Artist of the day, September 5, 2020: Karel Teige, a Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic (#1086)

Karel Teige (1900 – 1951) was a Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic and one of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s movement. He was a member of the Devětsil (Butterbur) movement in the 1920s and also worked as an editor and graphic designer for Devětsil's monthly magazine ReD (Revue Devětsilu).

Teige was born in Prague. With evidently endless energy, he introduced modern art to Prague. Devětsil-sponsored exhibitions and events brought international avant-garde figures like Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Walter Gropius, among many others, to lecture and perform in Prague. Teige interpreted their work, sometimes literally, for the Czech audience. In his 1935 Prague lecture, André Breton paid tribute to his "perfect intellectual fellowship" with Teige and Nezval: "Constantly interpreted by Teige in the most lively way, made to undergo an all-powerful lyric thrust by Nezval, Surrealism can flatter itself that it has blossomed in Prague as it has in Paris."

Although not an architect, Teige was an articulate and knowledgeable architecture critic, an active participant in CIAM, and friends with Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus. From 1929 to 1930 he gave guest lectures at the Bauhaus in Dessau

Teige and Meyer both believed in a scientific, functionalist approach to architecture, grounded in Marxist principles. In 1929 he famously criticized Le Corbusier's Mundaneum project (planned for Geneva but never built) on the grounds that Corbusier had departed from rational functionalism, and was on his way to becoming a mere stylist. Teige believed that 'the only aim and scope of modern architecture is the scientific solution of exact tasks of rational construction.'

After welcoming the Soviet army as liberators, Teige was silenced by the Communist government in 1948. In 1951 he died in Prague of a heart attack, said to be a result of a ferocious Soviet press campaign against him as a 'Trotskyism degenerate,' his papers were destroyed by the secret police, and his published work was suppressed for decades.

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Mr. Karel Teige

Captain of the Avant-Garde book

1921, linocuts Karel Teige for Seifert, Czech avant-garde cubism modernism

1923 Karel Schultz, Sever, Východ, Zapad, Jih

1925, Film magazine

1925, Guillaume Apollin- Sedící Žena

1925 Mořsky půrvan (Sea Breeze) by Vladimir Germanovich Lidin.
Praha, Aventinum

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1926, Abeceda alphabet with by Milča Mayerová

1927, Art journal ReD,
the special edition on the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution

1928, Rupture (Zlom)

1928 Composition with typographic elements

1928, Svět, který se směje cover

1928 ,With the Ship that Brings Tea and Coffee

1930. Krásná literatura česká v prvním desetiletí republiky

1932 ,Original cover of the book The Minimum Dwelling

1938, Untitled

1939,  Collage #68

1941, untitled by Karel Teige

1942, collage

1947, Architecture Misfit #9

1947, Untitled  (BEZ NÁZVU)

1948, Collage #350

1948, Collage No. 353

1951, Collage

Collage No. 357

Collage No. 166

Collage No. 198

Collage No. 288

Collage No. 355