assessment of the avant-gardes place within the larger society.This unpublished man-

uscript, probably written in late 1935 or early 1936, reads like a cathartic 500-page rant66. It is at once

a searing, unsparing critique of modernism and Einsteins corrosive self-reckoning with his own

Pierre Lavals state visit to Berlin, which occurred in late September 1931, so the letter presumably dates from

around that time.63 Undated letter to Ewald Wasmuth, probably summer of 1932.

64 Carl Einstein, preface,Exhibition of Bronze Statuettes B.C. Hittite, Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek (1933) in:Werke3, 224.


66 See note 3


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former illusions about it. He now turned on artists and intellectuals, vilifying them as arrogant, elit-

ist, and self-deluded, as pampered pseudo-revolutionaries providing distraction for the ruling classes

and seeking to preserve their own privileged status. Point by point he rejected the position of his

previous writings. Here I cite a few representative passages:

Die Avantgarde arbeitete anarchisch abgetrennt. Sie war unfhig, eine zwingende

Anschauung zu bilden, welche eine Kollektive beeinflussen konnte.

Das Verbrechen der Intellektuellen bestand darin, da sie sich alle Privilegien an Schp-

fung zuschanzten, genau wie die kapitalistischen Unternehmer das Monopol der Produkti-

on beanspruchten. Beide Gruppen hatten sich auerhalb der kollektiven Tatsachen und des

gemeinschaftlichen Tuns gestellt. Sie verhielten sich aristokratisch exklusiv. Sie betrachte-

ten die Geschichte und die Masse als hilfloses und zweitklassiges Objekt und rissen alle

Vorrechte der Wertung und des Ordnens an sich.

Die bedeutenden Stile entwuchsen Verhltnissen und Zustnden, deren Charakter und

Kultur bereits bestimmt waren. Anscheinend vermgen Dichter oder Maler dem Dasein

keinen primren Sinn zu verleihen und keine primre Realitt zu bilden. Kunst scheint nur

dann zu reicher Blte sich zu entfalten, wenn die elementaren Probleme, wie sociale

Gliederung, Lebensformen, Anschauung usw., bereits fixiert sind und nur noch bildhaft

besttigt werden sollen. Die idealistisch eingestellten Modernen irrten, da sie whnten, man

knne isoliert und social abgespalten auf imaginativem Weg eine verpflichtende Realitt

erzeugen.

Die Moderne von heute wird vergehen, da sie der socialen Bindung und Normierung er-

mangelt. Diese Kunst wird an autistischer berzchtung und spielerischer Abgespaltenheit

zugrunde gehen.

Die Maler fanden in den tektonischen Formen eine Ersatzkollektive, welche die subjektive

berzchtung beschwichtigen sollte. Sie waren die gleichen Artisten geblieben. Die Suche

nach verpflichtenden Formen verendete in resigniertem Irrtum. Bildtektonik, die keiner

tektonischen Gesellschaft entspricht, ist musikalischer Sport.67

67 Einstein,Fabrikation der Fiktionen,14, 48, 51, 325-326.


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This last quotation touched upon the question Einstein had never before addressed: what was the

bridge from the tectonic picture to the tectonic i.e. the collectivesociety? InDie Fabrikation der

Fiktionenhe finally conceded that there was no such bridge, that it had to work the other way round:

Ein neuer geistiger Stil ist nur nach einer Revolution mglich, die abgenderte sociale Tatsachen

schafft und andere menschliche Typen hervorbrachte. Die Intellektuellen mssen wieder den Sinn

fr ntzliche Mitarbeit gewinnen und die Utopie der sthetisch vollkommenen, doch zwecklosen

Handlung aufgeben. Knstlerische Konventionen sind nur sekundre Folgen von bestimmenden

socialen bereinknften. Von diesen erhalten jene ihren Sinn.68

As the Spanish civil war began in 1936, Einstein must have seen an opportunity for such

ntzliche Mitarbeit , a chance to renew and redeem his life, and he and his wife Lyda set out for

Barcelona, leaving Paris, as he put it to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, sans dire un mot 69. In Spain he

joined the anarcho-syndicalist militia of Buenaventura Durruti, made up of Arbeitern, Proletariernaus den Fabriken und Drfern. A thread connects Einsteins remarks, in a 1936 radio address, on

his experience in the Columna Durutti, with Georges Braqueand the BEB II fragment on the

German revolution written two years earlier. Er [Durruti] hatte das vorgeschichtliche Wort ich

aus der Grammatik verbannt. In der Kolonne Durruti kennt man nur die kollektive Syntax. Die

Kameraden werden die Literaten lehren, die Grammatik im kollektiven Sinn zu erneuern. . . .

Durruti hatte die Kraft der anonymen Arbeit innigst erkannt. Namenlosigkeit und Kommunismus

sind eines70. 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.

What then was left forart? Einstein had already realized that it could at best play a collabora-

tive role in society wenn sie bescheiden an der Produktion einer neuen Wirklichkeit mitarbeitet,

renouncing its privileged status and the delusions of a Sonderutopie71. Yet even as he abandoned

his hopes for modernism he 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

68 Ibid., 32627.

69 Letter of 6 January 1939,Einstein/Kahnweiler Correspondance, 1067.

70 Carl Einstein, Die Kolonne Durruti (November 1936),Werke 3, 520.

71 Einstein,Fabrikation der Fiktionen,327.


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Kunst, which in one outline was projected to encompass five volumes 72. IfDie Fabrikation der

Fiktionenis a cathartic reckoning with his own delusions about modernism, the Handbuch and

another late unfinished project, La trait de la vision, may be partly understood as Einsteins at-

tempt to rethink art, its history, and what he now saw as the failed project of modernism within that

trajectory. In the four folders of notes that can be dated with certainty as postdating Einsteins re-

turn from Spain, bold, impassioned assertion has given way to open-ended inquiry and, for Einstein,

unprecedented modesty.

A detailed outline for the Handbuch shows that, beginning with the Paleolithic Era, it

would trace the evolution of art from a broad-based collective expression to its decline as an elitist,

individualistic one in the modern era.73 In one of the late folders that represents his final thoughts on

the subject, he reflects on the decline of arts power:

Sobald man bewusst darstellte - also zwischenSein u Bildschied, wurde K[unst] indirekter,

elastischer u willkrlicher - die K[unst]W[erke] verloren an Bedeutung u naturgemss an

Tiefe der Wirkung, d[a] die KWs jetzt nur noch Darstellungen, doch nicht mehr Personen

in einem bestimmten Zustand (Tote ) ( ) oder Kraefte waren - die KW unterschieden sich

allerdings vom Gott oder der Person, da sie nur partielle Zustnde oder Kraefte, gewisser-

massen Teile lokalisierten, also nicht so komplex als das lebendige Phnomen waren.

von hier aus die Entkraeftunug der Bilder74

Here Einstein looked to the animist practice he had first described in NegerplastikEs bedeutet

nichts, es symbolisiert nicht; es ist der Gott as thesine qua nonof any socially effective art. As we

have seen, he had attemptedpassionately, desperately, blindlyand utterly failed to constitute

Cubism and Surrealism in the animist image of African art. Where once he had declared that art de-

termined human perception and defined our visual reality, he now acknowledged a fundamental dis-

72 An extensive selection of notes is published inWerke 4, 301-447.

73 Einstein,Werke 4, 304, 308, 309, 312, 317.

74 Images, Einstein adds, were animistisch partiell aktiv eine Position die mit dem Niedergang desAnimism unhaltbar wurde d[as] h[eisst] die Bilder sanken zu Darstellungen herab.

Einstein,Werke 4, 37071. .


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tinction between being and image; Darstellung ist vom Sehen verschieden, he conceded. 75 For him

this meant an irreversible loss of arts presumed former agency.

In notes for his Trait de la vision Einstein now called for empirical research, travaux de

laboratoire, to investigate, through questioning human subjects, such issues as perception, visual

memory, responses to forms76the contrast with the certainties of the Braque book, with its utopi-

an wishful thinking concerning viewer response, could not be greater. Yet this very quest for under-

standing had its melancholy aspect, as Einstein now wondered whether der Versuch die K[unst] in

ihre Wirkung zu praezisieren, ist vielleicht ein Zeichen - dass wir bereits Abschied von ihr genom-

men haben.77

75 Einstein,Werke 4,370.

76 Ibid., 25965.

77 Einstein, Handbuch der Kunst, CEA, microform 242, p. 14.