The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was at the forefront of the modernist movement that defined the twentieth century. One of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators on cubism, he was also among the first authors to assess African sculpture as art. Yet his writings remain relatively little known in the Anglophone world. With A Mythology of Forms, the first representative collection of Einstein’s art theory and criticism to appear in English translation, Charles W. Haxthausen fills this gap. Spanning three decades, it assembles the most important of Einstein’s writings on the art that was central to his critical project—on cubism, surrealism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee, and includes the full texts of his two pathbreaking books on African art, Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921). With fourteen texts by Einstein, each presented with extensive commentary, A Mythology of Forms will bring a pivotal voice in the history of modern art into English.

A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art

Arts & Photography

Einstein, Carl

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (His Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, 4) (German Edition)

Rowohlt

In diesem im Original 1921 erschienenen Werk beschreibt Einstein die afrikanische Plastik mit zahlreichen Bildern.

Afrikanische Plastik (German Edition)

Salzwasser-Verlag Gmbh

La escultura negra y otros escritos (Spanish Edition)

Editorial GG

Con motivo de la exposición Piedad y terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica, el Museo Reina Sofía ha editado una publicación con ensayos de los comisarios T. J. Clark y Anne M. Wagner, así como de Jeremy Melius y Marisa García Vergara. El volumen cuenta también con una selección de textos de época, traducidos y reimpresos para la ocasión, de autores como Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, Anthony Blunt y Roland Penrose, entre otros.

Piedad y terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica

READ, HERBERT

PENROSE, Roland

LEIRIS, MICHEL

Clark, T.J.

Blunt, Anthony

García Vergara, Marisa

Wagner, Anne M.

BATAILLE, Georges

Melius, Jeremy

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

"There is hardly any other art which Europeans approach with so much mistrust as African art. The first move is to even deny that there is such a thing as ‘art’, and then to emphasise the distance which separates such products from the creations of the Europeans, with a contempt that leads to demeaning terminology […] In his judgements on the Negroes the European retains one major postulate: his invincible, however exaggerated, superiority. Such disrespect for the Negro is de facto born of our ignorance and the source of the unjust harm done to him." Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was a pivotal figure in the development of European modernism that occurred during the years leading up to World War I. With the short, dense and revolutionary text of Negro Sculpture, Einstein undertook the first (European) critical response to African sculpture, challenging various prejudices and misconceptions around this subject. It would quickly become a crucial text for the European avant-garde and today remains indispensable to understand the shift in discussion towards non-European art taking place at the time. Originally published in 1915, the complete text of Negro Sculpture is presented in English translation here for the first time, including all 108 original plates. Patrick Healy, writer and philosopher, currently works as a senior researcher at the Technical University Delft. He lives in Amsterdam. Healy's forthcoming translations for November Editions include Carl Einstein’s Bébuquin and a revised edition of the selected writings of Karl Kraus, In These Great Times.

Negro Sculpture

November Editions

‘I am a mirror, a motionless puddle glittering with reflected gaslight. But has a mirror ever mirrored itself?’ Bebuquin is the first and only novel of Carl Einstein, arguably the most influential art critic of the early-twentieth century. An anarchist, street fighter and European intellectual of astonishing range, Einstein was hailed as the ‘prophet of the avant-garde’. The novel charts the young Giorgio Bebuquin’s hallucinatory journey through the Museum of Cheap Thrills in search of a way to smash the boundaries of logic and causality. Exploding all narrative conventions Bebuquin is an experimental tour de force, indispensable to understanding the development of literary Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism. Translated into English by Patrick Healy, the present edition also features an introduction, a chronology of Einstein’s life and the original German text, first published in 1912. ‘Einstein had it, he really was at the top.’ Gottfried Benn

Bebuquin: or the Dilettantes of the Miracle

Literature & Fiction

Literary

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