Plan des formes, plan des forces

Abstract

Between Negerplastik (1915) and Afrikanische Plastik (1921), there is a shift in Carl Einstein’s perspective. This author, who was one of the first thinkers on African art and its scope for the avant-gardes, avoids a disembedded aesthetic approach lacking reference to the practices and beliefs which give substance to objects, and is instead concerned to connect them to geographical areas and styles. But his work goes beyond the expected debate between aesthetic and ethnological approaches. His originality is to have been able to conceive of these works both as conduits of belief and as plastic solutions, working on the basis of the concepts and theses of formalism. This approach, which reflects upon the spiritual load of the object and its image, makes it possible to understand the scope of African art among modern painters, not in terms of forms, as the theory of primitive imitation would argue, but in terms of forces, or rather by thinking about what the forms owe to the forces.

Keywords

• Carl Einstein
• African sculpture
• primitivism
• formalism
• cubism