Carl Einstein's History Without Names From Geology To The Masses

Henri Breuil at the foot of a
large geological section, 1935.

Album no. 3, Breuil Archives,
Muséum national d’histoire
naturelle.
72 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00189
Carl Einstein’s History
without Names:
From Geology to the Masses
MARIA STAVRINAKI
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY ZOE STILLPASS
Our wondrous civilization is the result of the silent efforts of millions of

unknown men, as the chalk cliffs of England are formed of the contributions
of myriads of foraminifera.1
In the 1930s, the art historian and critic Carl Einstein set out to write a different
kind of art history. Previously focusing on the art of his own time, authoring
dozens of texts on contemporary artists and up to three versions of his opus Die
Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the Twentieth Century, 1926/1928/1931),
Einstein changed his approach and attempted to understand society, and the func-
tion of art in it, through the longue durée (or, as he put it, die lange Zeit) of art
history. He did not cease, however, to immerse himself in the history of the present.2
Around 1931 or 1932 he compulsively began writing several art history books,
none of which he completed. Instead of naming artists in these books, Einstein
examined supra-individual visual and social laws. He situated these laws at the
origin of art and considered them essential to the making of human history. Then,
from 1936 until 1939, he volunteered to participate in the Spanish Civil War. These
two decisions were not contradictory. For, as we shall see, Einstein’s presentist
approach to history—his antihistoricist conviction, shared by many historians and
philosophers of this period and later on, that history is not written once and for all
but always depends on the historian’s present—led him both to write his anonymous
art histories and to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was convinced that together
these two experiences, one cold and the other ardent, one contemplative and the
other active, one detached and the other participatory, were in the process of replac-
ing the modern “I” with a whole and primitive “we.” For Einstein, the primitive
“we” necessitated a history without names.
This essay extends revisionist accounts of Einstein undertaken by European and
Grey Room 62, Winter 2016, pp. 72–101. © 2016 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 73
American historians in the last ten to fifteen years.3 In the 1970s, the first readings,
which should not be disregarded, took a mostly Marxist approach.4 Recent inter-
pretations have taken into consideration poststructuralist philosophy and anthro-
pology, leading to some innovative hypotheses on themes that have structured
Einstein’s thought since Negerplastik (1915), his inaugural essay on African art.5
In order to expand on these recent interpretations, by stressing the essential part
that the political aspects of Einstein’s thought play in his overall conceptual project,
as well as on research that for the last twenty years has explored artistic practices
and discourse through the lens of temporality, I would like to focus on a blind spot
in the study of Einstein and in self-reflexive art-historical research in general. I will
examine a historical paradigm that emerged at the beginning of the 1930s not only
in Einstein’s work but in other fields such as history, ethnology, and philosophy as
well as in numerous artists’ works. This paradigm takes the longue durée approach
to history, and in so doing, it disregards proper names.6 The paradigm unfolds in
Einstein’s thought like a game of varying time scales that overlap and stretch from
stable geology to the fleeting present, and from ostensibly semi-stable societal
structures to the individual as microscopic agent of history. What were the episte-
mological and philosophical premises of such a paradigm? What were its political
aspects? Quite simply, what conception of art undergirded this turn toward the
longue durée, and how did it differ from the modernist paradigm that Einstein, a
major formalist theoretician, previously developed in his texts on art?
To answer these questions, this essay descends through a series of layers. I begin
by connecting Einstein’s functionalist understanding of art objects and social
relations to contemporary ethnological interpretations of material culture. I then
consider what Einstein understood to be the basic functionality of art: its status as
a fiction and its ability as fiction to expand human beings beyond the limits of their
present. Questions of temporality bring us to the essay’s third and fourth sections,
which further explore Einstein’s understandings of temporality: in particular, the
contrast of biological and art-historical time scales and the ability of artistic fictions
to intervene in human history. Intervention was a crucial issue for Einstein, and
the penultimate section connects his work on the history of art to politics, specif-
ically his critique of fascism. I conclude by contrasting Einstein’s proposal for art
history without names with an earlier, related project: that of Heinrich Wölfflin.
Functionalism in Art History

From 1932 to 1939 Einstein worked intermittently on a Handbook of Art (Handbuch
der Kunst). The exact dating of the manuscript remains uncertain, although we can
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assume that Einstein stopped writing to participate in the Spanish Civil War.7 We
have only a rough draft of this manuscript, which is often repetitive, disorganized,
and was obviously written without a structured outline. Nonetheless, the scattered
pages of the Handbook of Art form a coherent historical “narrative” and, above all,
a precise epistemological project. The Handbook of Art is both a genetic process
and a palpable object.
When Einstein began this project, many parameters had changed since the first
handbooks of a universal history of art. First, the universality in question had
greatly extended its reach. For example, in his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, first
published in 1842, Franz Kugler considered Celtic and Germanic monuments as
humanity’s first aesthetic contributions.8 Only later in the nineteenth century did
prehistory emerge as a scholarly field in light of geological and paleontological
discoveries such as human fossils. The experience of constant temporal expansion
into the depths of history became even more stupefying with the discovery of pre-
historic art.9 This radical reevaluation of the very notion and the scales of history
extended Einstein’s speculations back by hundreds of thousands of years. At the
same time that he greatly increased the age of his objects, Einstein also widened
their geographic scope. Einstein was one of the main proponents in Europe of
recognizing the aesthetic value of ethnographic artifacts. But all of these differ-
ences are secondary in comparison to the major methodological turning point rep-
resented by Einstein’s Handbook—foregrounded by the designation as a handbook
of art and not a handbook of art history—namely, the shift from fetishistic objects
to their anonymous producers.
Why did Einstein omit the term history? He certainly did not mean to eliminate
the historicity of art. On the contrary, Einstein simply intended to complete the
task that the modern artists he supported had undertaken in their artworks: to fight
against the modern reification and fetishism of symbolic objects. Remembering the
Marxist lesson on commodity fetishism, he decided to write a history of people as
producers and consumers of symbolic objects rather than a history of these objects
detached from the processes of their production and their use. Einstein wrote, “Art
history has a distinctive feature: it provides a description of objects that succeed
each other in time instead of presenting events and actions. Man disappears behind
objects, which instead of explaining him, hide him. Thus, we present as history
something that looks more like a morphology of minerals.”10 In short, art history,
which “mineralized” and therefore deadened its objects, seemed as if it had never
broken off from natural history, which had provided a taxonomic model for the
first classifications of art in the eighteenth century.11 The nationalist and racist
Stavrinaki | Carl Einstein’s History without Names: From Geology to the Masses 75
presumptions of the nineteenth century did not make matters any better.12 For,
according to Einstein, art historians invented “geographic units” to explain the
“birth” and affiliations of artworks, which they rooted deeply in the soil. In attempt-
ing to describe the supposedly natural morphological characteristics of artworks,
art history had paradoxically sucked the life out of them, petrifying them.
Einstein therefore formulated what we may call an alternative sociological
model which no longer rooted artworks in national identity or in the racial body
but rather in the functional interweaving of social life. This sociological approach
to artworks parallels closely the strategies developed at the same time by anthro-
pologists to understand ethnographic artifacts. Just as Einstein strove to write an
art history that replaced autonomous objects with the action of the human beings
who created the objects, the first French field ethnologists from Marcel Griaule to
Michel Leiris (who worked between literature and ethnology) also wanted to avoid
reifying objects within their ethnographic accounts of Africa.13 After all, these were
the very objects once considered fetishes: first in the religious sense and then
(through their formal appropriation by the avant-gardes) in the aesthetic sense.14
In contrast, by the 1930s French ethnologists aimed to document artifacts by
placing them in the proper “operational sequences” and by gathering (through
writing and multifarious means of reproduction) information about their prove-
nances and their uses. This new generation of ethnologists, philosophically
indebted to Marcel Mauss, believed it was important to reconnect each object
to “techniques of the body,” techniques that enhanced and extended the body.15
Griaule, in the magazine Documents, had already criticized archeologists and aes-
thetes who, when observing pottery, “will admire the form of a handle, but they
will studiously avoid studying the attitude of the drinking and asking themselves
why, among many peoples, it is shameful to drink while standing up.”16 In 1936,
André Leroi-Gourhan added, “The object ceases to be an exotic oddity for the
Sunday visitor. In the field we noted all the particularities of its birth, its kinships.
It left its country of origin and took its milieu with it.”17 Like Einstein, Leroi-Gourhan,
who had trained at the Ethnographic Museum in Paris, believed that even the most
minor object could embody entire disciplines. Describing the demands of team
fieldwork, Leroi-Gourhan defined the object as “the crossroads of the disciplines at
work within ethnology.”18 For both Leroi-Gourhan and Einstein, the process
of functionalization affected not only the ethnological or the art-historical object of
study but the fundamental structure of disciplines themselves.
Turning from ethnographic artifacts to works of art, we can see how Einstein
displaced artworks from the forefront of his history and instead focused on the
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people who, by producing and consuming these artworks, acted through them. In
so doing, Einstein hoped to develop a social and, above all, an active art history.
As he wrote his Handbook, he fanatically pursued one goal, to the point of obsession:
to succeed in grasping his art-historical objects through their multiple and inter-
woven functions—symbolic, social, political, and (to a much lesser extent) eco-
nomic. Every artwork became a synecdoche for the discipline of art history, as if
Einstein wanted to examine the sociological, functionalist premise from every
angle, to study it both as object and method, and so to push art history toward an
endless epistemological functionalization.
Einstein’s functionalism manifested itself even in the title and the initial orga-
nization of his project. A “handbook of art” means a text with a practical aim; in
this case, the aim of gaining a new understanding of art history. Einstein planned
for his Handbook to comprise five volumes, of which only the first would include
historiographic writing. Significantly, this initial volume imagined history in a
very schematic fashion. Not obeying any criteria of periodization or geography, it
filtered these criteria through more conceptual axes, such as the anonymous or the
individual, the magical or the aesthetic, the religious or the political, the role of
the artist, and so on.19 He conceived the other volumes as annexes, which through
their objectivity, accuracy, and impersonality would expand on the main text
while attesting to its soundness. The four annexes were to include a geographic
atlas, a volume devoted to the diachronic and synchronic dating of humanity’s
artistic production, a collection of images, and an anthology of sources. Together,
these volumes would form a documentary composite. The volumes, in relation to
Einstein’s text, were supposed to play the same role that various documents such
as maps, record forms, photographs, films, sound recordings, and so on, were
meant to play in relation to the objects and attitudes observed by field ethnologists
of the same period. Einstein intended the four volumes to be as objective and
impersonal as ethnological studies.
The functionalization of art history entailed the application of a schematic
history organized into large units that extracted objects from the flow of time in order
to fix them in the relative immobility of the longue durée. While this might appear
paradoxical, Einstein was, after all, the one who had pursued the present to the
extent that he wrote three versions of the art history of his time (Die Kunst des 20.
Jahrhunderts) from 1926 to 1931. But by the mid-1930s, his approach consisted in
flying over the whole history of the species, from prehistory to his own time. From
this kind of “aerial photograph” of the vast history of symbolic artifacts, he hoped
to obtain a reliable view of the dynamics of history as a whole. This view, to use
Fernand Braudel’s later expression, could clear away events whose “crests of foam”
Braudel considered “the most capricious, the most deceptive form of time.”20 And
like Braudel, Einstein hoped to identify social structures (conjonctures) and the
rhythm of historical evolution through major turning points and the dynamics of
their tensions. He preferred this longue durée approach partly because he wanted
to anchor the destabilizing current events of his era and also, most likely, to protect
himself from the anxiety generated by these events.21
What clarifications could the long history of humanity provide for the years
1932, 1933, and 1939? Above all, Einstein noticed one particular human charac-
teristic: humanity’s insatiable need, in every region and at every age, to invent
fictions. This need for fiction drove men and women to act as historical subjects
and, quite simply, to become “human.” The function of art was to respond to this
need for fiction.
The Anthropological Function of Art: Fictions against the Economical Present

“Why do we need such a mass of visual fiction?” Einstein asked.22 He began to ques-
tion the incalculable quantity of visual artworks produced by humanity. In so
doing, he used an approach opposite to that of historicism—an approach we could
call functionalist. But this was a functionalism far more abstract than the ethno-
graphic contextualization of artifacts. For rather than attempting to date, locate,
designate, affiliate, and classify, Einstein attempted to generalize the irreducible
utility of visual fiction for the human species. Contrary to any rationalist under-
standing of utility, the overabundant accumulation of artworks throughout history
clearly showed that the human practice of creating visual fictions was profoundly
uneconomical, literally excessive. As Einstein wrote, “Art begins with the maximum
superstructure [einem Maximum an Überbau]—the maximum interpretation—see
the world of the primitives—self-projection is done completely uneconomically—
the maximum value and symbolism will be projected onto objects where sensa-
tions will be (un)loaded.”23 This excess of art was utterly different from the
self-destructive notion of expenditure advocated by Georges Bataille, Einstein’s
collaborator in the journal Documents.24 For Einstein, human beings’ uneconomi-
cal activity was hardly sacrificial; it was highly pragmatic. This “self-projection”
in visual fictions allowed human beings not only to protect themselves from their
overwhelming sensations but to launch themselves into the future, generating a
track extending out from a compact environment. Fictions allowed human beings
to challenge the constraints of the world and the limits of the present. For Einstein,
art dealt with
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a fear of death (the will to endure) and the guarantee of reproduction. Thus,
man feels instinctively threatened—anxiety and sexuality consume him—
and the dissatisfaction with (the relationships between) him and the world,
an unstable dissatisfaction, pervades his idea of the future, a need for change
and for a future.25
We can therefore explain this uneconomical activity of art described by Einstein
as a temporal surplus that exceeds the narrowness of the economical present
determined by strict necessity and preservation. Einstein wrote, “When a surplus
of anxiety and sexuality incites making art . . . we reach a perfection in which man
is no longer satisfied with spontaneous action and in which man not only lives,
but in which he also remembers and projects.”26 Mindless, instinctive reactions
would always be bound within the constraints of the present. But humanity’s fic-
tionalizing activity or, as Einstein would call it, man’s work of signs, provided an
escape from the present into the past and the future, which, according to his logic,
are the two most uneconomical orders of time.
For Einstein, the work of signs defined man’s place in the world and his relation
to higher and lower orders of being. Einstein explained that
man founded a world of signs. A table therefore exists as a thing, a sensation,
a word, an image–the being, the sensations are overwhelmed with shadows
and reflections, formed by man and appreciated more than the things them-
selves. In the world of things we place a display of signs that obtains a life
equal to that of things.27
He also evoked
the countless myths where the world is described as the excrement of the
gods—in the same way that we can call signs man’s excrements. He creates
signs as a voluntary generation, as if he wanted to make himself independent
of the happenstance of generation, and he wears himself out forming signs,
shadows and doubles.28
Human beings responded to the random nature of biological procreation by
generating their own fictional creations, the fruits of their own arbitrary decisions.
Fictional arbitrariness was the human response to the blind arbitrariness of nature.
Unlike the animals from which they descended, human beings could not be
reduced to pure instinct: they did not live in the present, and they were not satis-
fied with biological procreation. Human survival and human biological procreation
required much more than simple preservation and were therefore fundamentally
unnatural. They depended on fiction.29
Einstein was not the only person at the time to formulate an anthropological
theory of art. In the work of Henri Bergson and German philosophical anthropolo-
gist Arnold Gehlen (to focus on just two contemporary examples) the same anthro-
pological turn was taking place.30 As history was becoming progressively deeper,
human “nature” seemed more indeterminate than ever. Rapid advancements in
technology (an artificial system different from that of art) further accentuated the
indeterminacy of human nature. What exactly was the point of those fictions on
which human beings so avidly thrived? What role did fiction play in the exchange
between the individual and society? How could one distinguish between good and
bad fictions?
Bergson explored the idea of a “fabulation function” or a “myth-making func-
tion” in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). This “function”
pointed to the exclusive ability of human beings to invent fictions that they
themselves believe. This function first produced religion and more recently pro-
duced art. Bergson noticed that “homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with
reason” was also “the only creature to pin its existence to things unreasonable.”31
This paradoxical interdependence between reason and unreason was unique to
human beings. Embodied in the “fabulation function,” unreason compensated
for the flaws in reason. The difference between man and animal came down to
the gap, or the “interval” in Bergson’s words, between a goal and the act of reach-
ing that goal. While animals were endowed with an instinct that drove them
straight toward their goals, human beings possessed undetermined reason that
exposed them to the unexpected, to the worst as well as to the best. “An animal is
sure of itself. In its case nothing intervenes between aim and act.”32 For Bergson,
this uncertainty allowed human beings to coordinate several means, but always
with a view to “a remote end.” Uncertainty does not force human beings to
undertake what they were programmed to do but rather to do what they have not
fully mastered. Bergson concluded, “Between what it does and the result it wants
to attain there is more often than not, both in space and in time, an interval which
leaves ample room for accident.”33 The fabulation function works in this interval
to compensate for a lack of immediate results. By creating mental images that
filled in for reality, the fabulation function made action just as preformed for
human beings as instinct did for animals. The Bergsonian “interval” corresponds
to Einstein’s uneconomical time; that is, the extension of time toward the past
and the future.
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Similarly, in his magnum opus, Man, His Nature and Place in the World (Der
Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt; 1940), Gehlen defined human
beings as “deficient beings” (Mängelwesen) who had suffered a setback compared
to their primate relatives.34 Like Einstein, Gehlen argued that human experience
is a break in time, a “hiatus” through which culture separates actions and drives.
But the similarities between the theories of Gehlen and Einstein stop there.
While both Gehlen and Einstein were nostalgic for stable forms that could
restrain the dangerous force of the contemptible bourgeois liberalism of their
time, the two thinkers characterized these forms differently. Gehlen’s under-
standing of the human as a “deficient being” led him to conclude that man is also
a “being of discipline” (Zuchtwesen). He wrote that this general discipline
included “education and self-discipline, subordination and direction, activity and
work directed away from oneself,” all of which were in keeping with National
Socialist ideology.35
Einstein’s uneconomical definition of human time also related to the rise of
fascism (which effectively combined economical work and uneconomical fictions)
but was meant as a revolt against it. More than a decade prior, in 1919, Einstein had
interpreted the Russian revolution as a messianic interruption of uninterrupted
time, as if the present came to shine through in all its plenitude.36 In the 1930s, at
the time of the debates about the potlatch in the intellectual and artistic circles
around Mauss and the failure of Marxist rationalism to respond to fascist fictions,
Einstein gave an additional, more urgent meaning to the temporality of the inter-
val.37 Referencing Marxism, he argued that the economical “present” was inade-
quate for human beings. Moreover, human beings had a real need to produce
fictions in order to survive. This was because the production of fictions connected
the past and the future and so filled a gap in the present. Without intervals, man
was doomed to become either a purely rationalist being or a purely fascist being.
Einstein thus appears to have begun to consider the process of hominization
because of the emerging risk of “de-hominization.” If human beings had always
needed to dream collectively, as Einstein often wrote in lamenting the solitary
dreams of his time, how exactly were the collective dreams of fascism and Nazism
harmful? In his Handbook of Art he attempted to understand the role of fiction
during a period even earlier than the time of oral tradition grasped in myths and
legends.38 Einstein went as far back as the first gestures—gestures that had not
always left a trace but had helped human beings to escape animality and resist the
blind force of nature. To understand the present, and humanity’s ability to act in
that present, deeper scales of history were needed.
The Game of Scales in Art History: A History of the Tragic
According to Einstein, art does not originate from perfection, as many claimed.
Rather, art originates from a flaw, and the means to fix this flaw are notoriously
artificial and extremely precarious. Determined to prove that art performed an
active part in human survival, Einstein expanded his research to include a period
when fictions took on a crucial role in the process of hominization.
The history of art gives us relatively little information about the history of
men—his important inventions like fire and agriculture are unknown history
for us—tools—(therefore we wonder if “artistic evolution” does not actually
hide a cessation of time, if evolution is not illusion, or in the best-case
scenario, man’s revolt against stability, but which considered from a biologi-
cal standpoint, would be, despite everything, a revolt in vain.)39
Before art history was a history linked to the invention of tools, fire, and the domes-
tication of space and time. Art history, which since its institutional founding in
the nineteenth century had studied the evolution of styles, seemed insignificant
compared to this great history of technology. On the scale of the evolution of the
species, art history looked minute, like a brief cessation of time. Einstein managed
to fly over history while simultaneously focusing on a particular historical period,
one that had left few material traces behind. He did this by evaluating human
beings’ fictions not according to their quantity and visible changes but according
to their effectiveness. Seen from a certain height, the styles of art had not really
varied. The history of artistic styles was as stationary as the biological evolution
of the species from the time of the Altamira cave paintings to the 1930s.
Einstein explained, “The art that we know of only spans a short interval during
which we no longer fundamentally changed at the biological level.” He then
concluded, “At bottom, art history is the chronicle of very minor accomplish-
ments of which we greatly exaggerate the meaning from our close, always more
microscopic perspective.”40
Einstein was exaggerating. His hyperbole was itself a form of “large scale”
rhetoric that crushed the object it described. Einstein practiced an uncompromis-
ing relativism, a kind of vanitas vanitatum in which the absolute authority no
longer emanated from God but from anthropological and even geological history.
Evaluated on the scale of human biological evolution between the Altamira period
and the twentieth century, the evolution of styles was reduced to nothing. The
geological scale was even more merciless. Einstein wrote,
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That the change in representation only partially lends itself to be confined as
a change in view is implied by the fact that we can observe a relative con-
stancy of styles . . . in other words, a permanent and regressive return of the
latter . . . in other words, in the end, the history of representation is extremely
limited compared to biological history: 10,000: three million years.41
Art history as practiced since Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors,
and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times used a microscopic scale determined
by human beings’ own standards or, in Vasari’s case, the standards of the “genius”
artist. Similar to linear perspective (which imposed a deeply humanist view of
space), the microhistorical scale imposed a deeply humanist view of time. This
scale proved incapable of getting to the heart of the deep time of geology and of the
hominization process.
Einstein argued that art historians should proceed like geologists and physicists
whose time scales purely and simply ignored the “human parameter.” He affirmed,
When we write the history of the earth we immediately admit that man’s
influence on the planet he inhabits is so negligible that we don’t count it. In
the same way, when we talk about physics . . . we admit that these processes
necessarily and inevitably take place in a certain way in which man cannot
change anything.42
By means of an objectivity comparable to that of scientists, art historians should
escape from their “too human” perspective. This antagonism between a too human
history and natural history was not new; it goes back to the time when thinkers
such as the Comte de Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc) began to apprehend the
longue durée of the history of the earth. Buffon compared the selective written his-
tory of “all those supposed heroes” to natural history, which “embraces all spaces
equally, all times, and has no limits other than those of the universe.”43 Much later,
the Darwinist Edgar Quinet would go as far as predicting with unperturbed
certainty the end of humanity’s civil history, which appeared tiny compared to the
sovereignty of geological history.44 But Einstein’s game of scales had an aim
completely opposed to Quinet’s Darwinist objective. Unlike natural scientists,
whose objective measures confirmed the impassible magnitude of nature, the art
historian could at once escape from his microscopic, “too human” perspective and
gain access to an activity—the invention of fictions—that could counter this
impassible magnitude.
Initially, Einstein evoked the genetic processes in biology by which the human
being appeared as a simple “bit of nature,” much like a plant. He wrote that in
biology “man ‘evolves,’ but he isn’t made; genetically, he seems to us like a piece
of fate.”45 Einstein’s reference to “fate” is important here, for it relates directly to
his ideas about the limits of human action in the world. When human beings
appeared, biologically speaking, the “tragic” came with them—a concept that had
structured the philosophy of history and art in Germany since Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.46 For Einstein, the macro-
scopic, biological sciences represented the fatum—natural determinism—while
fiction contained that “tiny chance of freedom” that was the human lot.47 Einstein
was drawing on the dialectical mechanism of the “tragic” (as elaborated by Schelling)
but extended the conflict of Greek tragedy to human history as a process and as a
whole.48 According to Schelling, the tragic hero confirmed his freedom by hope-
lessly revolting against the certainty of his fate. Man’s privilege was to revolt
against fate, even if this revolt was known to fail. According to Einstein, fictions
were the hopeless revolts of humanity against the impassible and indifferent
constraints of nature, including political power. In this way, art history, which
Einstein had blamed for reifying and for being reified, suddenly became the ulti-
mate active history. “We observe man here not as a fatal piece of nature, but as a
voluntary and creative organism.”49
The Potential of the Avant-Garde

More precisely, art history had the potential to become the ultimate active history.
Neither geology nor biology was to Einstein’s mind a foundational science. While
in their biological history human beings evolved, in art history they were made.
And while geological history entirely overlooked the human parameter and unfolded
just as blindly as destiny, art as the ultimate fictional activity remained for Einstein
a privileged revolt against this destiny, “therefore introducing will and fatality.”
That is, geology and biology were necessary as reminders of natural and political
constraints, as indispensable factors against which human beings decided to fight
or not, as one of the two indispensable poles (along with human beings them-
selves), that produced the tension and the dialectics of human history. Created by
human beings, artworks had no autonomy but were incorporated into what resem-
bles an interminable process of hominization.
But these artworks gain a special meaning for us because we created them
ourselves, and they are inconceivable without man’s action. . . . Man and art-
works are inevitably connected to each other. Man, it appears, as long as he is
84 Grey Room 62
man, has the drive of art, he cannot help himself from making art whether it’s
good or bad; in other words, art is a part of nature that evolves from a fatal
form to a desired form.50
Einstein sketched, in a rather essentialist manner, the process that the prehistorian
Leroi-Gourhan would begin to analyze at the end of World War II; namely, the way
that human beings became human through the invention of tools, language, and
art. Since human beings lacked anatomical specialization, they were continuously
“exuded” by their evolving bodies and brains. In other words, tools, language, and
art became a part of these evolutionary processes, thereby extending them.51
Einstein specified the way in which the artificial was incorporated into the natural
among human beings:
Art is introduced there where we find the organized human existence.
Life in itself already means organization, existence in a particular form;
art is a part of our vital organization, it binds certain actions. Thus, just as we
sometimes fix our sensations in memories, we fix significant visual shocks
in images.52
As a constant observer of the avant-gardes and an experienced theorist of the
formative power that the composition of plastic signs can have over vision,
Einstein presented the practice of “visual shock” as anthropologically necessary.
He might eventually give up the present of the twentieth century, but he did so
with the goal of fixing this present in duration. Maintaining an axiologically
neutral position, Einstein never took a clear stance on the effectiveness of the
avant-gardes’ creations. Had they succeeded in attaching their fictions to human
perception? Over the years he wrote his Handbook, he never recorded a judgment
in its pages. Not one artist’s name appears in it either. This double absence is par-
ticularly telling. Einstein maintained his axiological neutrality and omission of
names in order to save the genuinely creative aspects of the present by protecting
them against what he now considered its excesses. Creation and stabilizing fixa-
tion, shock and habit, were the two poles necessary for human survival. Einstein
concluded that classifying art as only creation was ultimately a “modern preju-
dice.” He argued that art is “above all fixation and herein lies its deeply conserva-
tive nature.”53 Had avant-garde art succeeded in “fixing,” or had it vanished in the
vortex of endless novelties?54
Nevertheless, the fluctuation between creation and fixation that determined the
rhythm of history as a whole was not less dangerous for Einstein himself than it
was for artists. Could there be more tangible proof of this process of functionalist
dissolution of art history than the Handbook of Art itself?55 On every page of this
unfinished manuscript in which Einstein obsessively repeated his thoughts over
the years, we can sense the instability of this dissolution expressed with a mod-
ernist self-reflexivity. The Handbook of Art was for Einstein what symbolic ges-
tures were for the first human beings: constructing the handbook in large units on
a large time scale helped him protect himself from the temporal and spatial anxiety
of his time. Without a doubt, this overview of the global history of symbolic arti-
facts helped him understand the fascist alliance between politics and aesthetics.
Also like the first human beings, the Handbook of Art left only a few remains, the
rest having been carried away by life and history.
Sociology and Longue Durée Social History: The Political Functions of Art
During the 1930s, Einstein tended to be much more interested in art as a means of
preservation than as a producer of novelty, of normality rather than of exception.
And even when he was interested in “novelty,” he contested the notion that it arose
from exceptional individuals, such as the members of the avant-gardes. Even
novelties needed large social structures for their diffusion and objectification. How
did Einstein formulate this epistemological turn from novelty to preservation and
from the individual to society? And how was this turn related to the (tragic) game
of scales? Finally, what were its more specific, historical motivations?
Einstein believed that the most ancient objects enabled their users to stabilize
their experience for long periods of time. For Einstein, this stabilization had both a
biological value and an inseparable social value. He wrote, “Production at the
beginning of artistic history appears collective. Individuals are hardly prominent.
Once the form of representation is found, it remains relatively fixed; that is, the
historical constants operate for an extremely long time.”56 In the depths of prehis-
tory, the biological and social stabilization of the species occurred collectively, just
as the invariability of the forms would suggest. As Émile Durkheim showed when
he equated society with constraint (an argument that greatly influenced Einstein
and his circle of ethnologists in France), individuals were considered insignificant
actors in themselves, in comparison to the importance of social structures, includ-
ing the symbolic structure of style. Following this tradition of thought, Fernand
Braudel would later define the longue durée as falling under the constraining
structure of mental frameworks from which individuals could never completely
escape.57 For Einstein, the seriality and repetition of forms were the two social
attributes of the same type of art that reproduced its objects in several copies.58 His
study of primitive civilizations convinced him that certain social structures were
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more subject to social automatism and to the restrictions of consciousness, just as
he had affirmed many times about Western contemporary society in his book on
Georges Braque.59 Moreover, the historiography concerned with humanity’s first
artistic practices—such as the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain—had emphasized
the constancy of artistic forms.60
Since Einstein believed that such collectivist periods of human existence (pre-
history, protohistory, Middle Ages, or the 1930s) warranted a distinct sociological
approach, he advocated a kind of methodological relativism. According to this
approach, each era should prescribe its method to the historian and not the other
way around. Einstein explained,
We practice early history as a kind of sociology, the major fundamental
elements will be understood and described in a condensed way; time rarely
moves only ahead . . . it sometimes seems as if history never accelerates,
rather we repeat rules made by the gods, the constants of domination, social
structure, the veneration of the gods, and artistic canons; in other words, the
overall style hampers the variability of the event.61
A collectivity as an agent of history goes hand in hand with temporal, religious,
social, and cultural invariability. According to Einstein, this slowed historicity
down, much as Braudel would later explain through his double time scale of the
longue durée and social conjoncture. The historian was called to apply a method
similar in form to that of the stable sociological structures being analyzed. For
social structures appear here in a synchronic horizontality, as if they were part of
a single present. Social domination, religious hieratism, and artistic canons defied
the flow of time, thereby providing unique conditions for art-historical analysis.
The object of research lent itself to observation in an almost unalterable state, as if
it had been removed from all atmospheric variations. Through this analysis,
Einstein hoped to show how the biological value and the social value of an artwork
interconnected in processes such as hominization and, later, the symbolic and
political history of human societies.
Consider Einstein’s changing approaches to the art of Africa. When he began
writing about African sculpture in 1914 (the year he drafted Negerplastik), Einstein
emphasized the author’s disappearance within the form of the artwork. Indeed,
form had turned out to be as despotic as God himself.62 This formalist interpreta-
tion changed in The Handbook of Art. From this point on, Einstein became less
interested in ontological and formal effectiveness and more concerned with the
social effectiveness of the author’s disappearance. “Why this omission?” he asked.
He answered,
Kings = gods or their intermediaries and representatives: in them the mana
of the kingdom and the power of the gods or of the world meet—that is why
they rule. In this way, the king keeps the world in balance as the mediator
between the gods and the people. . . . The artist cannot see the gods; he channels
the vision of the kings and the priests as the users of mana.63
The artist in this kind of society did not embrace anonymity of form in order to
forget his or her individuality and channel the absolute (as was more the case in
subjectivist social eras). Instead, the artist embraced anonymity in order to rein-
force royal or sacerdotal domination as it was exerted on the masses through vision.
All things considered, the artist was only a secondhand intermediary, although
indispensable to the proper functioning of power. The true intermediary between
God and people was the king or the priest, the exclusive possessor of mana (or
some other immaterial capital), which, when used correctly, assured the proper
functioning of the cosmos. The artist’s passiveness therefore revealed his or her
social role: through the artist’s own passive execution of the style devised by power
holders, he or she guaranteed the active durability of these rulers. Style used as an
instrument of “social control” was as canonical as a rite, “a fixed taboo.”64
Einstein would greatly emphasize the interdependence between social domi-
nation, religious hieratism, and artistic canons. These phenomena did not develop
spontaneously or separately within collectivist societies. Rather, they were struc-
turally linked to one another. Social domination was effected in despotic regimes
through religious hieratism, while both social domination and religious hieratism
were reproduced through the seriality and the repetition of style. Art was the
memory of power, the medium that stored authoritarian strategies. Here we can see
the complementary relationship between the biological value and the social value
of the artwork, because visual fictions contributed to the survival and to the repro-
duction of the species. For better or for worse, according to the era and the place,
visual fictions were strictly human supplements that wrote history, whatever that
history might be.
This amounts to saying that by attributing a social dimension to biology, Einstein
opposed the racism of his time and overthrew the reifying processes that dominated
art history. In a chapter entitled “Art as Social History of Groups,” he wrote,
Art history oscillates between the history of individuals and the history of
things. In its place, a social history of groups. For it isn’t the nuances but the
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major highlights that are decisive. . . . Art as history of oscillations in the
relationships of groups, the subject as their representative and their reality,
therefore the history of a social struggle for power.65
Einstein’s distant, aerial perspective on artistic production was the methodologi-
cal corollary to sociology, a discipline that went beyond nuances and individuals.
He argued that the dynamics of group relationships should replace morphological
history, geographic units, and the history of geniuses. Moreover, these dynamics
would replace Einstein’s own modernist formalism, which he gave up in the 1930s
for an acute sociologism.
Anonymous History: A Battle against Fascism

Like natural organisms, fictional organisms in their later phase underwent a
process of fossilization. However, unlike nature (which was supremely indifferent
to man), the fossilization of fictions always ended in harmful consequences for
their progenitors. Einstein wrote,
These signs change, they live and they die, but they outlive the men who
made them. Reflections and shadows thus prove to be more durable and more
powerful than us—we who are dominated and crushed by the enormous
mass of shadows, which we nourish and which nonetheless hamper our
“evolution.” We age and we die, but our “leftovers” survive.66
Therefore, the fictions that had (in their ability to mediate past, present, and
future) added a missing historical supplement to human life, could just as easily
take the supplement away by hampering human evolution to the benefit of their
own lifeless immortality. This vampiric syndrome was due to the material dura-
tion of the artworks, which often outlived their creators. Einstein wrote, “the art-
works break away from the act that made them and take on an exceptional
monstrous existence [und gewinnen ein monströs selbstständiges Sonderleben],
hence the misunderstanding about eternity and ideal existence.”67 Artworks had
by definition a hybrid nature: artificial in themselves, they grant themselves a bio-
logical (i.e., social) value through human beings’ use of them. But this hybridity,
essential for art, became a “monstrosity” when the artworks lost their biological-
social value to become aesthetically eternal. Suspended in an ideal existence, they
did not help human beings to construct their history but on the contrary prevented
them from doing so. As a result of this setback, human beings remained “deficient
beings” in relation to their progressively more terrifying material surroundings.
Fascism was counting on this: eternal works of art were transforming human
beings into “deficient beings,” unable to revolt against their biological-social
milieu, when they were not fully smashed to pieces by the power of geology. Truly,
who can ignore that the incarnation of geological scale when Einstein was writing
his Handbuch der Kunst was fascism itself?
Einstein’s reflections on the social function of art must be understood in the
context of the debates about cultural heritage that were inaugurated after the
Spartacist uprising in 1919 and were restarted in the 1930s by, among others, Ernst
Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lukács.68 In this case, Einstein was opposed
to Lukács. His conception of history was close to that of Bloch and Benjamin,
although he did not recognize, like them, the emancipatory role of the avant-gardes
in this history. The debate on cultural heritage concerned the durable materiality
of artworks that made these works the heritage of generations. This topic prompted
arguments about historicism, the dilemma between realism and modernism, and
the relationship between the masses and history. When Einstein emphasized the
ambivalence of fictions that were both capable of reifying or effecting a revolu-
tionary change in history, he was close to ideas developed by Benjamin in his 1937
essay on the collector and historian Eduard Fuchs. There, Benjamin explained the
dialectical historian’s method, which entailed smashing through the self-suffi-
ciency and inalterability of the past constructed by historicism. Fuchs had argued
against the notion of the artwork as an autonomous, materially and formally
complete entity that was like a synecdoche for the past. According to Benjamin,
Fuchs’s dialectic consisted in showing that
these works integrate their fore-history as well as their after-history; and it
is by virtue of their after-history that their fore-history is recognizable as
involved in a continuous process of change. Works of art teach him how their
function outlives their creator and how the artist’s intentions are left behind.
They demonstrate how the reception of a work by its contemporaries is part
of the effect that the work of art has on us today. They further show that this
effect depends on an encounter not just with the work of art alone but with
the history which has allowed the work to come down to our own age.69
The “fore-history” of an artwork was not written once and for all but changed
according to different readings and future uses. Due to its stratified nature and its
indeterminate opening into the future, the artwork resisted reification and a heritage.
The artwork was nobody’s property; it could not be added to the long list of artworks
that art history had capitalized, but rather escaped it like an evasive gesture.
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Here we find another meaning of this functionalization of art history. As
Einstein explained, “The art historical approach is always influenced by the point
of view of the present and the art of the present. Consequently, the ways of exhibit-
ing, the angles and the perspectives of art history change according to the nature
of the art of the present.” He continued, “Our expectations of the artwork change,
just as the effect produced by artworks changes.”70 Precisely because of their durable
materiality, artworks throughout all of human history—and not only in the
present—could become necessary supplements to human actions. For this reason,
Einstein remarked that history was periodically punctuated by regressions back to
hidden or overlooked pasts.
But Einstein’s project was also a constant reflection on the theme of history’s
“names.” On this point as well, he participated in a more general epistemological
turn, shared by French ethnology and historiography.71 The greatest contribution
of Fuchs to art history was also, according to Benjamin, his critique of the museum
collections during the time of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. They exhibited the
culture of the past “‘in splendid holiday array, and only rarely in its mostly shabby
working clothes.’” These shabby working clothes also mean the absence of a
signature, “that fetish of the art market.”72 Fuchs, Benjamin wrote, “cleared the
way for art history to be freed from the fetish of the master’s signature” by the
material relationships that have always united the mechanical reproduction of
the artwork and mass art, which is, by definition, anonymous.73 Fuchs himself
collected caricatures for the same reasons he esteemed anonymous sculpture from
the Tang period: he approached genres and forms as incarnations not of aesthetic
theories but of social classes and their means of production and reproduction.
The history of mass art, deprived of signatures and exceptionality, was also in
the 1930s a history that concretely opposed the cult of great men promoted by
fascism. In fascism, the anonymity of art was the very condition of the cult of the
unique name: the one of the leader. After guiding two “great men,” Benito Mussolini
and Adolf Hitler, on their tour of Roman antiquities, the archeologist Ranuccio
Bianchi Bandinelli recounted an informative anecdote:
As we left the Baths of Diocletian . . . Mussolini asked me if the name of the
architect was known. When I responded negatively, he exclaimed with
satisfaction: “Architecture is always anonymous: the Baths of Diocletian, the
Baths of Caracalla, the Pantheon of Agrippa, the Forum of Caesar, the Forum
of Augustus. . . . And today,” he added with a scornful pout, “these architects
want to leave their signature.”74
Opposing this regime of the signature, whether it was the signature of the leader
or of the artist, Benjamin defended a history dedicated to “anonymous artists and
to the objects that have preserved the traces of their hands.” For he believed this
history “would contribute more to the humanization of mankind than the cult of
the leader—a cult which, it seems, is to be inflicted on humanity once again.”
Becoming an “angel” of the history of his own present, Benjamin nevertheless
ended his essay without false hope. According to the philosopher, anonymous
artists and the traces of their hands, “like so much else that the past has vainly
striven to teach us, must be decided, over and over, by the future.”75
“Who built Thebes of the seven gates? / In the books you will find the names
of kings. / Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?” These are the first
“Questions from a Worker Who Reads” by Bertolt Brecht. “Every ten years a
great man” stood out from the pages, but “Who paid the bill?”76 Who—what
man and what action—was hidden behind monuments, expeditions, and
battles? Einstein responded to these issues with his Handbook of Art, which he
imagined as an inverted image of “official history”: “official history and what
history keeps quiet. The suppressed witnesses.”77 In his texts written about the
Spartacist uprising, such as “Revolution Smashes Through History and
Tradition,” the inverted history that Einstein evoked offered hope. He opposed
the repetition and the capitalization of time in historicism with moments
of interruption and the present at its height. The anonymous heroes of his
history—Christians, peasants, Anabaptists, workers, and a few Russian artists—
were those who had seized the present, unlike the intermediary heroes of offi-
cial history who used the objects and the actions of others.
Fifteen years later, when fascism was in full swing in Europe, everything
became much less utopian. While in 1919 Einstein had praised the masses “with-
out language” and “without heritage,” supposedly as primitive as the earth itself,
heritage weighed too heavily on the shoulders of his new anonymous heroes. He
wanted The Handbook of Art to give a voice to the social classes that did the
mnemonic work of the collectivity, those who had venerated normative artworks
after forgetting that they had created these works themselves. Soon after, Einstein
adopted a much more mediated materialism. Around the same time, Benjamin cri-
tiqued Karl Lamprecht’s cultural history for concealing the fact that every cultural
document was actually “a document of barbarism.”78 Surprisingly similar to
Benjamin once more, Einstein wrote, “Art is often a negative document of the era.
In art we oppress the defeated social classes.”79
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Serial Anonymity: Wölfflin, Einstein, and Modernism
Einstein was not the first to attempt to write an anonymous art history. In 1915
Heinrich Wölfflin called for “an art history without names” (Kunstgeschichte ohne
Namen), “where one could see, step by step, the birth of modern vision, a history
that does not just talk about individual artists, but which shows in an uninter-
rupted series [lückenloser Reihe] how a pictorial style is born from a linear style,
an a-tectonic style of a tectonic style, etc.”80 Was it then a coincidence that Einstein
made Wölfflin his prime target? He thought that Wölfflin’s epistemological project,
although fundamentally correct, was based on an incorrect method. For Einstein, as
for Wölfflin, art history had always been a matter of vision, but Einstein anchored
this vision more and more in society and not in an evolution understood as “an
autonomous development from the inside” or as the “unfolding of an internal
arrangement according to an immanent law.”81 Einstein would often critique this
curious Wölfflinean machine that produced forms in succession at a regular and
automatic pace free from any social influence.82 Wölfflinean history was “without
names” simply because its agent was not human but rather a disembodied suprain-
dividual principle.83
Einstein was also becoming progressively less concerned with formalism, both
that of Wölfflin and his own. In 1915, Einstein had based his entire argument in
Negerplastik on the normative, impersonal form of African artifacts in relation to
European psychologism. Later, in 1926, he divided his chapter on cubist painting
in Art of the 20th Century into two parts. He devoted the first part, significantly
longer, to an analysis of cubism without names, which he explained as an almost
transcendental visual and cognitive process. Only afterward did he add his
succinct analysis of the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. This way of
proceeding was faithful to the spirit of cubism itself. Indeed, Françoise Gilot pro-
vides a fascinating account of Picasso’s explanation of cubism as the
manifestation of a vague desire on the part of those of us who participated in
it to get back to some kind of order . . . to search again for an architectonic
basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it. People didn’t under-
stand very well at the time why very often we didn’t sign our canvases. Most
of those that are signed we signed years later. It was because we felt the temp-
tation, the hope, of an anonymous art, not in its expression but in its point
of departure.84
But things had certainly changed for Einstein in the 1930s. As an antiformalist he
adhered less than ever to Wölfflin’s conception of art as a language understood
through the evolution of its “grammar and structure.” Now he founded his
linguistic conception of art on the function of communication. Einstein was inter-
ested in both language and art as the results of mimicry and social conventions, as
the means of establishing relationships of domination or of equality, of conforma-
tion or of revolt. Einstein critiqued Wölfflin’s theory for the same reason that
Pierre Bourdieu would critique linguistics at the beginning of the 1980s, especially
Ferdinand de Saussure’s founding form of linguistics. Bourdieu criticized
Saussure’s linguistic model for existing “independently of its users (‘speaking sub-
jects’) and its uses [parole] as well as for assuming that its autonomous logic
determines the much more concrete habitus, social values, and ‘differential devi-
ations.’”85 Early in his career, Einstein strongly agreed with Viktor Shklovsky that
art serves the specific and irreplaceable purpose of defamiliarization.86 By the
1930s, he had become much more concerned with the successful historical process
of familiarization and legitimization. Earlier, Einstein was fascinated with the idea
of art history as the “dialectical struggle of forms” or as the distinguishing features
of phenomena; now, he was much more interested in the regular and repetitive
aspects of these phenomena, rooted in other spheres of social life.
Despite these profound differences, formalism and sociologism shared an
aversion to the “biographical illusion” and the tyranny of the “proper name.” For
instance, Boris Eichenbaum found the ideal subject matter for his formalist inves-
tigations in popular “second rate” literature, and Paul Valéry dreamed about a
history of poetics in which not one author’s name would appear.87 Similarly,
the sociologist Ernst Grosse began his book on ethnological and prehistoric art,
The Beginnings of Art (1893), by denouncing biographical approaches to art and
observing, “we find it darker and more silent with each step we take further into
the past. Who was the master of the Altar of Isenheim, that most ingenious work
of German painting? Who was Matthias Grünewald?”88 Like Grosse, Einstein
found in the anonymous visual artifacts from all places and all times the ideal
material for his socioethnological method.
Einstein gave three interpretations of Picasso in Art of the 20th Century. In the
1926 edition, he granted primacy to cubism over and against its two inventors,
Picasso and Braque. In 1928, he turned Picasso into a tragic Nietzschean hero,
revolting with joy against fate. In the final version of 1931, which was the most
utopian, he presented Picasso as the inventor of visual myths, endowed with the
capacity to change history. This constant rewriting showed not only his wavering
evaluation of the painter but even more so his sensitivity toward the changes of
history. In contrast, the Einstein of The Handbook of Art believed that the struc-
94 Grey Room 62
tures of the moderns could not last; they were falling apart in a never-ending
formal overindulgence. Maintaining his axiological neutrality, he recognized that
the moderns were obligated to “leap out of the historical series” and invent some-
thing new. However, they quickly found that this leap led them nowhere. He wrote
that in the past, “metamorphosis reached completion definitively, but today trans-
formation has become permanent, a hybrid species of metamorphosis mania,
perhaps the sign of a crisis that has been going on for a while, indicating the inabil-
ity to formulate the longue durée [die lange Zeit]; we flee from fixation.”89 Einstein
presented modernity as the regime of eternal transition, of a permanent crisis that
comes to nothing and is never fixed.90 He explained modernity as a regime that
was fundamentally incompatible with the longue durée (die lange Zeit) because,
as François Hartog has argued, it was doomed to the eternal present of change.91
Einstein considered the moderns’ incessant transformation an inferior form of
metamorphosis, because genuine metamorphosis was not simply a change but a
change fixed in a form, a breach integrated into an identity. Forgetting then his
long and numerous analyses of Picasso’s metamorphic power and of the post-
cubist generation, Einstein now believed that the modernist machine had run idle.
Avant-gardism, fascism, imminent revolt: even when he was exercising his
macroscopic vision and contemplating the continents of time, Einstein never
ceased to look at his present. His presentism was connected to the macrohistoric
time scale and to the aerial perspective of sociology. From this point on, the histo-
rian required a detached point of view to look at his own time. He wanted to
observe and evaluate art, society, and politics in an all-encompassing and
sociological manner without being deceived by the nuances and the superficial
differences that separate individuals, for by that time Einstein’s thought had
become increasingly Platonic. He wanted to observe the present as if it were
motionless, removed from any accelerating dynamics. Such was the chiasmus in
Einstein’s thought in the 1930s: just as the past could and even should become pre-
sent, the present should be treated as if it were already past, even as if it were
already dead.
Notes
1. J. Kaines, “Western Anthropologists and Extra Western Communities,” Anthropologia 1, no. 2
(1874): 233–34.
2. Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1926/1928/1931).
3. See Sebastian Zeidler’s October special issue (107, Winter 2004), as well as his forthcoming
book, Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press). See also the writings of Mark Haxthausen, who has worked on Einstein’s thought for many
years. His critical anthology of Einstein’s writings will be published by University of Chicago Press.
Uwe Fleckner has recently added another monograph on Einstein, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006). Finally, Joyce Cheng’s article, “Immanence Out of Sight: Formal
Rigor and Ritual Function in Carl Einstein’s ‘Negerplastik,’” Res 55/56 (2009): 87–102, is a good
example of the anthropological turn in Einstein scholarship.
4. See, for instance, the still-interesting study of Heidemarie Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins
(Munich: W. Fink, 1976).
5. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der Weissen Bücher, 1915); available in English
translation as “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Mark Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October, no. 107
(Winter 2004): 122–38.
6. The theme of the longue durée, along with that of anonymous history, has gained an important
currency over the past few years—no doubt tied to our own historical position of ecological and
political uncertainty. The same systems that are used by Einstein—geology, biology, and symbolic
structures—are also used by Manuel de Landa in his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New
York: Swerve Editions, 2000). See also the historiographical work of Daniel Lord Smail, Andrew
Shryock, and Mary Stiner.
7. Haxthausen has suggested to me that the main part of the manuscript was written before the
Spanish Civil War and that the writing was continued in 1939, when Einstein returned to France.
8. Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1842), 3–14.
9. The first reaction to the Altamira cave paintings in Spain was to consider them modern forgeries.
10. Carl Einstein, “Probleme der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung: Kunst, Wirklichkeit, Fiktion,” in
Konvolut mit kunstgeschichtlichen und -theoretischen Notizen zum Handbuch der Kunst (here-
inafter referred to as HdK), vol. 4 of Werke, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin:
Fannei und Walz, 1994), 366–67.
11. See Debora J. Meijers, Kunst als Natur (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1995).
12. See Éric Michaud, “Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History,” October, no. 139
(Winter 2012): 59–76; and Éric Michaud, Les invasions barbares: Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art
(Paris: Gallimard, 2015).
13. Michel Leiris, Instructions sommaires pour les collecteurs d’objets ethnographiques (Paris:
Musée d’ethnographie et Mission scientifique Dakar-Djibouti, 1931). Jean Jamin has written consi-
derably on this mission. See, especially, Jean Jamin, “La Mission ethnographique Dakar-Djibouti
1931–1933,” Cahiers ethnologiques, no. 5 (1984): 7–73; and Jean Jamin, “De l’humaine condition de
Minotaure,” in Regards sur minotaure: La revue à tête de bête (Geneva: Musée d’art et d’histoire,
1987), 79–87.
96 Grey Room 62
14. Roughly speaking, we could differentiate three moments in the interpretation of ethnological
artifacts until the 1930s: initially, after having been considered for several centuries as curiosities,
these objects were seen in the nineteenth century as the documents of a vertical human history (the
testimonies of a racial in-aptitude); then they became aestheticized by the avant-gardes (even if
the latter’s reading was not always devoid of racism); finally, the ethnography of the 1930s handled
them as documents of a horizontal social structure.
15. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88.
16. Marcel Griaule, “Poterie,” Documents 2, no. 4 (1930): n.p.
17. André Leroi-Gourhan, “L’ethnologie et la muséographie,” Revue de synthèse 11, no. 1 (1936):
27–30.
18. Leroi-Gourhan, “L’ethnologie et la muséographie,” 30.
19. See the outline of this volume (whose chapters Einstein finally wrote in a fragmentary fashion)
in HdK, 303–20.
20. See Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(1949; Paris: Armand Colin, 1990). Although the book’s first edition was in 1949, the doctoral thesis
from which it was issued was written in the 1930s. See also the important article by Braudel aiming
to defend the primacy of history over sociology, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,”
Annales 13, no. 4 (1958), reprinted in Réseaux 5, no. 27 (1987): 7–37.
21. Einstein’s historiographical project belongs to the large “distance” strategy that Helmuth
Lethen observes in the culture of the Weimar Republic. See Helmuth Lethen, Cool Conduct: The
Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002).
22. Einstein, “Probleme der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung,” 366.
23. Carl Einstein, “Der Betrachter,” in HdK, 332.
24. From his texts in the journal Documents (1929–1930) until the end of his life, and especially in
his project La part maudite, Bataille theorized the notion of sacrifice and the impossible quest of the
absolute.
25. Carl Einstein, “Psychische Prozesse des Sehens und der Darstellung. Der Betrachter. Stil.
Zielsetzung der Kunst,” in HdK, 337.
26. Einstein, “Psychische Prozesse des Sehens und der Darstellung,” 338.
28. Einstein, “Psychische Prozesse des Sehens und der Darstellung,” 338–39.
29. Devin Fore’s stimulating analysis of the realist turn of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s
explores this idea. See Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
30. To this list we could add Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, as well as Sigmund Freud in
Civilization and Its Discontents.
31. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley
Brereton (London: Macmillan, 1935), 83.
32. Bergson, 115–16. In his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1770), Herder gave an even stronger
description of animals’ instinctive self-confidence, explaining that an animal stays within the same
limited and unchanging sphere or circle from its birth to its death, the very narrowness of this sphere
assuring the animal’s completion. The Herder reference was important for Adolf Gehlen and his circle.
33. Bergson, 116.
34. Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Berlin: Junker und
Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1940).
35. Gehlen, Der Mensch, 32.
36. This messianic presentism can be found in Carl Einstein, “Revolution Smashes through
History and Tradition” (ca. 1920), trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October, no 107 (Winter 2004):
139–45. See also my “Un bref éclat du temps: L’absolue synchronie de l’art et de la Révolution russes
selon Carl Einstein,” Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. 117 (Fall 2011): 4–11.
37. Seminal here is Mauss’s 1925 text on the potlatch, available in English as The Gift: Forms and
Functions, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Routledge), 2002. This text had an important impact on the
circle of the Collège de sociologie (Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, etc.).
38. Einstein explored the time of myths in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century (1931).
39. Carl Einstein, “Das Transvisuelle. Perzeption. Sehen und Darstellen. Stil,” in HdK, 369–70.
40. Einstein, “Das Transvisuelle. Perzeption,” 369–70.
41. Carl Einstein, “Probleme des Sehens. Fassungen des Wirklichen. Stil. Proportion/Komposition.
Das Transvisuelle,” in HdK, 383.
42. Carl Einstein, “Halluzination und Bewusstsein. Geschichtsprozesse und Kunstwerk. Methode
der Kunstgeschichte. Bildoptik, Sehen. Utopie und Kunst. Stil,” in HdK, 389. Less than a century
after the writing of these lines, the notion of the “anthropocene” has emerged, radically reversing
Einstein’s argument: “the influence of man on the planet” is no longer considered “negligible”;
rather, to put it mildly, it is seen as geologically determinative.
43. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, conte-
nant les époques de la nature (1749–1789), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pillot Editeur, 1837), 480.
44. Edgar Quinet, La création (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1870).
45. Carl Einstein, “Halluzination und Bewusstsein,” 389.
46. Peter Szondi, Essai sur le tragique, trans. J.-L. Bessoin et al. (Strasbourg: Circé, 2003); and the
very interesting Pierre Judet de la Combe, Les tragédies grecques sont-elles tragiques? Théâtre et
théorie (Paris: Bayard, 2012).
47. Einstein’s Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts may be read as a history of the tragic. I interpret it
in this way in my book Contraindre à la liberté: Carl Einstein, les avant-gardes, l’histoire (Paris:
Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, forthcoming).
48. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (1795), vol. 3
of Hauptwerke der Philosophie (Leipzig: Meiner, 1914).
49. Einstein, “Halluzination und Bewusstsein,” 389–90.
50. Einstein, “Halluzination und Bewusstsein,” 389–90.
51. See especially André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). We could also add here the work of Bernard Stiegler—developed
from Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger—Technics of Time, 1: The Fault of
Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
98 Grey Room 62
Press, 1998). See also Danny-Robert Dufour, On achève bien les hommes: De quelques conséquences
actuelles et futures de la mort de Dieu (Paris: Denoël, 2005); and Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), 33–54.
52. Einstein, “Halluzination und Bewusstsein,” 391.
53. Carl Einstein, “Sehen und Darstellung. Bild und Betrachter. Subjekt, Objekt. Geschmack,
Ästhetizismus,” in HdK, 343.
54. While Einstein refrained from asking this question in his Handbook of Art, he made it the
central question of another manuscript he was writing, The Fabrication of Fictions, one of the most
brutal attacks on the avant-gardes in the twentieth century. See Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der
Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbeck: Rowolt, 1973).
55. Devin Fore detects the same tendency in Einstein’s autobiographical project. See Fore,
187–242.
56. Carl Einstein, “Geschichtsprozesse. Stil- und Perzeptionsveränderungen. Realismus.
Impressionismus,” in HdK, 325.
57. The writings of Jan Assmann are also helpful here, especially his analysis of long-term cultural
memory. See Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and
Political Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
58. Einstein, “Geschichtsprozesse,” 325.
59. Einstein’s Georges Braque was published in French in 1934. On the primitive nature of indus-
trial modernity according to Einstein, see my essay “Les Braque de Carl Einstein: Entre stabilité
classique et mythe romantique,” in Georges Braque, 1882–1963, ed. Brigitte Léal (Paris: Grand
Palais/Galeries nationales, 2013), 152–61.
60. This is a constant theme of prehistoric studies at their nascent stage: “Individuals do not
matter very much and their works are difficult to distinguish from one another: they are the product
of the same social group and the fruit of their activity resembles the creations of their companions
immersed in the same industrial specialty.” Émile Cartailhac and Abbé Henri Breuil, La Caverne
d’Altamira à Santillane près Santander (Monaco, 1906), 141.
61. Einstein, “Geschichtsprozesse,” 325.
62. On despotic sculpture, associating apocalyptic temporality and neoclassic thought, see my
“Apocalypse primitive: Une lecture politique de Negerplastik,“ in “Einstein et les primitivismes,”
ed. Isabelle Kalinowski and Maria Stavrinaki, special issue, Gradhiva , no. 14 (2011): 56–77.
63. Carl Einstein, “Vision. Stil,” in HdK, 347–48; emphasis in original. Einstein is referring to the
notion of “mana,” a polysemous concept meaning moral authority and prestige, analyzed by
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert in “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie” (1902–1903), in Marcel
Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 5–100.
64. Einstein, “Probleme des Sehens,” 374; and Einstein, “Vision. Stil,” 348.
65. Carl Einstein, “Kunst als soziale Gruppengeschichte,” in HdK, 354.
67. Carl Einstein, “Das Transvisuelle. Fiktion. Ästhetizismus. Individualismus und Imagination,”
in HdK, 353.
68. See Frederic J. Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin’s Essay on Eduard Fuchs: An Art-Historical
Perspective,” in Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left, ed. Andrew
Hemingway (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 106–122.
69. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid
Doherty, and Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 118.
70. Einstein, outline of HdK, 303.
71. French ethnology moved away from spectacular exceptions to focus on unremarkable ordi-
nary objects that were called, according to Durkheimian terminology, “averages.” In a field that
included the reformative sociology of Paul Rivet, Mauss, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, as well as the hesi-
tant Marxism of Leiris, ordinary objects became the natural representatives of the working class—
a little bit like the machine-made objects in Fernand Léger’s paintings. Rivet denounced the choice of
objects displayed in museums, the “objects remarkable for their rarity, or for their artistic or careful
workmanship,” and attributed this choice to “the mistake of a man who wishes to judge contempo-
rary French civilization by its luxury goods, which are encountered only in a very limited sector of
the population. Now, what is especially important to know are all the aspects, or at least the average
aspect, of a civilization and not the exceptional aspect that caters to the privileged classes.” Paul
Rivet, “L’étude des civilisations matérielles,” Documents, no. 3 (1929): 133.
72. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” 142.
74. Rannuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Quelques jours avec Hitler et Mussolini, trans. Dominique
Vitoz (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2011), 33. I owe this reference to Lucia Piccioni, whom I sincerely thank.
76. Bertolt Brecht, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” in Poems, 1913–1956, rev. ed., ed. John
Willett and Ralph Anderson with Erich Fried, trans. Edith Anderson et al. (New York: Metheun/
Routledge, 1987), 252–253.
77. Einstein, outline of HdK, 314.
78. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (thesis 7), in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.
79. Einstein, “Kunst als soziale Gruppengeschichte,” 357.
80. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in
der neueren Kunst (Munich: Hugo Bruckmann, 1915), vii.
81. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Sur l’évolution de la forme” (1921), in Réflexions sur l’histoire de l’art
(Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 36.
82. Einstein, Georges Braque, 14.
83. See also Arnold Hauser, “Art History without Names,” in The Philosophy of Art History (1958;
Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 119–223.
84. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Vivre avec Picasso (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965), 67.
85. Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard,
1982), 23.
86. See Shklovsky’s programmatic text “Art as Device” (1917), in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose,
100 Grey Room 62

trans. Benjamin Sher (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 1–14.
87. Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 99–139;
and Paul Valéry, “De l’enseignement de la poétique au Collège de France,” in Variété 5 (Paris: Folio,
2002), 287–93.
88. Ernst Grosse, Die Anfänge der Kunst (Freiburg and Leipzig, 1894).
89. Einstein, “Kunst als soziale Gruppengeschichte,” 375.
90. This is strongly reminiscent of Reinhart Koselleck’s later thought on the temporalities of
modern history and is an element that might also help to think, the other way around, the writing
of history by Koselleck as well. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical
Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
91. See François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia
Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

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Henri Breuil at the foot of a

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Our wondrous civilization is the result of the silent efforts of millions of

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