Karel dough

Toyen and Karel Teige (1925)

Karel Teige (born December 13, 1900 in Prague , Austria-Hungary , † October 1, 1951 in Prague) was a Czech critic , art theorist , publicist , artist and translator .

Karel Teige was a versatile, politically left-wing personality: He participated in the founding of poetism and was involved in the fields of fine arts , architecture, film and literature. He consistently propagated the avant-garde art and lifestyle and was one of the best-known members of the avant-garde group Levá fronta (Left Front).

As an organizer, theorist and mediator, he influenced the development of Czech culture, especially poetism and surrealism . Jaroslav Seifert called his generation the “Generation Teige”.

Life

After graduating from high school in 1919, he began studying philosophy at the Charles University in Prague , but was already devoting all his energies to his activities in the field of avant-garde art. In 1920 he became the leading figure of the modern culture association Neunkraft ( Devětsil ). In this context, he formulated his understanding of proletarian art, which, in contrast to the Soviet art model, did not make any didactic claims but dealt with the actual cultural life of the proletarians: metropolitan folklore, circus, penny novels, film screenings, etc. Karel Teige contained poetism defined in a first manifesto in 1924: Poetism wants to be the means that the human imagination and creativity wants to expand in order to achieve a balance between modern civilization and human sensitivity. Art should become a permanent part of life, a happy modus vivendi, filled with Jaroslav Seiferts all the beauty of the world . In 1928 and 1930 Karel Teige wrote two further manifestos of poetism in which, on the one hand, he continued to elaborate poetry for all the senses and, on the other hand, attempted to link the Marxist sociology of culture with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis .

From 1927 to 1930 he edited the monthly ReD (Revue Devětsil) which became a leading magazine of the European avant-garde.

As part of his aesthetic considerations, Karel Teige continuously dealt with the aesthetics and sociology of architecture. At the beginning of the 1930s, in addition to anti-fascist publications, he was almost exclusively concerned with the sociology of architecture. He propagated functionalism and constructivism , seeing both styles as a technical and scientific service to the needs of mankind, with the tendency to strive from form to function. He polemicized with Le Corbusier , even when, in contrast to Le Corbusier , he defined architecture as a socio-scientific discipline. In 1930 he published the extensive work on the sociology of architecture , which enabled him to hold a visiting professorship at the Bauhaus Dessau University from 1929 to 1930 . He cherished a similar appreciation for the architectural approaches of the Bauhaus for Soviet constructivism, which he thematized in 1936 in his book Development of Soviet Architecture . He turned against the renewal of the pompous academicism of the 1930s.

Karel Teige was also strongly drawn to the medium of photography and film. He published the book Film as early as 1925, followed by studies on Charlie Chaplin and Soviet filmmakers. In 1929 his study on the aesthetics of film was published, which summarized his findings and defined film as the pure art of image and movement.

His artistic work is also of great importance: it involves typographic works , illustrations, photomontages and collages that date mainly from his surrealist phase.

In 1934 Karel Teige founded the surrealist group together with Vítězslav Nezval . The historical background is provided by the rise of the National Socialists in Germany and the promotion of socialist realism in the Soviet Union . Again Karel Teige did not understand surrealism as an aesthetic school, but as a philosophy of life that united the perspective of revolutionary reality and fantasy, the collective and freedom, understanding and feeling. In contrast to André Breton , he rejected mysticism and occultism and insisted on the Marxist sociology of art. In 1936 he published his extensive work, Annual Fair of Art , which explains the result of his studies on the phenomenon of “modern art”.

In the brochure Surrealism Against the Current 1938 condemns the campaign of the Stalinist power against modern art and draws parallels to then current events in Hitler Germany ( Degenerate Art ).

During the occupation he continued to devote himself to his aesthetic studies and edited the monographs Jan Zrzavý (1940) and Grünewald (1941).

After the Second World War, he wrote a dissertation, but did not take the doctoral examination.

In post-war art he devoted himself increasingly to typography , commercial graphics and the publication of his studies in magazines. He continued to work for the surrealist group and opened the international exhibition of surrealism in 1947.

Shortly after the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 , he fell victim to aggressive denuncian agitation. He firmly refused to adapt to the regime.

He made friends with a group of young surrealists, including Jindřich Štyrský , and took part in the samizdat editions of Zodiac Signs .

Karel Teige died of a heart attack a few days before a police house search, in which large quantities of his manuscripts disappeared. Immediately after his death, two women with whom Karel Teige had a close relationship committed suicide: Jožka Nevařilová and Eva Ebertová.

Works

Studies

• Stavba a báseň
• Svět, který se směje
• Svět, který voní
• Jarmark umění
• Surrealism proti proudu

Scientific work

• Soudobá mezinárodní architektura
• Moderní architektura v Československu
• Moderní fotografie v Československu
• Vývojové proměny v umění
• Vývoj sovětské architektury
• Sociologie architektury
• Jan Zrzavý

German-language editions

• Collages 1935-1951 and surrealism and photography , Museum Folkwang, Essen 1966
• Karel Teige: Liquidation of Art. Analyzes, manifestos , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1968
• Karel Teige: "Poetism - a Manifesto" in: Die Prager Moderne. Stories, poems, manifestos , edited and with an afterword by Květoslav Chvatík , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1991, pp. 139-148
• Vítězslav Nezval / Karel Teige: Depesche on Wheels: Theater texts 1922 - 1927 , Berlin: Basisdruck, 2001

English language editions

• Modern Architecture in Czechoslavia and Other Writings (Texts & Documents), JP Getty Trust Pubn, 2000, ISBN 089236596X
• The Minimum Dwelling , MIT Press, 2002, ISBN 0262201364
• Foto kino film (1922) and The Aesthetics of Film and Cinegraphie (1924) in: Cinema all the time: an anthology of Czech film theory and criticism, 1908 - 1939 , hrg. by Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik, University of Michigan Press, 2008, ISBN 0930042999

literature

• Kvetoslav Chvatık: "Herbert Marcuse and Karel Teige on the social function of art" in: The Frankfurt School and the Consequences , ed. by Axel Honneth and Albrecht Wellmer , Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986, pp. 367–383
• Karel dough. L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde , ed. by Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svácha, MIT Press, 1999, ISBN 0-262-04170-7 - also contains 4 essays by Teige himself
• Hans-Joachim Schlegel (Ed.): "Subversions of the Surreal in Central and Eastern European Film", Frankfurt / Main: Deutsches Filminstitut, 2002 ISBN 3-9805865-4-5
• Esther Levinger: "A life in nature - Karel Teige's journey from Poetism to Surrealism" In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte , Vol. 67.2004, 3, pp. 401-420
• Peter A. Zusi: "The Style of the Present: Karel Teige on Constructivism and Poetism" in: Representations , 88. Fall 2004, pp. 102-124
• Prague Architecture and European Modernism , ed. by Tomáš Valena and Ulrich Winko, Berlin: Mann, 2006
• Radu-Alexandra Răuţă: "Shifting meanings of modernism: parallels and contrasts between Karel Teige and Cezar Lăzărescu" in: The journal of architecture , Royal Institute of British Architects. - Vol. 14.2009, 1, pp. 27-44

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Karel Teige in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Literature by and about Karel Teige in the catalog of the German National Library
• Karel Teige , short biography on phil.muni.cz (Czech)