"This book collects fourteen essays by the woefully understudied Carl Einstein, translated here from the German. Einstein was a major critic in the early twentieth century. He was a large presence in Paris when it was the crucible of the modernist avant-garde. He was one of the earliest thinkers to take Cubism seriously. He was an architect of formalism and perhaps the first critic to produce a substantial text on African art and its relationship to modernism that rejected Sub-Saharan African cultures as "primitive." And, his views on repetition and mechanical reproduction are in direct opposition to those of Walter Benjamin. Charles Haxthausen identified and translated these fourteen essential texts and has provided critical introductions to each one as well as a longer introduction to Einstein's life, work, and contribution to the intellectual culture of the 20th century"--Provided by publisher.