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 art's 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 functionality-not 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 humanity-into 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 Einstein's 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 Lütticken Ulrike Müller Jenny Nachtigall David Quigley Cornelius Reiber Erhard
Schüttpelz Kerstin Stakemeier Maria Stavrinaki Elena Vogman Zairong Xiang Sebastian
Zeidler.With reproductions of artworks by:Jean (Hans) Arp Willi Baumeister Georges Braque
Brassaï Claude Cahun Lux T. Feininger Max Ernst Florence Henri Barbara Hepworth Hannah
Höch Heinrich Hoerle Paul Klee Germaine Krull Helen Levitt André Masson Alexandra
Povòrina Gaston-Louis Roux Kalifala Sidibé Louis Soutter Yves Tanguy Toyen Jindrich
Styrský Raoul Ubac Paule Vézelay and many others.
