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Carl Einstein 159 revelation. German reactions remained muted but French ones were enthusiastic, a fact that Einstein recognized frankly in the 1920s. The proliferation of scientifi c expeditions increased the interest in these African works and also changed the discourse surrounding them. While Negerplastik had profoundly and irrevocably changed Europeans’ perceptions toward non- European works and conferred a new status, that of being art, upon them, Einstein’s subsequent work, Afrikanische Plastik (African Sculpture), which appeared in 1921, took a more anthropological view of these objects. This book was also very successful. An art theorist with an international reputation, Einstein moved to Paris permanently in 1928, where he co-founded FIG. 3 (left): Caryatid stool. Luba, DR Congo. Reproduced from Negerplastik, 1915, pl. 77. Ex Pierre Vérité. (Hôtel Drouot, Collection Vérité, 17 June 2006, lot no. 234). FIG. 4 (right): Mask. Songye, DR Congo. Reproduced from “À propos de l’Exposition de la Galerie Pigalle,” Documents, no. 2, (March) 1930, p. 112; and “Exotische Kunst,” Kunstauktion, no. 9, 2 March 1930, p. 5. Ex Béla Hein, Sydney Burney, Roland Penrose. the magazine Documents, which bears clear marks of his infl uence. In it, he introduced and developed the notion of the “ethnology of modern art” and examined the tensions and relationships that existed between modern art and primitivism, which he had initially discussed in his major work L’Art du XXe Siécle (The Art of the Twentieth Century), fi rst published in 1926 and reprinted in 1928 and 1931. He also enlisted the help of many German specialists, including Leo Frobenius and Eckart von Sydow, among others. With the present work, Einstein’s contributions on the arts of Africa have now been reprinted and are presented along with other previously published texts on the subject. All of the German texts in his body of work have been translated and annotated. Captions for Negerplastik, as well as information that was republished, completed, or brought up to date in Afrikanische Plastik, including the bibliographies, have been compiled by Jean-Louis Paudrat in the present work. This publication is an homage to Einstein and is one more element of the ongoing and admiring interest that Einstein’s contemporaries such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris, and many others expressed for his work. That admiration was shared by the most important African art specialists, such as Jean Laude, who initiated the subject of Einsteinian studies in the 1970s.


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