Art Humanities Primary Source Reading 47

Carl Einstein
Carl Einstein (1885-1940 was a political activist, art collector, magazine editor and
groundbreaking art historian. His Negro Sculpture of 1915 was the first study of African
art to emerge from within the sphere of modern art, and this was the audience for which it
was intended. In this text and elsewhere Einstein attacked the idea of evolution in art,
much as Picasso does in the statement reprinted here (PSR49) Einstein did not see
African art as an art of the past, or as a precursor to modern art. Instead he saw it as an
important art form in its own right. A close friend of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s (PSR48),
Einstein also saw important similarities between African art and the recent efforts of
cubism.

Negro Sculpture included 111 plates of works of African art without captions or
information about where they came from or the material from which they were made.. It
has been suggested that in doing this Einstein was resisting the typical way that non-
western cultural artifacts were displayed at the time in Europe. Since at least 1867,
World’s Fairs and expositions had featured exhibits that claimed to represent entire
cultures from the non-western world, sometimes recreating entire villages. Ethnographic
museums grouped sculptures with objects such as baskets and weapons, or displayed
them in such large numbers, that it was difficult to examine individual objects on aesthetic
grounds. Today Einstein’s decontextualization of the African art objects he wrote about
would be criticized, but it is likely that at the time Einstein was trying to emphasize certain
artistic features of the objects that he believed transcended their context. In addition, he
believed that these cultic objects were intended to be able to stand alone, without
explanation of context, and that this was a part of their cultic power. Like the ideal of an
autonomous art that the cubists argued for (PSR46, 48, 49) these objects did not seem to
imitate anything, but instead stood on their own.

EXCERPT FROM "NEGRO SCULPTURE," 1915

. . . A few years ago, in France, we lived through the epoch-making crisis. By means of a
tremendous effort at awareness, men recognised the irrelevance and questionableness
of the accepted method. Some painters were able to command sufficient strength to turn
away from mechanical, repetitive craftsmanship; shaking free from the customary means
of expression, they investigated the elements of the perception of space-what this leads
to, and what conditions it imposes. The results of this important struggle are sufficiently
well known. At the same time they necessarily discovered Negro sculpture, and
recognised that it has, on its own, given birth to the pure plastic forms.
The efforts of these painters are usually referred to as abstraction, although no
one could possibly deny that a direct spatial awareness could not have been approached
without an immense critical effort in clearing away erroneous paraphrases. This is the
essential point; and it sharply distinguishes Negro art from the art which has taken it as a
guide. What appears in the latter as abstraction is, in the former, a direct experience of
nature. From a formal point of view Negro sculpture will be found to be-out-and-out
realism.
The contemporary artist cannot concentrate on working towards pure form; he
still feels himself to be in opposition to what has gone before. His creative effort involves
an excessive element of reaction. His inevitably critical approach strengthens the
analytical in his work.

From Negerplastik, Munich, 1915, 2nd ed. 1920, pp. XI-XII.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Born in Mannheim, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was an art dealer, publisher and writer. In
1907 he opened the Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris and visited Picasso’s studio, where he saw
the recently completed Demoiselles D’Avignon. He instantly became an ardent supporter
and defender of Picasso’s art. Other artists Kahnweiler came to promote and exhibit over
the following years included Georges Braque, as well as such important modernist
painters as Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Fernand Léger.

Kahnweiler was not only a promoter and patron of cubism from the moment of its emergence in
Paris, he was also one of its most dedicated and brilliant theorists. Exiled from France during
World War I, Kahnweiler wrote his groundbreaking study The Way of Cubism in Switzerland. In
this book, Kahnweiler likens Cubism to a new language, and insists that one had to learn that
language before trying to appreciate the images created with it. In the excerpt provided below,
Kahnweiler describes some of the trial-and-error and discovery that led Picasso and Braque to
the development of Cubism, as well as the ways in which Cubism differs from previous Western
art. From Picasso’s struggle to use color in a new way, to Braque’s experiments with limiting the
depth represented in a painting, Kahnweiler describes how Cubism led away from the
Renaissance method of “painting light as color on the surface of objects” towards something new,
where the mind of the viewer played as much of a role in the total experience as his or her eye. A
similar emphasis on the idea that cubism leads away from an art of imitation, that it is an art
which is “an end in itself” fully autonomous from the duties of mimicking appearances, can also
be found in Albert Gleizes’ and Jean Metzinger’s roughly contemporary book, Cubism (PSR 46)

Kahnweiler’s writing is particularly interesting in the context of the Core curriculum because of the
way he draws on one of western philosophy’s central figures, John Locke. In the excerpt below,
Kahnweiler is particularly interested in Locke’s idea of primary and secondary qualities. Readers
familiar with Locke’s writing can keep it in mind here and when looking at Cubist works and see if
they think Kahnweiler’s use of Locke is helpful or plausible.

EXCERPT FROM THE WAY OF CUBISM, 1920

Several times during the spring of 1910 Picasso attempted to endow the forms of his
pictures with colour. That is, he tried to use colour not only as an expression of light, or
chiaroscuro, for the creation of form, but rather as an equally important end in itself. Each time he
was obliged to paint over the colour he had thus introduced; the single exception is a small nude
of the period (about 18 x 23 centimeters in size) in which a piece of fabric is coloured in brilliant
red.
At the same time Braque made an important discovery. In one of his pictures he painted
a completely naturalistic nail casting its shadow on a wall. The usefulness of this innovation will
be discussed later. The difficulty lay in the incorporation of this “real” object into the unity of the
painting. From then on, both artists consistently limited the space in the background of the
picture. In a landscape, for instance, instead of painting an illusionistic distant horizon in which
the eye lost itself, the artists closed the three-dimensional space with a mountain. In still-life or
nude painting, the wall of a room served the same purpose. This method of limiting space had
already been used frequently by Cézanne.
During the summer, again spent in l'Estaque, Braque took a further step in the
introduction of “real objects,” that is, of realistically painted things introduced, undistorted in form
and colour, into the picture. We find lettering for the first time in a Guitar Player of the period.
Here again, lyrical painting uncovered a new world of beauty-this time in posters, display windows
and commercial signs which play so important a role in our visual impressions.
Much more important, however, was the decisive advance which set cubism free from the
language previously used by painting. This occurred in Cadaqués (in Spain, on the
Mediterranean near the French border) where Picasso spent his summer. Little satisfied, even
after weeks of arduous labour, he returned to Paris in the autumn with his unfinished works. But
he had taken the great step; he had pierced the closed form. A new tool had been forged for the
achievement of the new purpose.
Years of research had proved that closed form did not permit an expression sufficient for
the two artists' aims. Closed form accepts objects as contained by their own surfaces, viz. the
skin; it then endeavours to represent this closed body, and, since no object is visible without light,
to paint this “skin” as the contact point between the body and light where both merge into colour.
This chiaroscuro can provide only an illusion of the form of objects. In the actual three--
dimensional world the object is there to be touched even after light is eliminated. Memory images
of tactile perceptions can also be verified on visible bodies. The different accommodations of the
retina of the eye enable us, as it were, to “touch” three-dimensional objects from a distance.
Two-dimensional painting is not concerned with all this. Thus the painters of the Renaissance,
using the closed form method, endeavoured to give the illusion of form by painting light as colour
on the surface of objects. It was never more than “illusion.”
Since it was the mission of colour to create the form as chiaroscuro, or light that had
become perceptible, there was no possibility of rendering local colour or colour itself. It could only
be painted as objectivated light.
In addition, Braque and Picasso were disturbed by the unavoidable distortion of form
which worried many spectators initially. Picasso himself often repeated the ludicrous remark
made by his friend, the sculptor Manolo, before one of his figure paintings: “What would you say if
your parents were to meet you at the Barcelona station with such faces?” This is a drastic
example of the relation between memory images and the figures represented in the painting.
Comparison between the real object as articulated by the rhythm of forms in the painting and the
same object as it exists in the spectator's memory inevitably results in “distortions” as long as
even the slightest verisimilitude in the work of art creates this conflict in the spectator. Through
the combined discoveries of Braque and Picasso during the summer of 1910 it became possible
to avoid these difficulties by a new way of painting.
On the one hand, Picasso's new method made it possible to “represent” the form of
objects and their position in space instead of attempting to imitate them through illusionistic
means. With the representation of solid objects this could be effected by a process of
representation that has a certain resemblance to geometrical drawing. This is a matter of course
since the aim of both is to render the three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plane. In
addition, the painter no longer has to limit himself to depicting the object as it would appear from
one given viewpoint, but, wherever necessary for fuller comprehension, he can show it from
several sides, and from above and below.
Representation of the position of objects in space is done as follows: instead of beginning
from a supposed foreground and going on from there to give an illusion of depth by means of
perspective, the painter begins from a definite and clearly defined background. Starting from this
background the painter now works toward the front by a sort of scheme of forms in which each
object's position is clearly indicated, both in relation to the definite background and to other
objects. Such an arrangement thus gives a clear and plastic view. But if only this scheme of forms
were to exist it would be impossible to see in the painting the “representation” of things from the
outer world. One would only see an arrangement of planes, cylinders, squares, etc.
At this point Braque's introduction of undistorted real objects into the painting takes on its
full significance. When “real” details are thus introduced the result is a stimulus which carries with
it memory images. Combining the “real” stimulus and the scheme of forms, these images
construct the finished object in the mind. Thus the desired physical representation comes into
being in the spectator's mind.
Now the rhythmization necessary for the coordination of the individual parts into the unity
of the work of art can take place without producing disturbing distortions, since the object in effect
is no longer “present” in the painting, that is, since it does not yet have the least resemblance to
actuality. Therefore, the stimulus cannot come into conflict with the product of the assimilation. In
other words, there exist in the painting the scheme of forms and small real details as stimuli
integrated into the unity of the work of art; there exists, as well, but only in the mind of the
spectator, the finished product of the assimilation, the human head, for instance. There is no
possibility of a conflict here, and yet the object “recognized” in the painting is now “seen” with an
intensity of which no illusionistic art is capable.
As to colour, its utilization as chiaroscuro had been abolished. Thus, it could be freely
employed, as colour, within the unity of the work of art. For the representation of local colour, its
application on a small scale is sufficient to effect its incorporation into the finished representation
in the mind of the spectator.
In the words of Locke, these painters distinguish between primary and secondary
qualities. They endeavour to represent the primary, or most important qualities, as exactly as
possible. In painting these are the object's form and its position in space. They merely suggest
the secondary characteristics such as colour and tactile quality, leaving their incorporation into
the object to the mind of the spectator.
This new language has given painting an unprecedented freedom. It is no longer bound
to the more or less verisimilar optic image which describes the object from a single viewpoint. It
can, in order to give a thorough representation of the object's primary characteristics, depict them
as stereometric drawing on the plane surface, or, through several representations of the same
object, it can provide an analytical study of that object which the spectator then reassembles in
his mind. The representation does not necessarily have to be in the closed manner of the
stereometric drawing; coloured planes, through their direction and relative position, can bring
together the formal scheme without uniting in closed forms. This was the great advance made at
Cadaqués. Instead of an analytical description, the painter can, if he prefers, also create in this
way a synthesis of the object, or in the words of Kant, “put together the various conceptions and
comprehend their variety in one perception.”

From Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich, 1920, pp. 27-34; English ed. Way of Cubism, New York, 1949, pp.
10-12.