Carl Einstein in “Fairest Spain” from Picasso to Durruti
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63 II Juan José Lahuerta Carl Einstein in “Fairest Spain” From Picasso to Durruti Let us begin with George Grosz’s watercolour of 1919. Like most of his works at the time, the paper is filled with angular scenes depicting vice. Two naked women occupy the centre. Lower down on the right, there is a fat, bald chap with round glasses, smoking a pipe. His bald head is superimposed over a woman’s thigh. The short-sighted man with the sardonic smile is Carl Einstein: “a chap sandwiched between a businessman, a gramophone and a woman’s leg” he wrote years later, clearly referring to Grosz’s work1. He had just returned from Brussels, January. For Einstein, events followed where he had spent the First World War a pattern that was to be repeated in the and had taken part in revolutionary future. The police arrested him on 15th soldiers’ councils. The Einstein we see in January and he spent much of 1919 the painting had just joined the KPD2 –the hiding out in the homes of acquaintances German Communist Party, to which Grosz and friends. From November 1919, also belonged. Einstein was committed Einstein and Grosz published the journal to the Sparticist League, which was then Der Blutíge Ernst (In Bloody Earnest), being brutally repressed. That same year of which only six issues saw the light –1919– opened with the murders of Karl of day, given the censorship then in th Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 force. The writer and artist warned their ■ 1 C. Einstein. “George Grosz” (1926) ad idem: El Arte como revuelta. Escritos sobre las vanguar- dias (1912-1923), Madrid: Lampreave & Millún, 2008. p. 107 pub. U. Fleckner. Among the gen- eral bibliography on Einstein, see L. Meffre, Carl Einstein. 1885-1940. Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. 2002: U. Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer Intellektuellen Biographie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 2006. 2 Translator’s note [A.S.]: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands. n&c II 64/65 readers to spurn both “Art for Art’s sake” Arabs and the Fandango. In other words, and “Literature for Literature’s sake”, the song with its reference to “Fairest promising readers that their work –with Spain” not only reveals shared romantic its combination of the printed word and notions of the country and its wild drawings– would have a “deadly impact”3. gypsy music but also a kind of parallel In his book: A Little Yes and a Big No: The world where everything was genuine Autobiography of George Grosz4 the author and passionate. For Northern European does not mention Einstein at all –which romantics, Spain had the exoticism of the speaks volumes on Grosz’s memory East and was a great deal more accessible. and the painter’s ability to gloss over Perhaps one needs to know just how difficult episodes. The glaring omission popular this romantic song was in Weimar also reveals Einstein’s importance. Germany but as one can see, it must have been played in cabarets and brothels. It Many have noted Einstein’s commitment certainly strikes a discordant note, with the to the Sparticist Revolt in 1919 –an gramophone horn spouting the words Fern experience that was to be decisive in im Süd’ das schöne Spanien in the midst of his later support for Anarchist Trade a brothel full of naked tarts and their ugly Unionism during The Spanish Civil customers. This is the scene Carl Einstein War. In fact, when his tomb was found dispassionately beholds as he smokes a at Boeil-Bézing in 1968, Michel Leiris pipe. However, this musical air recalling and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler wanted to the old, romantic Spain had, in the years write on the tombstone: “A Fighter for following the Great War, been turned the Sparticist Revolution and the Spanish into a seedy little number in cabarets in Republican Army”. How curious this is! In Germany, Paris and elsewhere. In Grosz’s Grosz’s watercolour, there is a gramophone sinister scenes, the “Spanish” music is not from which waft the words Fern im Süd’ a cheerful lied but rather a sign of the das schöne Spanien (Far to the south lies sordidness and menace of the setting. fairest Spain). This is the opening line of a poem written in 1834 by Emanuel Given how Einstein’s life panned out, Geibel5, to which Karl Reissig put music. one might see these as prophetic words. Geibel was a popular poet of the time and Einstein had a passionate relationship with he was particularly interested in Spanish Spain towards the end of his life, fighting folklore. He translated romances and on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil 6 published a book of Spanish songs that he War as a member of the Durruti Column . made up himself, one of which contains However, his interests as a critic and art the words from the gramophone in the historian had brought him into contact whore house depicted by Grosz. As one with things Spanish before that. This came can imagine, Giebel’s poem speaks of the about through his friendship with Juan sun, mountains, flowers, rivers, castanets, Gris and Picasso and his later interest in ■ 3 L. Meffre. op. cit. p.85. 4 Published by The Dial Press (New York, 1946). 5 Translator’s note: The poem is Der Zigeunerbube im Norden. Those wondering what the song sounded like can find out by listening to the 1908 recording here: http://www.archive.org/details/edgm-15925. 6 His texts from this period have been gathered in C. Einstein, La Columna Durruti y otros artículos y entrevistas de la guerra civil española. Barcelona: Mudito & Co., 2006 pub. U. Fleckner 7 On Einstein and the avant-garde, see: L. Meffre. Carl Einstein et la problematique des avantgardes dans les arts plastiques, Bern: Peter Lang. 1989: U. Fleckner, La invención del siglo xx. Carl Einstein y las vanguardias. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia: and C. Einstein, El arte como revuelta. cit. 65 Carl Einstein in “Fairest Spain” Juan José Lahuerta II other artists such as Miró and Dalí 7. On takes a more serious tone, with the writer the one hand, these links stemmed from insisting on the need both to avoid easy European stereotypes of Spain that were a literature and to treat the artist as a hero. hangover from Romanticism. On the other Let us turn back the clock to 1912 and hand, they were rooted in Einstein’s belief Einstein’s first reference to Picasso. It that the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War cropped up in an article on the latest marked the beginning of a revolution. in French painting. Despite the French Let us begin with Picasso, given that it context of the piece and its treatment seems the artist was one of the last people of Picasso as the culmination of French Einstein wrote to before his death. From tradition of painting, Einstein cannot help his dwelling in Barcelona’s carrer Verdi making the following comment: “Standing (Verdi Street), Einstein penned his last before one of Picasso’s canvases, one is missive to Picasso. It was also to be the reminded of Spanish architecture and its last letter he sent from Spain8. “You cannot intricate Gothic forms.” Later in 1923, in imagine,” he wrote, “how happy I feel to another article10 he considered Picasso’s have fought alongside your countrymen. work to be full of “Cervantine contrasts”. It is the happiest of my memories.” He In a 1928 article simply titled “Picasso”, followed this up with: “Believe me, I am he noted the painter’s work was “full of ready to lay down my life for your country Spanish emphasis” and that his still lifes and there can be no doubt that Franco “recalled Zubarán’s nocturnal intensity will be defeated.” The letter was dated and rigour” and so forth11. It is interesting 6th January 1939. Just twenty days later, that Einstein’s discussion of Picasso as a Fascist troops marched into Barcelona. great “French” painter includes references Match magazine featured a double-page to Spanish art, albeit minor ones. photo spread in its February 1939 edition9. The allusion to “the Gothic complexity of A sensationalist double-page photo was Spanish architecture” is unsettling and plastered with snapshots of ministers, merits discussion. Einstein’s words are generals and ambassadors crossing the revealing because they encapsulate the French border. One of the photos was of notion of Spanish Art as grotesque –an Carl Einstein. He was wearing clothes idea whose roots lay in Romanticism he had dyed blue just a few days before and that had gained currency among after removing all military insignia. critics in the eighteen eighties. Far He then passed himself off as a militia from being abandoned, the notion was officer and told tall tales as he sat on a taken to absurd lengths in the early 20th Perpignan café terrace. Yet Fortune had century. Einstein was as convinced of the other things in store for Einstein and his “Gothic complexity” of Picasso’s Cubism role as a spinner of yarns would prove as other critics were of the “excess” and short-lived. Even so, Einstein’s letter monstrous nature of El Greco’s works12. ■ 8 Correspondencia Carl Einstein-Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1921-1939. Barcelona, Ediciones de La Central, 2008. pp. 124-125 (L. Meffre edition). 9 U. Fleckner, op. cit., p. 420. 10 Translator’s note: See “Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers” [Rescued Paintings, Disappointed Academic Painters], Werke Band 2. 1919–1928, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 334–39, 334.