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A Mythology of Forms: Carl Einstein on Picasso
Charles W. Haxthausen
Original English text of “Una mitología de las formas: Carl Einstein sobre Picasso,” published in: Picasso e
Historia, ed. José Lebrero Stals and Pepe Karmel. Málaga/Madrid: Museo Picasso Málaga; Editorial Machado,
2021, 83-99.
Pictures matter for us only when they succeed in destroying reality and generating it anew. They
are therefore tools for intensifying crisis. Pictures should not represent but be. . . . The decorative
apparences and ‘higher reality” of a bankrupt aesthetics are finished. Pictures are animate beings,
provisional fragments. We don't care a rap for immortality; death, this vital force, should not be
suppressed with aestheticisms.1
The author of these words was the German critic Carl Einstein; his topic was Pablo Picasso. The
text, from 1932, attests to the radical agency Einstein attributed to Picasso’s art, an agency that,
so he fervently believed, transcended the aesthetic and extended to the transformation of our
world-picture and the generation of collective social formations.
Einstein (1885–1940) has been at best marginal to the art-historical discourse on
Picasso.2
When cited at all it was usually his shorter pieces, those that were published in French
or translated from German into English. Interesting as they may be, these brief texts convey little
of the brilliance and originality of Einstein’s writing on the artist. For that one must read his
sections on Picasso in the three editions of his Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the
20th
Century), published as volume 16 in the prestigious art history series of the interwar years,
the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. The first edition appeared in 1926, successively revised and
expanded editions followed in 1928 and 1931. Through the three editions the section on Picasso
grew from just under 2000 words in the first edition to nearly 10,000 in the third, constituting the
single largest component of the book.3
It was also, apart from the monographs by Ivan Aksenov,
Maurice Raynal, and Eugenio d’Ors, the longest text on Picasso’s art to appear in any language
up to that time.4
In this essay my goal is to offer a concise overview of the writing of a critic who
produced arguably the richest, most intellectually ambitious writing on Picasso during the
interwar period. I hope to make a compelling case that it merits greater attention in the discourse.
I suspect Picasso might have agreed: as recently came to light, he evidently thought highly

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enough of Einstein to engage him in installing his largest retrospective up to that time, at the
Galeries Georges Petit in Paris in 1932.5
Moreover, during this period Einstein also had a
decisive role in guiding the collector Gottlieb Friedrich Reber in forming one of the largest and
most distinguished collections of cubism of its time, with 160 works by Picasso, including over
sixty paintings.6
*****
Taken as a whole Einstein’s art criticism forms a poignant narrative: the protracted and
ultimately failed struggle of a leftist intellectual to justify contemporary art—to himself as much
as to his readers—as a transformative social practice. At its core was his conviction that the
source of art’s power lay in its form. For over two decades Einstein tenaciously clung to the
belief that a change in artistic form had the potential to change human visuality, and by changing
human visuality to change human subjectivity and our construction of the real. Of art’s aesthetic
pleasures he had little to say—usually he dismissed these as a numbing, pernicious narcotic.
Artworks engaged him, he wrote, only insofar as they “comprise the means to modify the real,
the structure of the human subject, and our world-picture”;7
for “the real is invented by man and
must always be invented anew, because it is continually dying away.”8
Einstein believed that “art
determines seeing in general. . . . [T]he artist determines our common mental images of the
visual world.”9
Art therefore had the power to create a compelling alternate version of the world,
and this was its ultimate function and justification. The consummate example of such an art,
Einstein believed, was the work of Pablo Picasso.
For Einstein, the necessary condition of the artwork’s power to transform the real was its
achievement of what he called “totality.” It’s a difficult concept, but one fundamental to
Einstein’s art theory and what he saw as the stakes in contemporary art. He deployed this term
idiosyncratically—in Western philosophy, totality has been traditionally associated with holism,
yet as used by Einstein the term signifies its antithesis: he identified totality not with coherent
collective unities but with singular self-complete entities—individual, formally autonomous
works of visual art. Because the totalized artwork is radically autonomous, extrinsic to the world
as known, it militates against any illusion of wholeness, any sense of temporal continuity or
causal connectedness with that world. Thus the self-complete totality of the artwork makes it an
agent of disruption, of disorder, a weapon directed against the conventional, illusory order of the
world. To be effective the artwork had fully to seize possession of the beholder, temporarily

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shutting down visual memory and extinguishing the sense of self—as Einstein writes: a totality
“effaces all qualities that are not subordinated to the specific means of the new sensation.”10
The
handwritten draft of Einstein’s essay on totality, dating from 1914, a text otherwise completely
devoid of proper names, bore the title “Picasso.”11
The name Picasso appears for the first time in Einstein’s writing in 1912, in his “Notes on
Recent French Painting.”12
This short essay, his sixth published work of art criticism, was the
first in which he took stock of innovative tendencies in contemporary painting in France, the art
that was to be the central focus of his writing over the next two decades. Here Einstein described
Picasso as presenting a subjective vision of nature that built on the constructive dimension of
Cézanne’s art. “Picasso sought a formula that permits him to structure every part of the picture
plastically and tectonically.”13
Einstein never mentions cubism by name, yet it’s clear from his
reference to “certain basic, stereometric forms,” to “pictures in brown, dark yellow, and gray,” in
which “the whole is sustained by tectonic contours,” that it is cubism to which he refers.14
It’s
also clear from his overview of Picasso’s art that he must have been able to see a good deal of it.
Einstein had almost certainly visited the Paris gallery of Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, since Picasso did not exhibit in the salons, and perhaps also saw the collections of
the German dealer Wilhelm Uhde and of Gertrude and Leo Stein.15
We should hardly conclude from this early essay that Einstein already had a firm grasp of
Picasso and cubism. He was intrigued by him, to be sure, yet an article published six weeks later
reveals him to be struggling with what must have been the “hermetic” phase of cubism post-
1910, with its fracturing of the closed form and isolation of line from color in an abstract, open
structure that resisted a clear reading of the motif. Einstein was skeptical: Picasso
renders the plastic factor by severing it with lines, yet squeezing and dismantling it into planes; he
should be doing architecture. . . . He assumes a beholder who orients himself in the picture with a
movement of the eyes in two contrasting directions, he is thus borrowing purely architectonic
effects from volume. These seem to me to be serious stylistic contradictions.16
By the following year Einstein had apparently resolved his doubts: he declared Picasso “the
strongest of today’s artists.”17

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Probably Einstein’s earliest opportunity to closely study Picasso’s art would have been
the exhibition Picasso * Negerplastik, shown in December 1913 in Berlin at the dealer Otto
Feldmann’s recently opened Neue Galerie. The show included forty-four paintings—thirty of
them cubist works from 1909–13—along with twelve drawings and watercolors and ten etchings.
There is some speculation that Einstein may have been involved in this exhibition—he had
written the catalogue text for the preceding show at the gallery.18
It seems plausible, however, that Einstein’s encounter with Picasso’s cubism in the Neue
Galerie exhibition was a major factor in his first major text of art criticism, the short,
pathbreaking book Negerplastik, written in 1914 and published the following year. Certainly his
account of the incorporation of features seen from different viewpoints into a unified form in
African sculpture is in fact more evident in Picasso’s works of 1909 than it is in the African
pieces he illustrated. It is noteworthy that an advertisement from the publisher of the first edition
of Negerplastik described Einstein’s text as founded “on the basis of fundamentally cubistic
intuitions.”19
It is significant that in the book Einstein argued that African sculpture, unlike the
contemporary Western art that was influenced by it, was an art of realism. What appears in the
latter “as abstraction is, in the former, nature presented unmediated. In formal terms, Negro
sculpture will prove to be the most potent realism.”20
As we shall see, he would later characterize
the work of Picasso and Braque as “subjective realism,” as a possible version of the world, not as
an abstraction of it.
Einstein published nothing on Picasso between 1914 and 1921. Like many admirers of
Picasso’s cubism he seems initially to have been perplexed by the artist’s development since
1914 as he began working in more naturalistic styles alongside a cubist mode.21
This comes
through clearly in Einstein’s correspondence with the Paris-based Polish painter Moïse Kisling:
The drawings of Pipasso in the spirit of day before yesterday [avanthier] that’s indeed a little case
of baroque bankruptcy. It’s necessary to progress from experiment to realization. . . . This
gentleman doesn’t know how to make the most of his experiments. On the one hand he is mister
cubist style, on the other mister observer. I don’t see any integration, the rest remains diffuse with
him.22
And in a subsequent letter to Kisling Einstein described Picasso as
A nice fanatic against the pompier within himself. Of van Gogh he rightly says that he’s a
sentimental lout and Pablotte himself? What engages me in Picasso is the investigation of space,

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the fourth dimension, but let’s be clear. Where are his solutions. It is the path of a clever man
who wages a battle against his own kitsch with an honest and admirable intelligence. His
research has yielded some touching canvases —in short, he is a scientist; but the solution?23
Yet only eight months later, in an article published in the French magazine Action, Einstein
declared Picasso “the most intelligent of contemporary painters.” His stylistic pluralism did not
betray a lack of character, “he is simply eminently modern.”24
By the time Einstein finally published an article on cubism, in February 1923, the
movement was widely seen as having been eclipsed.25
He rejected that claim while offering his
first expanded remarks on what he saw as the stakes of cubism: “Cubism . . . is seeing without
bias.”26
It was necessary to save painting by purging it of “hackneyed and false painterly
means.”27
Cubism wasn’t a matter of style, technique, or fashion, it was engaged with an issue
fundamental to painting: the construction of pictorial space. The cubists strove in their art to
capture “a seeing that constructs space and the fourth dimension of time.”28
Einstein was
particularly concerned with drawing a distinction between Picasso and Georges Braque, and in
this article he seemed to betray a preference for the latter. Picasso was of a “dialectical, split
nature . . . filled with Cervantesque contrast.” Braque was “le peintre d’une pureté lucide et
audacieuse, whose production is not defined, like the Spaniard’s, by a dialectic rich in contrasts,
but by the continuation and gradual enrichment of resolved outcomes.”29
Illustrated in the article
were two works each by Braque and Juan Gris. Picasso had none.
Three years later, in the first edition of his massive survey, Die Kunst des 20.
Jahrhunderts (The art of the 20th
century), Einstein presented his first extended account of cubist
painting. The chapter, comprising just over thirty-one densely printed pages, has an unusual
structure—it is broken down into two basic components, a thirteen-and-half-page theoretical
section followed by four short sections extending over eighteen pages devoted, respectively, to
Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. One of the oddities of Einstein’s account is that
in the long introductory section there are no references to works or dates and only Braque and
Picasso are mentioned and only once, together in single sentence. By contrast, the section in
which the four artists are treated individually abounds in dates and references to specific works,
some of which are illustrated, yet the developmental aspect of cubism that is registered in these
texts is not acknowledged in the theoretical model that Einstein presents in the introductory part
of the chapter.

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Einstein’s theorization of cubism in the introduction was modeled on the work of Braque
and Picasso, and because it is at the core of his writing on Picasso it merits summation here. His
interpretation might at first strike the reader as all too familiar, a rehashing of what by the time of
the book’s publications had become the clichés of early cubist criticism, largely discredited
today—the simultaneity of multiple viewpoints, the condensation of time into space, the primacy
of the mental image over the optical one, the “realist” nature of cubist art. All these elements are
present in the pre-war commentary of the French critics, and they also appear in Einstein’s
cubism chapter but, as we shall see, with a unique, radically different twist.
A common theme among the early French commentators was that vision is deceptive,
conception is its corrective; the mind corrects the fugitive, contingent impressions provided by
the eye to get at the “essence” of the object. That cubism was fundamentally a realist art, a more
accurate representation of objects as known by the mind rather than by mere surface appearance,
was a recurrent claim in the early writing on these painters.30
Most of the elements of this
interpretation are present in Maurice Raynal’s article of 1912, “Conception et vision,” one of the
classic early accounts, although he never mentioned cubism by name. “We never see an object in
all its dimensions at once. . . Now conception gives us the means.” One showed the object from
multiple viewpoints in order ‘to increase knowledge’ by painting forms as they are conceived in
the mind.31
Such, it was claimed, was the true realism.
Certain passages in Einstein’s cubism chapter may seem consistent with such accounts.
The cubist painting offered “a summation of the elements that give us a more comprehensive
view of objects as the crucial stations of our seeing are condensed into a picture.”32
It is a
condensation of a process that unfolds in time into a spatial unity, a synchronic image of a
diachronic process, adapted to the exigencies of the picture plane. These different viewpoints,
these discrete moments of envisaging an object or objects, rather than being consolidated into a
single motif as in previous painting, are synchronically represented as planes and juxtaposed on
the two-dimensional picture surface. In all of these aspects Einstein seems very much in accord
with his French predecessors, yet his account of what is at stake in the cubist project is in fact
profoundly antithetical to their interpretation. He turns their binary opposition between
conception and vision on its head.
For Einstein cubism was not about conceptions of the object, it was about seeing, seeing
purged of visual habit, of visual memory, of prior “knowledge.” It was about the genesis of the

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object in the mind through seeing without preconceptions. To be sure, like the French critics he
also defined cubist art as realist—as “a subjective realism,” but it is a realism not of the object
but of the act of seeing. As he wrote, in the cubist works of 1910–12 (he cited Picasso’s portrait
of Kahnweiler as one example) the pictorial object is “the representation of a pictorial object
unbreached by conventional reality and having nothing in common with the real.”33
The object
becomes dynamic, “a symptom of seeing; space becomes the very task of subjective creation,
that is, it is generated artistically through means specific to the picture, and the object is the
result of this process.”34
What cubism represents, then, is not objects as independent entities, but
objects as a product of the motile subject’s visual activity, free responses to the “genetic
stimulus” of the motif, adapted to the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.35
This is “a free
pictorial object,” a “pervasive construction,” insulated from nature— it represents the “absolute
dictatorship of isolated pictorial form.”36
A totality.
In the first edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts the five-page Picasso section offers
a dense, concise overview of his development starting with his childhood works from the age of
twelve—of the sections on the four cubist artists, it is the most detailed. Without any mention of
Demoiselles d’Avignon Einstein locates the beginning of cubism in 1907, and offers a fairly
comprehensive list of cubist devices from the years after 1909: the deployment of a comb to
create the texture of hair; Picasso’s use of elements of “the real” as a contrasting sign in the
structural arrangement of forms; the reintroduction of color; the abandonment of modeling; the
enrichment of “the calligraphy of their pictures with letters of the alphabet”; the pasting of
“newspaper clippings and wallpaper samples” onto the surface.37
Einstein clearly saw these
things and registers them in his biographical section, but he does not incorporate them into his
theoretical explanation of cubism that opens the chapter.
It’s noteworthy that in the brief chronology at the beginning of his Picasso section
Einstein identifies the Blue Period, the period of Les Saltimbanques, the Rose Period, and the
Negro Period in 1907, and then comes the “beginning of cubism,” which he dates 1908–9, and
there the chronology stops. Is it coincidence that the years 1908–9 are those for which Einstein’s
interpretation of cubism in the introductory section is most compelling? It is a cubism
characterized by faceted, strongly plastic volumes, as is manifest in the works of Braque and
Picasso in these years, as in the latter’s Woman with Pears (New York, The Museum of Modern
Art), which Einstein illustrates. But that description is hard if not impossible to reconcile with

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the paintings that follow in 1910–12, such as Picasso’s The Poet (Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, New York) also illustrated. It is marked by what Leo Steinberg called a “withdrawal
from tangibility” as the objects “become ever more evanescent.”38
Although Einstein’s cubism interpretation has its blind spots and may be flawed as an
explanatory model, it’s arguably the only early writing on this art that does justice to the radical
implications of cubism as painting, painting that had the potential to alter not only our
conception of art but our intuition of the visual world. Most of the prominent early advocates of
cubism, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Raynal, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
whatever their merits and differences, could be said to have tamed cubism, making it seem less
daunting by arguing that ultimately it was a ‘realist’ art, that it could be reconciled with our
existing knowledge of objects, with their familiar images in our minds—Kahnweiler called them
“Erinnerungsbilder,” memory images.39
Einstein stood apart from all of these early critics. He
made the radical argument that cubism’s images could not be reconciled with anything we had
seen or thought we knew. Its great achievement was that it destroyed our memory images.40
He
fervently believed that cubism could be a model for refiguring our own seeing—not that that the
world would look to us like a cubist painting, but by impressing upon us that our seeing can be
an open process, a creative act.
A decisive turning point in Einstein’s assessment of Picasso came two years later, in the
second edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. In substance the text appeared virtually
unchanged—except for the section on Picasso.41
Einstein rewrote it, expanding it to more than
four times its original length, from just under 2000 words to 8300 and adding six new
illustrations of recent works. Although the account of cubism in the chapter’s introductory
section remained essentially unchanged from 1926, the expanded Picasso section immediately
following it told a different story, not only about Picasso but about cubism itself. One can get a
sense of this change by the introduction of terms Einstein had never before used in his writing on
Picasso or cubism. Over the course of twenty pages the words Gesichte (visions) and its latinate
synonym Vision and the adjective visionär (visionary) occur twenty-nine times, Halluzination
(hallucination) or halluzinativ (hallucinative) twenty-five times, Traum (dream) and its cognates
fifteen—none of these words appears in the introductory section of the chapter or in the sections
on the other three artists.42
Now the cubist painting of Picasso offered not merely a “re-forming
of the experience of three dimensions as generated by our bodily into two-dimensional form,” as

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Einstein had interpreted it in 1926,43
but was in part intrasubjective, internally generated by
“dreamlike visions,” by states of “formal ecstasy” with a “hallucinatory basis.”44
This radical
shift in Einstein’s interpretation owes its appearance to his encounter with surrealism, which was
to have a transformative impact on his writing over the next five years. That is also evident by
the occurrence, for the first time in his writing, of the word Automatismus (automatism) in this
text on Picasso.45
His dialectical nature now became a virtue: “Never does he want to be the dupe
of any manner, and his stylistic pluralism is driven by a creative skepticism.” Einstein hailed him
as “the discoverer of the signs of his epoch and the creator of its painterly psychograms.”46
In the book’s third edition, which appeared three years later, Einstein developed this
approach further, introducing new elements. The new vocabulary from the second edition is
augmented by the word “myth” and its cognates—it appears nineteen times. What did Einstein
understand by “myth?”47
He did not mean it in an iconographic sense, namely with reference to
subjects such as Picasso’s minotaurs or his etchings to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.48
In his Picasso
text he doesn’t provide a definition of myth, but other texts from these years are helpful in this
regard. In one of them he defined myth as rooted in a “conflict between man and the . . . world,
and . . . man, thus menaced, defends himself against the outside reality by creating a new,
mythical reality.”49
In the fragmented modern world myth is no longer a collective expression as
in ancient times, but is born in individual isolation. Einstein characterizes it as a “revolt” against
existing reality, and in art this revolt is carried out by means of visual form.50
Creating “new
objects” or “new gestalten,” the artist forges “visual myths,”51
harbingers of a new visual reality.
This reality is inhabited by what he described as “creatures of a mythology of forms.”52
Einstein now dubbed the period from 1924-30 “mythic realism.”53
Representative of this
“mythic” phase was the series of grotesquely malformed human heads and figures dating from
1927–30, of which no fewer than eleven examples were reproduced in the third edition of Die
Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. It’s as if Picasso had created a species of aberrant humanoid
creatures marked by the presence of common features—randomly placed eyes, a few coarse
strands of hair, a toothy mouth evoking a vagina dentata, and, often, a pair of eyelets denoting
noseless nostrils.54
Yet in each figure these shared features are uniquely aligned—or, rather,
misaligned, for these creatures have no common, normative morphology. Where the entire body
is represented, the same nightmarish asymmetry and malformation applies. It’s a radical assault
on what Einstein called “tautological repetition” in the pictorial figuration of the human body, a

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“dissociation of mental images.” Here, he explains, a formal, not a biological canon is in force.55
Einstein surely had such works in mind in hailing Picasso’s “gratifying propensity for
perversion.” He exulted: “in Picasso’s pictures man and his reality become destandardized.”56
These visual myths came into being, according to Einstein, in a temporary state of
possession, of erasure of the ego, “the dreamer’s anesthesia.”57
He described this most pointedly
as an “hallucinatory interval.”58
It occurred within a “highly active zone” between “the labile
strata of the unconscious and the conscious.” “In this state what we call gestalt is born, and it
stands in deep contrast to objects.”59
The source of these “mythic gestalten” is not, as in cubism,
the external world of optical sensation, but an inner, optically “invisible” world.60
The
hallucinatory interval generates “psychograms”—spontaneous images flowing freely from the
unconscious. Yet Picasso always reasserts control, developing “his psychograms to the point of
consciously tectonic form.” These “consciously tectonic” forms, by which Einstein means forms
of a controlled, quasi-geometric rigor, he characterizes as a defense against the potentially
destructive power of hallucinations: “the more violently a stream of visions courses through a
person, the more strenuously will they defend themselves against them by a protective shield of
tectonic forms to prevent being fatally blown to pieces.”61
Taking Einstein as our guide, how might we read Picasso’s paintings of the later
twenties? Can we find characteristics that seem to manifest a coexistence of discretely
identifiable unconscious hallucinatory and conscious tectonic elements, in which the former are
harnessed, tamed by the latter? Or does the tectonic completely co-opt and tame the irrational,
unconscious, hallucinatory elements? To judge from the paintings that Einstein chose to
reproduce and his own terse remarks about them, it seems that in Picasso’s art of the later
twenties there are instances of both. In Painter and Model from 1928 (Museum of Modern Art,
New York), to which Einstein specifically refers, he notes how hallucinatory becomes “crisply
tectonic.”62
While the figures would be barely identifiable as such without the vertically aligned
eyes and mouths, the whole is tightly harnessed by the pervasive incidence of straight edges of
vertical, horizontal, and diagonal shapes—Einstein describes it as a “a static barrier of forms,”
that serves to dam the “psyche’s torrents,” it is a defense against an “errant, animistic
madness.”63
On the other hand, the extraordinary The Painter and His Model (Museum of
Contemporary Art, Tehran) from the preceding year, not cited specifically by title but illustrated

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in the plate section, must be one of the works Einstein had in mind when he referred to the
“ateliers.” The painting could be read as a programmatic exemplification of Einstein’s ideas. He
writes of “plotted-out fields of influence of the individual figures. One could speak of auras.”64
Here it is as if the tectonic confronts the hallucinatory; it’s as if Picasso had painted the artist at
the moment of reasserting his consciousness, his tectonic will, against the monstrous looming
creature born of his hallucinations. A drastic asymmetry rules: the body is without joints and the
usual divisions; her left arm is a slender stump, her right one as large as her left leg; a breast
distends from a grotesquely malformed semblance of a face. The painter, by contrast, is all
straight lines, angles, skeletal. He is all structure, the very embodiment of the tectonic principle.
If the model seems to overwhelm him through the sheer scale and visual impact of her form, she
nonetheless remains contained within the tectonic elements of the space—the wainscotting,
above which a line extending from the canvas encompasses and contains her upper body, and
below, the warped, raking floorboards, a destabilizing remnant of traditional perspective.
Superimposed over this linear structure is a kind of gray scrim, punctured with two large
apertures through which we view the image. It’s not quite coextensive with the canvas, which
gives it a tangible planarity. It’s the sole color in the painting, establishing another layer, with
apertures through which we glimpse the figures, enhancing the works spatial complexity—
Einstein writes of “a multi-voiced fugue of optical and figural layers,” of a “polyphonic style rich
in oppositions.”65
This aptly captures the effect of this astonishing painting.66
Although Einstein describes tectonic forms as a conscious intervention by Picasso to
tame his hallucinations, he also claims that they originate in the hallucinatory interval. And it is
they that transform private visions into collective myth. Why this identification of the tectonic
with the collective? For Einstein tectonic forms have deep-seated sexual connotations; they are
identified with “the ancient symbols of procreation and birth, of life and death. These tectonic
motifs belong to both sexual zones, are both masculine and feminine, and as a result every image
is built into a bisexual organism.”67
They are therefore symbols with universal resonance across
time, culture, and social class.
Einstein’s position on the role of memory has also evolved. As we have seen, previously
he had declared that cubism overrode visual memory of the object by representing the short-term
cumulative memory of a single unmediated phenomenological optical experience—objects,
rather than being given, were seen as a by-product of the function of seeing. But now, with the

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artist in the grip of ha llucination, another kind of memory kicks in: for in “visions one is cut off
from memory and history and moves beyond inherited forms, forging ahead into the future or
plunging into archaic memory.”68
In referring to “archaic memory” Einstein makes a distinction between conscious
personal and cultural memory and unconscious collective memory, what he calls the “archaically
collective substratum of the unconscious.” Here his thinking is almost certainly indebted to Carl
Gustav Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, which he had elaborated in a series of
publications over the previous decade, one of them being his book Psychologische Typen
(Psychological types), which Einstein had read. Jung distinguished between three psychic levels:
consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. “The collective
unconscious,” he wrote, “appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for
which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology
could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.”69
Some readers of this text
may roll their eyes at the mere mention of Jung, ready to dismiss Einstein on the basis of guilt by
association. But permit me to recall an anecdote related by John Richardson. When he asked
Jacqueline Picasso “what her husband thought of Freud” she responded, “Il préférait l’autre.”70
Be that as it may, my purpose here is not to argue for the soundness of Einstein’s or any
other Jungian interpretation of Picasso. What interests me is what would have drawn Einstein to
such theories. The notion of an art arising from and addressing a collective unconscious yielded
an ostensible solution to an acute problem: how a new art, shattering aesthetic norms and visual
conventions, might achieve collective resonance. The price of the modern artist’s subjective
isolation, Einstein had argued in the book’s first edition, was an “tremendous need for a
collectively valid form.”71
Tectonic forms, forms with ostensibly universal sexual connotations,
could serve as a bridge from the private subjectivity of the socially isolated contemporary artist
to the collective. Einstein called these tectonic forms “gestalt-types” (Gestalttypen), a term that
suggests a visual analogue to Jung’s archetypes (Archetypen), and like these they were intrinsic
to human beings themselves.72
The “mythology of forms” had deep roots, and that was the basis
of its promise.
This did not end well. Einstein soon came to the painful realization that he had been
deluding himself. In a note from 1934, he savaged himself as “der ewige revoluzzer,” the
perpetual phony revolutionary, who remains “hopelessly behind the changing conditions of the

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times because he is always fighting for the same revolutionary utopia, which he seeks to achieve
by a change in artistic form.”73
That sums up the faith that Einstein had expressed in his Kunst
des 20. Jahrhunderts and his other writings on contemporary art. Its illusoriness must now have
become even more painfully apparent with Hitler’s seizure of power. Shortly thereafter, in the
unpublished book manuscript Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, a rambling, searing 500-page
polemic against the avant-garde and his own former illusions about it, he admitted that the
intense desire to renounce the given world had misled one to believe in the possibility of
inventing an absolutely new one: “Poets or painters,” he bitterly conceded, “are incapable of
endowing existence with any primary meaning or shaping a primary reality.”74
Modern
intellectuals, he now claimed, had been afflicted with mythomania. Of that Einstein’s 1931
Picasso text is a prime example. His “mythology of forms” was just that, a mythology, albeit not
in the affirmative sense he had intended.75
Thanks to Luise Mahler for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1 Einstein, “Picasso: Anläßlich der Ausstellung in der Galerie Georges Petit,” Die Weltkunst 6, 24/25
(June 19, 1932): 1–2.
2 The major exception is Sebastian Zeidler. See his “Life and Death from Babylon to Picasso: Carl
Einstein’s Ontology of Art at the Moment of Documents,” Papers of Surrealism 7, 2007,
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk /papersofsurrealism /journal7 /acrobat %20files/articles
/Zeidlerpdf.pdf; and Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art, Ithaca, NY, Cornell
University Press and Cornell University Library, 2015. Zeidler, however, is writing within the
discourse of Einstein scholarship.
3 My English translations of the 1926 cubism chapter and the Picasso text from the book’s third edition
have become available in Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, ed., trans.,
and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2019),
145–193, 212–246. Some of the material in the present essay has been adapted from my introductions
to those texts.
4 Ivan Aksenov, Pikasso i okrestnosti (Moscow, Tsentrifuga, 1917); Maurice Raynal, Pablo Picasso
(Paris, Les Éditions G. Crès & Cie, 1922); Eugenio d’Ors, Pablo Picasso (Paris, Éditions des
Chroniques du Jour, 1930). Raynal’s book, which was published first in German translation by Delphin
Verlag in 1921, was the longest treatment of Picasso in that language during the interwar years. A short
monograph by the German author Oskar Schürer (Pablo Picasso [Leipzig, Klinkhardt & Biermann,

14. 14
1927]) was less than 8,000 words. Although not a monograph on Picasso, at roughly 30,000 words
Kubismus (Brno, Moravsko-slezská Revue, 1921), the book by the Czech collector and art historian
Vincenc Kramář, offers the era’s most nuanced discussion of Picasso’s cubism.
5 On the evidence for this see my remarks in Einstein, Mythology of Forms, 221.
6 Einstein dedicated the cubism chapter of the second and third editions of Die Kunst des 20.
Jahrhunderts to Reber. On Einstein and Reber see Peter Kropmanns and Uwe Fleckner, “Von
kontinentaler Bedeutung: Gottlieb Friedrich Reber und seine Sammlungen,” in Die Moderne und ihre
Sammler: Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed.
Andrea Pophanken and Felix Billeter (Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2001), 347–407, which includes a
catalog compiled by Fleckner of Reber’s collection of modern art. On Einstein and Reber, see also
Dorothy Kosinski, “G. F. Reber: Collector of Cubism,” Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1061 (August
1991): 522–526.
7 Carl Einstein, Georges Braque (1934), in Werke: Band 3, 1929–1940, ed. Hermann Haarmann and
Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996). 256.
8 Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 3rd rev. ed. (1931), ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W.
Gaehtgens, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 135.
9 “Anmerkungen,” in Einstein, Werke: Band 1, 1907–1918, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus
Siebenhaar, Berliner Ausgabe (Berlin, Fannei & Walz, 1994), 214.
10 Einstein, “Il se pose la question,” in Werke: Band 4, Texte aus dem Nachlaß I, ed. Hermann Haarmann
and Klaus Siebenhaar. Berliner Ausgabe (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992), 184.
11 Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Akademie der Künste Berlin, https://archiv.adk.de/bigobjekt/7062, 296, p 1.
12 Originally published as “Anmerkungen zur neueren französischen Malerei,” Neue Blätter 1, 3 (1912):
19-22. English translation in Einstein, Mythology of Forms, 16–22.
13 Einstein, Mythology of Forms, 20.
14 Ibid.
15 On Einstein’s visits to Paris at this time see my remarks in Mythology of Forms, 342n1, 357n4.
16 Einstein, “Bemerkungen zum heutigen Kunstbetrieb,” Neue Blätter 1, 6, (1912): 46–47; cited from
Werke 1, p. 140.
17 Einstein, “Ausstellung der Sezession in Berlin,” Der Merker 4, 11 (1913): 436–37; cited from Werke
1, 179.
18 The most informative account of the exhibition and its rare catalog is found in Sylvia Peuckert,
Hedwig Fechheimer und die ägyptische Kunst: Leben und Werk einer jüdischen Kunstwissenschaftlerin

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in Deutschland, in Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde: Beihefte, vol. 2 (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2014), 179–80.
19 The advertisement is reproduced in Rolf-Peter Baacke (ed.), Carl Einstein: Materialien: Vol. 1,
Zwischen Bebuquin und Negerplastik (Berlin, Silver & Goldstein, 1990), 112. While Einstein never
explicitly mentioned cubism in Negerplastik, he acknowledged the connection six years later in his
Afrikanische Plastik: “As cubism was in its beginnings, we investigated African artworks and found
consummate examples.” Einstein, Werke: Band 2, 1919–1928, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus
Siebenhaar, Berliner Ausgabe (Berlin, Fannei & Walz, 1996), 65.
20 Einstein, Negerplastik, in Werke 1, p. 240.
21 On the negative response of Picasso’s contemporaries to his simultaneous practice of several styles,
especially of cubist and neoclassical styles, after 1914, see Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and
Meaning, London, Phaidon, 2002, pp. 9–31.
22 Einstein to Kisling, January 22, 1921, in Carl Einstein: Briefwechsel 1904–1940, ed. Klaus H. Kiefer
and Liliane Meffre (Berlin: J. B. Metzler, 2020) 130–31.
23 Einstein to Kisling, February 1921, ibid.,.
24 Einstein, “De l’Allemagne,” Action: Cahiers de philosophie et d’art, 9 (October 1921): 31-32; cited
from Werke 2, 202.
25 Einstein, Gerettete Malerei, enttäuschte Pompiers,“ Das Kunstblatt 7, 2 (Februar 1923): 47–52; Werke
2, pp. 334–39. On cubism’s perceived eclipse see Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern
Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987).
26 Einstein, Werke 2, 337.
27 Ibid., 335.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 336. French in the original.
30 For a summary of the argument and a convenient representative sample from the early criticism, see J.
M. Nash, “The Nature of Cubism: A Study of Conflicting Interpretations,” Art History 3 (1980): 35–
36. On the persistence of this idea in the subsequent literature, see also Christine Poggi, In Defiance of
Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992), 59– 60.
31 Maurice Raynal, “Conception et vision,” Gil Blas, 29 August 1912, p. 4; English translation in Mark
Antliff and Patricia Leighten, eds., A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906– 1914 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 319–20.

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32
Einstein, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts Propyläen-Kunstgeschichte 16 (Berlin, Propyläen-Verlag, 1926);
Mythology of Forms, 167.
33 Einstein, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 72; Mythology of Forms, 172.
34 Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926), 63; Mythology of Forms, 163.
35 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts., 64; Mythology of Forms, 163
36 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 56, 59, 60; Mythology of Forms, 155, 159,
37 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 72; Mythology of Forms, 174
38 Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Steinberg, Other Criteria:
Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York, Oxford University Press, 1972), 159–60.
39 ‘Daniel Henry’ [Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler], Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1920),
30, 35–36, 39.
40 “It was the Cubists who undermined the object forever identical with itself; in other words
they undermined memory, in which ideas are reconciled with one another. Their greatest
achievement is their destruction of mnemonic images.” He made this radical claim in his “Notes on
Cubism (1929): English translation from the French by me: October 107 (Winter 2004):165.
41 Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2nd rev. ed. Propyläen-Kunstgeschichte 16 (Berlin:
Propyläen-Verlag, 1928), 68–87.
42 Yet, in the revised Picasso section Einstein includes Braque and Gris in this change, while leaving the
discrete texts on them basically unchanged.
43 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926), 62.
44 Einstein, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1928), 73, 75.
45 Ibid, 78.
46 Ibid, 79.
47 Zeidler (Form as Revolt, 217–221) has some helpful pages on Einstein’s understanding of myth in
these years.
48 Picasso first treated the minotaur theme in a large collage of 1928. Einstein reproduced it three years
later in the third edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, although he made no mention of it in his
text. Picasso did not begin to work in earnest on the minotaur theme until 1933. Picasso’s etchings for
Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, published by Skira in 1931, probably appeared too late for Einstein to
have known them before completing his manuscript.
49 Einstein, “Obituary: 1832–1932,” Transition XXI (March 1932): 207–14; cited from Werke 3, 216.

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50 From the section on Paul Klee, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 260.
51 Georges Braque, in Werke 3, 270, 318, 373.
52 “Créatures d’une mythologie des forms” was the formulation Einstein used in his first Picasso article
for Documents, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” Documents: Doctrines - Archéologie -
Beaux-Arts - Ethnographie 1, no. 1 (April 1929): 19.
53 Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 127.
54 For a trenchant discussion of these works, see T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to
Guernica (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2013), 147–90.
55 Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 117, 123, 134; Mythology of Forms, 228, 234, 244–
45.
56 Einstein, “Picasso: Anläßlich der Ausstellung,” 1–2.
57 Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 114; Mythology of Forms, 226.
58 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 113, 114, 121; Mythology of Forms, 223, 226, 233. Einstein had
introduced the term in the Picasso section of Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1928), 72, 73, 77, 78.
59 Georges Braque in Werke 3, 387.
60 Ibid., 336.
61 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 116; Mythology of Forms, 228.
62 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 132; Mythology of Forms, 243.
63 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 132, 133; Mythology of Forms, 243, 244.
64 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 134; Mythology of Forms, 244.
65 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 132; Mythology of Forms, 243.
66 A recent exhibition at the Musée National Picasso Paris, Picasso: Tableaux Magiques (1 October
2019–23 February 2020) offered an unprecedented opportunity to view a large selection of these
pictures, including five of the eleven paintings Einstein reproduced in his book as examples of the
artist’s “mythic realism.” As I viewed this large array of works, most struck me less as products of
trance-like possession, of hallucinations tamed by the tectonic, than as a manifestation of Picasso’s
delight in testing his imaginative powers for reinventing the human body. In his youthful novella,
Bebuquin, oder die Dilettanten des Wunders (1912), Einstein had written that “Das Künstlerische
beginnt mit dem Wort anders,” the artistic begins with the word otherwise (Werke 1, 101). That’s how I
interpreted the fecund spirit that was at play in most of these works.
67 Einstein, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931) 116; Mythology of Forms, 228.

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68 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931), 112; Mythology of Forms, 224
69 Jung, “Die Erdbedingtheit der Psyche,” published in Hermann Graf von Keyserling’s anthology,
Mensch und Erde (Darmstadt, Reichl, 1927), 83–137. Z. S. Strother writes that “By 1930, Einstein was
influenced by a Jungian critique of Freud to argue that the unconscious should be considered a creative,
progressive force.” “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, 4 (2013): 9.
Heidemarie Oehm was the first to suggest the possible influence of Jung’s theory of the collective
unconscious on Einstein in her pioneering study, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins (Munich, Wilhelm
Fink Verlag, 1976), 49, 168. More recently, two other scholars have made this connection: Matthias
Berning, in Carl Einstein und das neue Sehen: Entwurf einer Erkenntnistheorie und politischen Moral
in Carl Einsteins Werk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 132–141, and Maria Stavrinaki,
in Contraindre à la liberté: Carl Einstein, les avant-gardes, l’histoire (Paris: Les presses du réel,
2018), 176.
70 John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, with the collaboration of
Marilyn McCully (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 486.
71 Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926), 86; Mythology of Forms, 193.
72 Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1928) 75.
73 The passage appears in a text fragment, Carl-Einstein-Archive 43, slip 21 in an envelope of notes and
fragments mostly dealing with the German revolution of 1918–19. Two of the slips in the envelope are
dated to the first two months of 1934: no. 2, January 21, 1934, and no. 9, February 24, 1934.
74 Einstein. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1973),
51.
75 It was an instance of “le mythe du mythe,” as Stavrinaki writes in her discussion of Einstein and myth,
in Contraindre à la liberté, 170–92.