Karel Teige

Karel Teige was the major figure of the Czech avant-garde movement Devětsil (Nine Forces) in the 1920s, a graphic artist, photographer, and typographer. Teige also worked as an editor and graphic designer for Devětsil's monthly magazine ReD (Revue Devětsilu).

With evidently endless energy, Teige introduced modern art to Prague. Devětsil-sponsored exhibitions and events brought international avant-garde figures like Man Ray, Paul Klee, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Le Corbusier and Walter Groupis, 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. 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 of a heart attack, said to be a result of a ferocious Soviet press campaign against him as a 'Trotskyite degenerate,' his papers were destroyed by the secret police, and his published work was suppressed for decades.

L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde, Published by MIT Press, was edited by Eric Dluhosch and Rotislav Svácha, with an introduction by Kenneth Frampton. This comprehensive volume examines the life and work of Karel Teige, one of the leading figures of the European avant-garde, and contains ten essays by eminent scholars and four annotated and translated theoretical tracts by Teige, previously unavailable in English. It is available through the Wolfsonian-FIU museum shop.