«Un’immane critica delle confuse perifrasi». Introduzione a Carl Einstein critico d’arte (Parte II)
Michele Fucich
Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was a German art critic and writer whose original approach to European avantgarde and primitivism so far hasn’t been adequately taken into account by Italian scholars, despite a growing international attention to his intellectual legacy over the last two decades. The article tries to map out the main topics, references and achievements of Einstein’s critical thinking from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, when his focal points became Cubism and some of the leading European avant-garde artists. The essay argues to what extent Einstein’s early, pioneering and best-known work (Negerplastik, 1915) should not be misinterpreted, as it has often happened, in terms of a merely purovisibilist approach to African art and Cubism. The author tries to interpret Einstein’s militant art criticism into a different perspective, which he considers more appropriate for further elaborations of Einsteins’s writings.