Carl Einstein (1885–1940)

Carl Einstein, né Karl, was born to a Jewish family in Neuwied, Germany. His parents were Sophie and Daniel Einstein. His younger sister Hedwig would become a well-known concert pianist and married sculptor Benno Elkan. In 1904, he moved to Berlin, where he studied philosophy and art history at Friedrich-Wilhelm University with Georg Simmel and Heinrich Wölfflin. In 1907, he visited Paris and learned about the works of artists such as Picasso, Braque and Gris. On his return, he started writing and joined the radical circle around Franz Pfemfert and his magazine Die Aktion. In 1913, he married Maria Ramm, making him Pfemfert's brother-in-law. Prior to World War I, Einstein published a novella and essays on art, politics, and literature, primarily in Die Aktion. He changed the spelling of his first name to Carl, and also used the pseudonym Savine Ree Urian. His book Negerplastik, published in 1915, established him as an important art critic. Einstein was one of the first to appreciate the development of Cubism, and addressed both the avant-garde of modern art and the political situation in Europe in his writing. He enlisted in the German army in 1914, and after sustaining a combat injury was reassigned to a civilian department in Brussels. He was involved in the short-lived Revolutionary Brussels Soldiers' Council and in the failed Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, and was twice arrested. He befriended Dadaist artists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield. As a target of the political right wing, he moved to Paris in 1928. There he co-founded the journal Documents with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. In 1936, he joined the International Group of the Durutti Column, an anarchist military unit fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Following the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Einstein returned to France and continued working on his Handbuch der Kunst, a cross-cultural survey of European modern art. When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940 in World War II, Einstein was trapped on the French-Spanish border. Seeing no alternative to being captured by the Nazis, he killed himself by jumping from a bridge on July 5, 1940.