Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0003
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's prose from the prewar period. It first considers an issue to which Einstein returns over and over again throughout his prose from the 1910s and the notes he ...
More
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's prose from the prewar period. It first considers an issue to which Einstein returns over and over again throughout his prose from the 1910s and the notes he compiled while writing it: the issue of what he variously called an origin, ground, or essence. It then discusses Einstein's conviction that the origin of anything at all is fundamentally inaccessible; at any one moment that origin is receding away from us as a causal chain whose links disappear back into the infinity of time. It also explores the generative principle of Einstein's prose, arguing that it was a fundamental ambiguity, or double sense, which was going to be a character trait of Einstein's persona: the lost wanderer. It argues that Einstein's personas keep struggling with the groundlessness that summoned them into being in the first place. Finally, the chapter explores essence in relation to Einstein's symbolism, the connection between nonessence and politics, the consequences of fanatic humorism for Einstein's prose, and why he turned from literature to art criticism.Less
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's prose from the prewar period. It first considers an issue to which Einstein returns over and over again throughout his prose from the 1910s and the notes he compiled while writing it: the issue of what he variously called an origin, ground, or essence. It then discusses Einstein's conviction that the origin of anything at all is fundamentally inaccessible; at any one moment that origin is receding away from us as a causal chain whose links disappear back into the infinity of time. It also explores the generative principle of Einstein's prose, arguing that it was a fundamental ambiguity, or double sense, which was going to be a character trait of Einstein's persona: the lost wanderer. It argues that Einstein's personas keep struggling with the groundlessness that summoned them into being in the first place. Finally, the chapter explores essence in relation to Einstein's symbolism, the connection between nonessence and politics, the consequences of fanatic humorism for Einstein's prose, and why he turned from literature to art criticism.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0006
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter focuses on Documents, a magazine cofounded by Carl Einstein with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. It examines how, as his purview broadened under Documents' all-inclusive masthead, ...
More
This chapter focuses on Documents, a magazine cofounded by Carl Einstein with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. It examines how, as his purview broadened under Documents' all-inclusive masthead, Einstein began to probe art history on the lookout for congenial personas. He discovered one in the seventeenth-century printmaker Hercules Segers, whose etchings prompted Einstein to compose a text that, written from a point of indifference, opened itself onto their bottomless vertigo. In turn, Einstein was drawn to central Asian art because of the way in which certain ritual objects became both the map and the territory of nomad art. This chapter also considers Einstein's writings on the work of Pablo Picasso in the later 1920s, with particular emphasis on his argument that Picasso's oeuvre was riven by a “double style” and how he tracked that doubleness both visually and theoretically.Less
This chapter focuses on Documents, a magazine cofounded by Carl Einstein with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. It examines how, as his purview broadened under Documents' all-inclusive masthead, Einstein began to probe art history on the lookout for congenial personas. He discovered one in the seventeenth-century printmaker Hercules Segers, whose etchings prompted Einstein to compose a text that, written from a point of indifference, opened itself onto their bottomless vertigo. In turn, Einstein was drawn to central Asian art because of the way in which certain ritual objects became both the map and the territory of nomad art. This chapter also considers Einstein's writings on the work of Pablo Picasso in the later 1920s, with particular emphasis on his argument that Picasso's oeuvre was riven by a “double style” and how he tracked that doubleness both visually and theoretically.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. ...
More
This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. It argues that Negro Sculpture was not a primitivist manifesto in any of the shopworn modernist senses; it was rather the result of a unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects. Far from abandoning the groundlessness of literature for the origin of art, Einstein instead discovered the former in the latter. This chapter suggests that groundlessness mattered in Negro Sculpture as both method and phenomenology and that Einstein's African sculpture ungrounded itself from the context into which it had been abducted. It also reads Einstein's Negro Sculpture in relation to Adolf von Hildebrand's relief and the freestanding sculpture of Georg Simmel's Auguste Rodin.Less
This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. It argues that Negro Sculpture was not a primitivist manifesto in any of the shopworn modernist senses; it was rather the result of a unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects. Far from abandoning the groundlessness of literature for the origin of art, Einstein instead discovered the former in the latter. This chapter suggests that groundlessness mattered in Negro Sculpture as both method and phenomenology and that Einstein's African sculpture ungrounded itself from the context into which it had been abducted. It also reads Einstein's Negro Sculpture in relation to Adolf von Hildebrand's relief and the freestanding sculpture of Georg Simmel's Auguste Rodin.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0007
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter focuses on Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Pablo Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Carl Einstein. In the later 1920s, Klee's work prompted Einstein to write a ...
More
This chapter focuses on Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Pablo Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Carl Einstein. In the later 1920s, Klee's work prompted Einstein to write a significant amount of art criticism about it, and which was powerful enough to support his argument. Klee became a focus of Einstein's most expansive intellectual project: his theory of “the real.” In Einstein's terminology, the real is not a reality that should be either inhabited or critiqued; it is rather a reality that needs to be actively produced. That production gets under way through an act of ungrounding that Einstein called metamorphotic revolt. This chapter examines how Einstein integrated cosmology into the Nietzschean formalism he had developed in his work on Picasso's surrealism under the rubric of metamorphotic revolt. It also considers the Klee version of Einstein's argument in relation to metamorphosis, myth, revolt, and realism.Less
This chapter focuses on Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Pablo Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Carl Einstein. In the later 1920s, Klee's work prompted Einstein to write a significant amount of art criticism about it, and which was powerful enough to support his argument. Klee became a focus of Einstein's most expansive intellectual project: his theory of “the real.” In Einstein's terminology, the real is not a reality that should be either inhabited or critiqued; it is rather a reality that needs to be actively produced. That production gets under way through an act of ungrounding that Einstein called metamorphotic revolt. This chapter examines how Einstein integrated cosmology into the Nietzschean formalism he had developed in his work on Picasso's surrealism under the rubric of metamorphotic revolt. It also considers the Klee version of Einstein's argument in relation to metamorphosis, myth, revolt, and realism.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0002
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This introduction discusses Carl Einstein's literature, political militancy, and philosophy as well as his career in art criticism and art history. Einstein was an enigma not only to postwar ...
More
This introduction discusses Carl Einstein's literature, political militancy, and philosophy as well as his career in art criticism and art history. Einstein was an enigma not only to postwar academics but also to his own contemporaries. The reviews of Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century were equally numerous and uncomprehending. Some of Einstein's acquaintances provided him with a source of income; others gave him new ideas, a political home, or access to artists and collections. The contexts through which Einstein kept moving never grounded his texts. To the contrary, his perennial shifts from the one to the other worked to sustain their author's groundlessness. The rest of this introduction explores Einstein's politics as discourse, along with its foundation in writing and his claim that anarchism was a profoundly “constructive” endeavor. It also considers groundlessness as the structure of Einstein's writing. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters in this book.Less
This introduction discusses Carl Einstein's literature, political militancy, and philosophy as well as his career in art criticism and art history. Einstein was an enigma not only to postwar academics but also to his own contemporaries. The reviews of Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century were equally numerous and uncomprehending. Some of Einstein's acquaintances provided him with a source of income; others gave him new ideas, a political home, or access to artists and collections. The contexts through which Einstein kept moving never grounded his texts. To the contrary, his perennial shifts from the one to the other worked to sustain their author's groundlessness. The rest of this introduction explores Einstein's politics as discourse, along with its foundation in writing and his claim that anarchism was a profoundly “constructive” endeavor. It also considers groundlessness as the structure of Einstein's writing. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters in this book.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book ...
More
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English. Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His contributions to the surrealist magazine Documents (which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille) including writings on Picasso and Paul Klee, remain unsurpassed in their depth and complexity. In a series of close visual analyses—illustrated with major works by Braque, Picasso, and Klee—the book retrieves the theoretical resources that Einstein brought to bear on their art. It shows us that to rediscover Einstein's art criticism is to see the work of great modernist artists anew through the eyes of one of the most gifted left-wing formalists of the twentieth century.Less
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English. Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His contributions to the surrealist magazine Documents (which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille) including writings on Picasso and Paul Klee, remain unsurpassed in their depth and complexity. In a series of close visual analyses—illustrated with major works by Braque, Picasso, and Klee—the book retrieves the theoretical resources that Einstein brought to bear on their art. It shows us that to rediscover Einstein's art criticism is to see the work of great modernist artists anew through the eyes of one of the most gifted left-wing formalists of the twentieth century.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's writings on the cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Einstein's shift from literature to art criticism was a shift from a nihilist ontology to a hopeful ...
More
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's writings on the cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Einstein's shift from literature to art criticism was a shift from a nihilist ontology to a hopeful one. Braque and Picasso seemed to have completed the wanderer's quest, for they had come up with “an image type that's characteristic of the beginning twentieth century.” Einstein extended his personal project into cubism by converting an ontological predicament into a powerful art-critical term known as Grundkontrast, or foundational contrast, which served him to describe how in their paintings Braque and Picasso “dovetailed the strongest possible representation of volume into the paradox of the surface.” This chapter also discusses what it calls Braque's open cylinder and Picasso's hinge. Finally, it explores Einstein's visual ethics by turning to Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power.Less
This chapter examines Carl Einstein's writings on the cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Einstein's shift from literature to art criticism was a shift from a nihilist ontology to a hopeful one. Braque and Picasso seemed to have completed the wanderer's quest, for they had come up with “an image type that's characteristic of the beginning twentieth century.” Einstein extended his personal project into cubism by converting an ontological predicament into a powerful art-critical term known as Grundkontrast, or foundational contrast, which served him to describe how in their paintings Braque and Picasso “dovetailed the strongest possible representation of volume into the paradox of the surface.” This chapter also discusses what it calls Braque's open cylinder and Picasso's hinge. Finally, it explores Einstein's visual ethics by turning to Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This introduction presents a summary of Carl Einstein's life. Einstein was born on April 26, 1885, in the provincial town of Neuwied in southwest Germany. He received a humanistic education at two ...
More
This introduction presents a summary of Carl Einstein's life. Einstein was born on April 26, 1885, in the provincial town of Neuwied in southwest Germany. He received a humanistic education at two gymnasiums, where he was introduced to ancient mythology. Einstein took classes with Alois Riehl, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Wölfflin, which opened the world of philosophy and art history to him. Wölfflin's Basic Principles of Art History became both a touchstone and a negative foil for his own formalist art criticism. The rest of this introduction discusses Einstein's career as a writer, citing some of his works such as Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century; his visit to Paris; and his participation in a number of major battles including World War I and the Spanish Civil War.Less
This introduction presents a summary of Carl Einstein's life. Einstein was born on April 26, 1885, in the provincial town of Neuwied in southwest Germany. He received a humanistic education at two gymnasiums, where he was introduced to ancient mythology. Einstein took classes with Alois Riehl, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Wölfflin, which opened the world of philosophy and art history to him. Wölfflin's Basic Principles of Art History became both a touchstone and a negative foil for his own formalist art criticism. The rest of this introduction discusses Einstein's career as a writer, citing some of his works such as Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century; his visit to Paris; and his participation in a number of major battles including World War I and the Spanish Civil War.
Ben Etherington
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503602366
- eISBN:
- 9781503604094
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503602366.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 3 considers a range of manifestoes and essays that articulate the primitivist project. Anchoring the discussion with Ernst Bloch’s conception of objective and subjective “nonsynchronicity,” ...
More
Chapter 3 considers a range of manifestoes and essays that articulate the primitivist project. Anchoring the discussion with Ernst Bloch’s conception of objective and subjective “nonsynchronicity,” it goes on to look at the ways in which artists appealed to the remnants of “primitive” societies when forming anticapitalist aesthetic programs that aimed to revive the possibility of primitive experience. It is argued that this program appealed above all to the colonized “conscripts” of capitalist modernity, something clearly in evidence in the early manifestoes and theorizations of “négritude.” Across the board, it is found that the primitivist project was conceptualized in terms of an idealized immediacy that could be reached only by breaking through the mediations of a totalized capitalism. Artists and writers discussed include Carl Einstein, T. E. Lawrence, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, and Alain Locke.Less
Chapter 3 considers a range of manifestoes and essays that articulate the primitivist project. Anchoring the discussion with Ernst Bloch’s conception of objective and subjective “nonsynchronicity,” it goes on to look at the ways in which artists appealed to the remnants of “primitive” societies when forming anticapitalist aesthetic programs that aimed to revive the possibility of primitive experience. It is argued that this program appealed above all to the colonized “conscripts” of capitalist modernity, something clearly in evidence in the early manifestoes and theorizations of “négritude.” Across the board, it is found that the primitivist project was conceptualized in terms of an idealized immediacy that could be reached only by breaking through the mediations of a totalized capitalism. Artists and writers discussed include Carl Einstein, T. E. Lawrence, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, and Alain Locke.
Gabriele Brandstetter
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199916559
- eISBN:
- 9780199370108
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199916559.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
The dance costume appears—either by revealing the body and its expressive movement or by transforming the form into a figuration of abstraction—as a medium of metamorphosis and simultaneously as an ...
More
The dance costume appears—either by revealing the body and its expressive movement or by transforming the form into a figuration of abstraction—as a medium of metamorphosis and simultaneously as an indicator of a specific aesthetic when combined with dance as a mimetic art of expression in “cultic soul dance”; or abstraction and constructivism in the “aesthetic masquerade” of scenic “sculptural costumes,” which mask the dancer’s body. This chapter examines the subject of dance costume and spatial sculpture in these terms. It considers the work of Loïe Fuller, Stéphane Mallarmé, Mariano Fortuny, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Léon Bakst, Carl Einstein, and Oskar Schlemmer.Less
The dance costume appears—either by revealing the body and its expressive movement or by transforming the form into a figuration of abstraction—as a medium of metamorphosis and simultaneously as an indicator of a specific aesthetic when combined with dance as a mimetic art of expression in “cultic soul dance”; or abstraction and constructivism in the “aesthetic masquerade” of scenic “sculptural costumes,” which mask the dancer’s body. This chapter examines the subject of dance costume and spatial sculpture in these terms. It considers the work of Loïe Fuller, Stéphane Mallarmé, Mariano Fortuny, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Léon Bakst, Carl Einstein, and Oskar Schlemmer.
