'Documents', founded in 1929 by Georges Wildenstein, was an unusual and perhaps one of the most interesting episodes in the history of the inter-war European avantgarde. The motor forces of the periodical were three extraordinary men: Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. Their project - a combination of science and art, of that which is part of the past and the avantgarde, of the European and the non-European - remained an isolated Nietzschean attempt at 're-evaluating all'. 'Documents' was also, and this is slightly less obvious, an uncommon atlas of images. This emphasis on visual experience brought the project conceived by Bataille and Einstein close to the conceptions launched by Aby Warburg. If the Mnemosyne atlas is a sui generis 'anthropology of the memory of forms' then 'Documents' can be recognised as an 'anthropology of that which is formless'
