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“Painting as a Language. Why Not?” Carl Einstein in Documents

“Painting as a Language. Why Not?” Carl Einstein in Documents “Painting as a Language. Why Not?” Carl Einstein in Documents RAINER RUMOLD Carl Einstein’s unique gifts were also his very burden: he was a lyrical poet and writer of experimental prose, as such a participant in the movements of Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, as well as an uncompromising critic and theorist of avant-garde productions, including his own. As a theorist he focused more radically than earlier thinkers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) on the limits of symbolic language, the written word with its elevated status in literature, and, ultimately, on the limitations of Western conceptual culture. This particular strand of his thought comes to the fore in the Berlin of the mid-twenties with his writings on modern art, and expands in his contributions to the Parisian avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929–30). Moreover, as the first theorist to view African sculpture within the discourse of Cubism, he had already turned in Negerplastik (1915) against the abstraction of perspective and narrative in the visual arts. At an extreme, Einstein (the “little Einstein,” his friend the critic and editor Franz Blei, once called him) was to argue against literature—belles lettres—as the culture of subjectivity, of metaphor and interiority, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

“Painting as a Language. Why Not?” Carl Einstein in Documents

October , Volume Winter 2004 (107) – Jan 1, 2004

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References (14)

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/016228704322790908
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

“Painting as a Language. Why Not?” Carl Einstein in Documents RAINER RUMOLD Carl Einstein’s unique gifts were also his very burden: he was a lyrical poet and writer of experimental prose, as such a participant in the movements of Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, as well as an uncompromising critic and theorist of avant-garde productions, including his own. As a theorist he focused more radically than earlier thinkers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) on the limits of symbolic language, the written word with its elevated status in literature, and, ultimately, on the limitations of Western conceptual culture. This particular strand of his thought comes to the fore in the Berlin of the mid-twenties with his writings on modern art, and expands in his contributions to the Parisian avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929–30). Moreover, as the first theorist to view African sculpture within the discourse of Cubism, he had already turned in Negerplastik (1915) against the abstraction of perspective and narrative in the visual arts. At an extreme, Einstein (the “little Einstein,” his friend the critic and editor Franz Blei, once called him) was to argue against literature—belles lettres—as the culture of subjectivity, of metaphor and interiority,

Journal

OctoberMIT Press

Published: Jan 1, 2004

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