Neolithic Childhood Art in a False Present, c. 1930

Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous arts social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionalitynot only of art. The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an Ethnology of the White Man together with the excavation of the deep time of humanityinto the Neolithic Childhood mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einsteins own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality. With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Ltticken, Ulrike Mller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian Zeidler With reproductions of artworks by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassa, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Hch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, Andr Masson, Alexandra Povrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidib, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindich tyrsk, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vzelay and others.