158 CARL EINSTEIN THE ARTS OF AFRICA the enrichment of forms and sculptural innovations that African sculptures could make possible. Joseph Brummer, a Hungarian sculptor living in Paris, commissioned Einstein to write the fi rst formal study of African art. His brief but dense pioneering text in Negerplastik, which is illustrated with numerous photographs of objects (ninety-four at fi rst, then ninety-one in the 1920 second edition) from artists’ and dealers’ collections, is one of the most important writings of the twentieth century on this subject. There were no captions for the objects illustrated. Einstein later explained the reasons for this—he had been hospitalized with a head wound at the time of publication and unable to supervise its preparation. However, the second edition of 1920 (the fi rst had been a great success) also had no captions. Despite this absence, the provenance of these works is of great historical and aesthetic importance, both for understanding the taste of the time and for understanding the makeup of major collections. Einstein acted as a consultant for several collectors and had a small collection of his own. Thanks to the meticulous research of Jean-Louis Paudrat, initially conducted in collaboration with Ezio Bassani, we have been able to learn more about the origins of these works, their movement, and to whom they belonged. During the heyday of European colonialism, Negerplastik expressed a new approach, free of ethnocentrism, to sculptural creations that some found disconcerting and bizarre but others experienced as a shocking aesthetic On the centenary of the release of the seminal African art book, Negerplastik, in Leipzig in May 1915 at the height of the First World War, the complete writings of Carl Einstein (1885–1940) published during his lifetime have been reprinted, both in French and German, under the new title Les Arts de l’Afrique. Einstein, a German Jew, was then fi ghting in the ranks of a German army, many of whose members expressed indignation about the “hordes of black savages” that had been launched into the confl ict by the English and the French. But for Einstein’s part, his close Parisian friends included those who, during his fi rst stay in Paris from 1905 to 1907, had communally and enthusiastically “discovered” so-called art Nègre. At the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris, there were many young cubist painters in search of solutions to creative limitations and the management of two-dimensional space, as well as foreign artists drawn by the capital’s effervescent atmosphere and a variety of intellectuals attracted by the zeitgeist in general. At the same time, objects from Africa brought to Europe for various reasons by missionaries, colonials, ethnographers, etc., were fi nding their way into museums, antique shops, and markets. They aroused the artists’ curiosity and sculptural imagination. The fi rst purchases of such objects were made by artists, antique collectors, and art afi cionados. Einstein, who was at the crossroads of artistic currents between Germany and France, immediately recognized the stimulating infl uence of primitive art in the birth of modernism. He believed that, while German expressionism and fauvism merely exhibited the surfaces and colors of a certain exoticism, other artists had been truly sensitized to FIG. 1 (above): Dogon covered bowl, Mali. Reproduced from “Exotische Kunst - Ausstellung in der Galerie des Theaters Pigalle in Paris,” Die Kunstauktion, year 4, no. 9, 2 March 1930, p. 5. Ex Béla Hein. Included in the Exposition d’Art indigène des colonies françaises, Pavillon de Marsan, Paris, November 1923–January 1924; Afrique Océanie, Galerie Pigalle, Paris, February–April 1930; and African Negro Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, March–May 1935. FIG. 2 (above right): Mask collected in the kingdom of Bafum, Cameroon. Reproduced from Afrikanische Plastik, 1921, pl. 12. Ex Carl Einstein, Tristan Tzara (Nouveau Drouot, Arts primitifs Collection Tristan Tzara et à divers amateurs, 24 November 1988, lot no. 192). By Liliane Meffre BOOKS Presentation and translation by Liliane Meffre. Captions and notes by Jean- Louis Paudrat. Jacqueline Chambon, 2015.
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