The Invention of the 20th Century: Carl Einstein and the Avant-gardes [Paperback]

Uwe Fleckner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 8480263865 | ISBN-13: 978-8480263863 | Publication Date: June 1, 2005 | Edition: Bilingual

The art critic and historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was one of the most important and multifaceted personalities of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde. His books, articles and essays were fundamental pieces for the critical study of the avant-garde movements; in them he introduced the West to African art and ratified Cubism as a movement in its own right. His intellectual oeuvre, rediscovered in recent decades, is now paid tribute at the MNCARS. This is the first international exhibition to offer a visual description of the work of Einstein, a key figure in visual arts as well as literature, theatre, film and political action.The Invention of the 20th Century shows significant works by the most important artists of the avant-garde movements, whom Einstein knew and on whose careers he reflected and wrote. The one hundred and twenty pieces on display are signed by names like Braque, Dalí, Grosz, Léger, Miró, Picasso, Rousseau, Paul Klee and Otto Dix, to name a few.

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Bilingual edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8480263865
• ISBN-13: 978-8480263863
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,447,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The missing link rehabilitated, January 4, 2012

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Invention of the 20th Century: Carl Einstein and the Avant-gardes (Paperback)

Carl Einstein biography has been due far too long, but outside of Germany and Spain (thanks to Uwe Fleckner one of its most enterprising rehabilitators and scholars under whose charge the exhibition and monograph has been rendered). Carl Einstein has been lauded for having championed primitivism and for having given impetus to many of the modernist movements we are most familiar with today - cubism, dadaism and verism. He was an art historian by trade and a solicitator of ideas by nature. He was a painter, a poet and a socialite who met a tragic fate when, like Walter Benjamin, he fled from the Nazi and committed suicide in 1940 rather than resign himself to the horrors of a concentration camp. He lived in Berlin, Paris, but also Vienna and Brussels and a host of other European cities, annotating and fomenting the movemnets and anarchist credo that saw modernism and its political context disseminate. His literary output is rather limited (Bebuquin - an expressionist pastiche is available only through kindle on Amazon), but his art criticism, both published and ephemerally annotated, comprises a veritable barometer for the artistic climate of the time. Amongst his friends were Picasso, Braque, Gris, Grosz, Michel Leiris, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Bataille, Hans Arp, Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Paul Klee, Raoul Hausmman to name a few, all of which were in great debt to his temper and intelligence, his aesthetic vision, which may best be incapsulated in the denouncement he oft reprised claim that it had become a "beuracracy of emtions". The incomprehensible silence to which his name has been obscured is tragic, yet hardly as tragic as the end his life has suffered. This rehabilitating momograph is pure genius. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, a Catalan wonder of an artistic institution, provides some recuperative wisdom to the otherwise distressing dissolution of his output and critical energy. In the present volume, in accordance with the exhibition, are reprinted colored representations of most of the works he tended to and critiqued, a collection of his most important descriptions, perceptive documentations and influential inspirational markings, and not least much of his theoretical output is traced. Carl Einstein believed the notion of a master linear narrative descriptive of art history to be no longer viable, and forever lamented the gap that exists between word and image so that art should create a better world, reconfigure and morph the pain into a creative habit that reinscribed and overcame. We awe much to Carl Einstein and owe just as much to Uwe Fleckner for this speldid rehabilitation.