This collection of essays investigates the relationship, as fraught as it is fascinating, between writer and art theorist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) and the European avant-garde. Einstein's significance for avant-garde aesthetics and his role in primitivism are probed in light of recent approaches to avant-garde studies, such as post-colonialism and the 'spatial turn'. The volume explores consonances, dissonances, shared and hidden agendas, and contributes to a mapping of some less familiar dimensions of Einstein and those movements of which he was both a part and an avid critic.