Michele Fucich

Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was a German art critic and writer whose original approach to European avantgarde and primitivism hasn’t been adequately taken into account by the Italian academic world, despite a growing international attention to his intellectual legacy in the last twenty years. The article tries to map out the main topics, references and achievements of Einstein’s critical thinking from the first 1910s to the early 1930s, in which cubism and some leading artists of the European avant-garde are meant to become the focal points. The essay pre-announces to which extent Einstein’s early, pioneering and best-known work (Negerplastik, 1915) shouldn’t be misunderstood as a merely purovisiblist approach to African art and cubism. The author gets ahead of some focal points disproving this frequent misunderstanding and therefore tries to get Einstein’s militant art criticism into another perspective, which should be appropriate for further elaborations of his writings. The essay should be construed as an introduction to Einstein’s biographical and critical profile and is meant to be followed with a second part in the next issue of “Predella”.