Revolution Smashes Through History and Tradition

Abstract

This text marks the end of a seven-year period during which, with the exception of a single short essay on Rudolf Schlichter (1920), Einstein had ceased writing on contemporary art; his art criticism from 1914 suggests weary disillusionment with the art world. a brief text, On Primitive (1919), written in the wake of the German revolution, he had declared that only revolution and participation in social reconstruction could give art a purpose.1 Evidently unimpressed with Berlin Dada's blend of art and he now believed-at least for a timethat he had found such an art in Russia. The absolute painting like they practiced absolute politics, he writes. The of the object by the artists of the Russian avant-garde was not a merely formal affair, but the destruction of both a social and epistemic order, a bourgeois order founded on possession, individualism, and the fiction of stable subjects and objects. Soaring on the wave of revolution, Einstein proclaims a dictatorship-not of the proletariat but of vision, a dynamic, functional vision, unfettered by objects, that can create a new reality. Following his argument to its radical conclusion, Einstein makes a case-for the only time in his writing-for objectless painting, for a nonrepresentational art, as well as vision directed against the object, vision as pure function. No other text of Einstein's so closely integrates politics with art theory. Einstein reiterated much of the argument presented here five years later in the section Russians after the Revolution in his Art of the Twentieth Century, but by then his political stance had softened and his verdict had soured: In the optical experiments of these there is more political conviction than painting; more Marxism than anything else.... The began with a formal utopia... and ended with quite harmless canvases, despite all the talk about