‘Verisimilitude, Artistry and Alterity – Carl Einstein and the African Object as Subject of Aesthetic Renewal c.1915 –1935 (original) (raw)

2013, The Challenge of the Object – Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Congress Proceedings, (Eds) G. Ulrich Großmann/Petra Krutisch

Since their arrival en masse in Europe during the nineteenth century, the reception of statuary and cultic utensils from African and other, then colonised cultures has continued to provoke debate on what is, and what is not art. The paper examines the context and methods of visual representation of African and Oceanic art objects in a number of publications that between 1915 and 1935 participated in transforming the perception of such objects from ‘savage idols’, or remnants of the so-called ‘primitive races’ to attaining the status as works of art coveted for their formal rigour and inventiveness. The paper contends that the role of Carl Einstein (1885-1940) and his book Negerplastik (1915) was central to this transformation. Following the ‘discovery’ of such objects by the artistic avant-garde, Einstein pioneered a format of visual representation that raised their status from ethnographic record to art object on a par with the western artistic canon. Like art history, which since its inception as an academic discipline has relied on deriving meaning from the analysis of photographically reproduced works of art, Negerplastik made productive use of the photographic image as simulacrum for the authentic work. Combining methodologies hitherto applied to theorize European sculpture with visual strategies akin to those representing classical sculpture as advocated by Heinrich Wölfflin, Einstein, as it were, ‘invented’ the category of African art. The paper assesses how Einstein’s book functioned as the model for subsequent representations of African sculpture, and how Negerplastik can be seen to resonate in the photographic albums of Charles Sheeler (1918) and Walker Evans (1935) as they in turn generated their own rhetoric of intervention into the discourse on modernist representation.

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