KAREL TEIGE: ARCHITETTURA E POESIA
53 RASSEGNA
Vittorio Gregotti [Editor]
Vittorio Gregotti [Editor]: 53 RASSEGNA [KAREL TEIGE: ARCHITETTURA E POESIA]. Bologna: Editrice Compositori srl, 1993. Original edition [anno XV, 53/1, Marzo 1993]. Text in Italian. Slim quarto. Thick printed French folded wrappers. 118 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisments. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly worn. A nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 118 pages and 175 color and black and white illustrations. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the work of Karel Teige in all of his areas of expertise: architecture, typography, book design and collage.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, RASSEGNA was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Contents
- Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
- Karel Teige e gli architetti del Devetsil by Rostislav Svacha
- Sotto le bandiere del positivismo by Simone Hain
- "Nejmensi byt," la casa minima by Eric Dluhosch
- L'architettura del libro by Zdenek Primus
- Karel Teige e la nuova tipografia by Karel Srp
- Sulle tracce de l'architettura moderna by Manuela Castagnara Codeluppi
- Il paradiso perduto; teige e la Russia sovietica by Otakar Macel
- Surrealismo e funzionalisimo: il duplice cammino di Teige by Hans Cisarova
I consider covers as a manifesto of the book: and this is their true commercial mission, a fact that is confirmed by the editors. It is therefore important that they strike the onlooker in as meaningful and expressive a manner as possible. To achieve this purpose, it is indispensable that their composition be characterized by a somewhat provoking energetic and active chromatic and formal balance; since energy is required, banal regularity is excluded.
-- Karel Teige
Because of location and history, Prague has long been a crossroads for various intellectual, religious and artistic currents. Cohabitation by Czech, German and Jewish communities created an inspirational cultural environment during the decade that began in 1910. Albert Einstein lectured at Prague's German university for three semesters; his stay overlapped with the blossoming of Czech cubism -- the most characteristic manifestation of the pre-war Avant-Garde in Prague. Prague received Picasso and Braque like nowhere else; Cubism there affected not only fine art but also the practical arts and even architecture. Art historian Vincenc Kramar referred, in his 1921 book KUBISMUS, to the essential relationship of the new art to "the transformation of our idea of the world, as reflected in Einstein's theory and in the studies of the fourth dimension."
Prague became the capital of independent Czechoslavakia after the fall of the Hapsburg monarchy in October 1918 and quickly became a magnet for the propagators of the great radical artistic movements of the era, including such ISMs as Dadaism and Futurism.
Avant-Garde activity in 1920s Prague was concentrated around the art group Devetsil, founded in October 1920 by Karel Teige. The Devetsil artists produced poetry and illustration, but they also made contributions to other art forms, including sculpture, film and even calligraphy. The first Devetsil manifesto formed the basis of Poeticism by urging new artists to look deeper into ordinary objects for poetic quality.
"In photomontage and typophoto the present day has a new type of writing and a visual language . . . Only through many experiments will we learn to use this new means of communication, this new way of writing. With it, we will be able to write new truths and new poetry." To Teige every aspect of modern life contained poetic value. Especially the new visual language made possible by technological advances in photographic reproduction, printing and typesetting. Teige understood the importance of reproduction as both a means and an end to artistic expression -- revolution could just as easily spring from a type case as from a rifled gun barrel.
Karel Teige (1900 – 1951) is known mainly as a theorist of the fine arts and architecture, a columnist, critic, editor, and organizer of events on the Czech arts scene in the 1920s. He was also a leading figure of the avant-garde group Devetsil (1920--32), which included at various times hundreds of important figures in painting, literature, architecture, photography, film, and theater. In 1934 Teige joined the Prague Surrealists, and from that year till his premature death he made nearly four hundred collages. During his life, however, he had few possibilities to make them known and the collages remained his private passion. It is now clear that they constitute a vital part of the history of European Surrealism.
Karel Teige's surrealist collages were not primarily intended for public exhibition. They were produced by Teige for private use and were never exhibited during his lifetime. Teige produced over 300 of these collages between the years of 1935 and 1951 and very few of them were released until the year after his death, when they were published in the samizdat journal Zodiac by the surrealist group of which he was leader.
This fact is significant since one of the aims of the Prague Devetsil group had been to use new forms such as the pictorial poem as a way of anticipating the extinction of the hung picture, with its bourgeois and capitalist associations. Teige's vision, that art should become life and art should be made by everyone, is encapsulated in the very genre of collage. For Teige, these collages were both a personal lyrical expression of his own (very male) subjective awareness and also a visual interpretation of his ideology.
Although these collages are unmistakably Czech in feeling -- many of them feature the Czech countryside -- all the collages in this exhibition have the hallmark of the international surrealist movement and influences of such artists as Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Man Ray. Teige absorbed the strategies of the modern movement during his trips to Paris in the 1920s; he then disseminated these influences among his many contacts and through his role as a prolific publisher and editor. The effect of Man Ray was particularly potent in the Czech-speaking world, an influence that can be seen in many of these collages.
This exhibition demonstrates Teige's importance as an active, creative artist who was very much a part of the modern movement. This role has been overlooked until quite recently, not only because so little of Teige's cubist work from the 1920s has survived, but mainly because his identity as a theorist, editor and typographer has eclipsed the creative aspect. To some extent this is because Teige's priority was always the cause of Marxist society, a utopia he believed in and hoped for. Around the time he began to produce his collages, he speculated about "the possible interrelationship between socialist realism and surrealism."
Because surrealism is based on the irrational language of the subconscious, its meanings are subliminal and opaque. Works of surrealism have to be "read" like the metaphors in a poem, rather than just looked at as aesthetic objects. However, this is especially the case with Teige's pieces since they represent such a private aspect of his artistic expression. -- Sue Bagust [rassegna 7418]