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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.