Between the Academy and the Avant-Garde: Carl Einstein and Fritz Saxl Correspond

Abstract

OCTOBER 139, Winter 2012, pp. 77–96. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Can we rethink art-historical discourse by recasting one of its most “academic” (to use a term of Bataille’s) or even “conservative” (to use a term of Carl Einstein’s) media, that of editorial correspondence? Moreover, what if we attempt to expand such correspondence from an epistolary exchange between two editors to a tentative conceptual agreement between the institutions that these two individuals represent? And what if the expressed objective of this correspondence—that is, the prospect of collaboration—ultimately fails: what form of intellectual or methodological affinities between the two parties might their aborted communication ultimately disclose? The following sequence of letters describes an interrupted exchange between the representatives of two well-known institutions, whose circles appeared momentarily to intersect only to become tangential shortly thereafter. This transitory connection and its textual vestiges—in letters, archival manuscripts, and printed articles—indicates that the original subject of this editorial correspondence was ultimately correspondence in and of itself: an epistemological system based on reflection and analogy—two terms that both correspondents exhaustively theorized in their writings yet failed to carry out in their institutional relations. Analogy, correspondence, similarity, likeness, resemblance, and similitude are terms that have been used to describe the survival of premodern mentalities within the heterotopias of mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century modernisms. But likeness produces more likeness, and a similar homology or uncritical automatism informs the literature that attempts to interpret these recurring analogies. In his critique of Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” Paul de Man cautions that “[t]he transcendence of substitutive, analogical tropes” associated with certain metaphors of likeness occasionally states their “totalizing power” as they move “from analogy to identity and from simile to symbol and to a higher order of truth.”1 Unlike other analogical parallels within the histories of modern art, anthropology, and literature, the following exchange of letters constitutes a form of correspondence between an academic library and a purportedly avant-garde revue that is singular in the history of the two institutions. The brevity of this momentary encounter