KAREL TEIGE
Karel Srp
Karel Srp: KAREL TEIGE. Prague: TORST, with the National Museum of Literature, Prague, 2001. First edition. Text in English and Czech. Square quarto. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 164 pp. 85 color plates. Text, bigraphy and bibliography. Wrappers faintly worn. Interior unmarked and very clean. A nearly fine copy.
6.25 x 7 softcover book with 164 pages and 85 full-page color plates -- the most extensive collection of Karel Teige's Photo Collages yet assembled. Essential.
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 René 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