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The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English. Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His contributions to the surrealist magazine Documents (which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille) including writings on Picasso and Paul Klee, remain unsurpassed in their depth and complexity. In a series of close visual analyses—illustrated with major works by Braque, Picasso, and Klee—the book retrieves the theoretical resources that Einstein brought to bear on their art. It shows us that to rediscover Einstein's art criticism is to see the work of great modernist artists anew through the eyes of one of the most gifted left-wing formalists of the twentieth century.

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book focuses on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully arranged some one thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, the book traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that “pathos formulas” structure the West's cultural memory, the book maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition, it considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. The book demonstrates that the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg's lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

This book sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left–right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the anti-modern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. This book argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.