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A01 The Crisis B18 Children’s Sergei Eisenstein (of Everything) Drawings and Max Ernst A02 Picture Atlas the Questions T. Lux Feininger Projects of the of Origins Julio González 1920sNeolithic (Propyläen B19 The ChildhoodS/O John Heartfield Kunstgeschichte, Function Florence Henri Orbis Pictus, B20 Pornophilia Barbara Hepworth Kulturen der B21 Occultism Hannah Höch ArtErde, Das inBild, aB22 False Automatism, Present,Heinrich Hoerle and Handbuch Dream, Halluci Harry O. Hoyt der Kunstwissen nation, Hypnosis Valentine Hugo schaft) B23c. Image 1930 Space of Paul Klee A03 Art Historical Biology Germaine Krull Images of His B24 Artistic Research: Fernand Léger tory and World Ethnology, Helen Levitt Art Stories Archaeology, Eli Lotar A04 From Ethnolo Physics Len Lye gical Art History B25 Gesture– André Masson to the New “a flash in slow Joan Miró Ethnographic motion through Max von Moos Museums centuries of Rolf Nesch A05 Models of evolution”: Sergei Solomon Nikritin Tempo rality Eisenstein’s Richard Oelze A06 Functions of the Method Wolfgang Paalen “Primitive” B26 The Expedition Jean Painlevé A07 The Art of the as a Medium of Alexandra Povòrina “Primitives” the AvantGarde Jean Renoir A08 The Precise (Dakar–Djibouti GastonLouis Roux Conditionality and Subsequent Franz Wilhelm of Art Missions) Seiwert A09 Carl Einstein, B27 Ethnology of the Kurt Seligmann “Handbuch der White Man? Kalifala Sidibé Kunst” B28 Theories of Fas Jindřich Štyrský A10 “The Ethnologi cism in France Toyen cal Study of Art”: B29 Fascist Anti Raoul Ubac African Sculpture Primitivism: Frits Van den Berghe A11 Archaeology as a “Degenerate Paule Vézelay Media Event Art,” 1937 Wols A12 Prehistory in the B30 Braque/ Catherine Yarrow Abyss of Time Einstein: World A13 The Prehistory Condensation C33 The “Exposition of Art: Rock B31 The Two Lives coloniale inter Drawings and of Myth nationale” and Cave Painting B32 UrCommunism, the AntiColo A14 The Paleolithic/ Expenditure, nialist Impulse Neolithic Age: Proletarianization C34 Afromodernism Mankind’s and “Self Childhood? James L. Allen Defense” A15 Fundamental Jean (Hans) Arp C35 Kalifala Sidibé: Crisis: Willi Baumeister Colonial or Ontological JacquesAndré Global Artist? Revolution and Boiffard C36 The Port: Formalization Georges Braque Contact Zone Brassaï and Space of B16 The Present Victor Brauner Mobilizations and the Art of Claude Cahun & C37 Conversion into the Present Marcel Moore the Fight: B17 Neolithic Joseph Cornell The Spanish Childhood Germaine Dulac Civil War MANUAL A The Impossible Expansion of History B The S/O Function AW (ARTWORKS) C Resistance and Lines of Flight APPENDIX CONTENTS / FLOOR PLAN Neolithic Childhood Art in a False Present, c. 1930 This is an exhibition about revolutions, role here. The works of art thus form an divisions, openings, and contradictions— exhibition within an exhibition. many of which seem uncannily topical. By Similarly present and engaged in “c. 1930,” Western modernism was already dialogue with the artistic avant-garde are being pushed up against the limits of its works from other areas of knowledge own project. The crass asymmetries of production and discourse, such as ethno- imperialist, racist rule and the structural logical books and magazines, art historical crises of capitalism were becoming ever publications, political pamphlets, cultural more glaringly apparent. critique, sociological literature, and texts In this situation, which spelled about biology and psychology. hopelessness for many of those who lived through it and which millions of others would not survive at all, escape routes of all kinds were important, even those that proved fantastical or fallacious. With its implication of a return to first origins, to beginnings, to the freedom of mimetic experimentation, Carl Einstein’s “Neolithic Childhood” captures very well this notion of flight into the realm of the imagination and alternative temporality. It was not by chance that we turned to the art historian, cultural critic, poet, and anti-fascist Carl Einstein (1885–1940) for both guidance and critical interjec- tions. For, until his suicide while fleeing the Germans, this Jewish intellectual, who was based first in Berlin and then in Paris, developed a productive radicalism that remains troubling to this day. The unease conveyed by his texts is sympto- matic of the multiple crises gripping the world in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The exhibition’s geographical parame- ters may be (Western) European, but they also show how colonial centers such as Paris became genuinely global cities in the interwar years. The visual art produced within the surrealist ambit played a central (001) Slideshow: Carl Einstein, Manuscripts · Courtesy Akademie der Künste, Berlin, CarlEinsteinArchiv, A no. 245. Key terms handwritten by Einstein in red crayon on front sides of The Impossible folded sheets of paper, in which he collected his notes: Tautology Expansion of History Primitive Totality Proportion Language Projection Irony Tecton [ics, ic] Space Immanence Forgetting Form Metamo [rphosis, rphotic] Analogy Stylization Seeing An Organ Repetition Rite Language Image Conscious Discrepancy SC [subconscious, subconsciousness] Imaginative Person I God Hallu [cination, cinative] Causality Turmoil Poetry Reality Crisis Abstract Gestalt Thing Split Metaphor (001) The year is 1930—a present wracked by A01 profound crises worldwide. The social order is coming unstuck, but so are tradi- The Crisis tional categories of knowledge. Europe’s imperialist expansion is at its zenith even (of Everything) as its very legitimacy is being radically The interwar years were regarded as a period of never- called into question. Political and social ending crises by those who were living through it. The polit- conflicts quickly assume global dimen- ical world order established in the aftermath of the First World War had certainly supplied grounds enough sions. The First World War, revolutions, the for concern about what André Breton in 1926 called the industrialization of production, the scien- “ special unrest of this period.” From the perpetuation of tization of everyday life, and new images the victorious powers’ colonialist projects and the first signs that a block of Western countries was forming and encounters with alterity distributed by in opposition to the Soviet Union, to the radicalization of mass culture have shaken the Eurocentric politics at the national level, the situation was as highly worldview to its core—and all the old charged as it was irremediably complex. The global crises of capitalism around 1930 further fueled the anxiety. In certainties that came with it. Both econo- a letter of 1931, Carl Einstein decried the way “crisis” had mic and social crises corresponded with turned into a “permanent state of affairs.” Indeed, not only had “crisis” become the central category for political an epistemological nervosity that has propagandists and all those attempting to diagnose the reached fever pitch. The individual’s place cultural malaise, but it was also dominating academic in time and even the concept of history discourse, notwithstanding the difficulty of distinguish- ing between accurate assessments of the situation and itself have become problematic. In search rhetorical escalation. of new beginnings, a new critical aware- ness mani fests itself in a recourse to all A01 (002) Gerhard Meyer, “Krisenpolitik und Planwirtschaft,” things archaic, to “deep time,” and to Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 4 (1935). Paris: Félix Alcan: pp. 398–436 [reprint Munich: Kösel/dtv, notions of humanity’s “childhood.” Ethnol- 1970/80]. ogists and prehistorians play a crucial role in the anthropological speculation sparked A01 (003) Erich Fromm, “Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6 (1937). Paris: Félix Alcan: by origins of all kinds. Disseminated by pp. 95–118 [reprint Munich: Kösel/dtv, 1970/80]. the media and by the increasingly import- ant field of art journalism, “world art” A01 (004) Max Horkheimer, “Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 1 and the spectacle of cave painting become (1932). Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld: pp. 1–7 [reprint cultural formulae for a revised view of Munich: Kösel/dtv, 1970/80]. history and modernism. A01 (005) Zell Ingram, “The Flight into Egypt,” Cover illustration Taking Carl Einstein’s “Handbuch for The Crisis. A Record of the Darker Races 3 (1933), der Kunst” as its operative center, Section ed. W.E.B. Du Bois. Baltimore: The Crisis Publishing Company (reproduction) · Courtesy The Crisis A sheds light on pictorial and textual Publishing Co. articula tions of the “archaic illusion” of the period from the 1920s to the 1940s. A01 (006) JeanJacques Rousseau, Die Krisis der Kultur, die Werke ausgewählt von Paul Sakmann. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1931. (002–006) A01 (007) Emil Lederer, Wege aus der Krise. Ein Vortrag. A01 (012) Edmund Husserl, “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissen Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1931. schaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,” Philosophia 1 (1936). Belgrade: Gesellschaft Philoso A01 (008) Arthur Mendt, Die Technik in der Krise unserer Zeit. phia: pp. 77–176 (reproduction). Berlin: Volksverband der Bücherfreunde/ Wegweiser Verlag, 1933. A01 (013) Ernst Fischer, Krise der Jugend. Leipzig/Vienna: Hess, 1931. A01 (009) Karl Mannheim, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff’s Uitgevers