Carl Einstein (born Karl Einstein)

A member of the Berlin Dadaists and the so-called “dissident” Surrealists in Paris, Einstein was also an influential art critic who transformed the field of African art history. He published more than one hundred articles and six books about art until his premature death while fleeing France during the Nazi occupation.

Einstein moved to Berlin in 1904, studying philosophy and art history at Friedrich-Wilhelm University with Georg Simmel and Heinrich Wölfflin. Prior to the First World War, he published a novella and wrote essays on art, politics, and literature primarily for the leftist periodical Die Aktion. It was Einstein’s 1915 book Negerplastik that first established his position as an important art critic. Published with photographs of African sculptures following Einstein’s text, Negerplastik identified a corpus of African wooden objects from the Belgian and French colonies through his perception of their shared formal characteristics.

After enlisting in the German army in 1914, Einstein sustained a combat injury and was reassigned to the Colonial Department of the civilian administration in Brussels. While in Belgium, in 1916, he developed his second book on African sculpture, which depended on his access to the collections and libraries at the Museum of the Belgian Congo. In Afrikanische Plastik, published in 1921, Einstein attempted to establish historical relationships among various African artistic practices through visual analysis and object dating. These two publications were among the first to acknowledge the role of African art in the formulation of a visual vocabulary for European modern art, particularly Cubism. Einstein’s subsequent writings on the work of the European avant-gardes would continue to wrestle with the core theme of these two books on African objects, namely the role of art in transforming the material conditions of modernity.

After the war, in 1919, Einstein returned to Berlin where he joined the German communist party, engaging in public demonstrations that resulted twice in his arrest. He also forged relationships with the Berlin Dadaists led by artists George Grosz and John Heartfield, and contributed to two of the group’s publications, Die Pleite and Der blutige Ernst. During this time Einstein refined his ideas about modern art, culminating in the 1926 publication Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, a critical survey of modernism that was republished in new editions in 1928 and 1931.

Frustrated with the intellectual and artistic climate in Berlin, and skeptical about Dada’s aesthetic approach, Einstein relocated to Paris in 1928, cofounding the journal Documents with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. In 1931 he began writing his monograph on the Cubist artist Georges Braque, which was released three years later. His last published book during his lifetime, it represents the pinnacle of Einstein’s critical thinking on art as social praxis.

Amid the ongoing rise of fascism in Europe, Einstein lost his belief in the political power of art. By 1935 he had drafted a manuscript entitled Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, indicting the artists and intellectuals with whom he had once surrounded himself as political dilettantes and pseudo-revolutionary frauds, though it remained unpublished until 1971. Einstein turned his criticism into action: that same year, he joined the International Group of the Durutti Column, an anarchist military unit fighting against Fascist forces led by Francisco Franco, as a combatant. Following the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Einstein returned to France and continued work on Handbuch der Kunst, a cross-cultural, transhistorical survey of European modern art in which he argued for its declining social power.

On July 5, 1940, following his internment by the French government after the German invasion, Einstein committed suicide.