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Karel Teige: functionalist and then some: the first exhibition in the U.S. of a leading Czech modernist illuminates the intellectual landscape of interwar Prague while adding new dimensions to the histories of design, architectural theory and the international style
Art in America, Dec, 2001 by Joseph Masheck
"Form follows function," wrote Louis Sullivan over a century ago; but nobody ever expected architecture to become either so purpose-built and tailored that no room's exact function could ever be changed, or else so elastic as to not have any fixed structure of its own. When Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson coined the term International Style for their 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922" and its now classic accompanying book, they invited functionalist modern architecture into the temple of historical styles, in fulfillment of 19th-century expectations that new building tasks and new materials must call forth a style for the modern age. (1) Hard-nosed functionalists, devoted to building as answering to utilitarian requirements, could hardly have been happy with this dubious legitimization. One of the hardest-nosed was the Czech theoretician Karel Teige (1900-1951). As Kenneth Frampton long insisted, Czechoslovakia was "the one country which has always been inadequately represented in any account of the International Style," and Hitchcock and Johnson quite "failed to mention the catalytic role played by the critic Karel Teige, whose Devetsil group was the driving force behind the Czechoslovakian left-wing Functionalist movement." (2)
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In latter-day discussions of architecture of the 1920s and '30s, at least among those aware of anything else Czech besides Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House, Teige's name would sometimes flash by in generalizations about "functionalism"--as if that were synonymous with modernism. Yet one never quite knew why this nonbuilder who had set out to be a painter, then studied art history, became an editor, and took up graphic design and photomontage, was so pertinent to functionalism. In some way his pertinence had to be crucial to the question of extreme functionalism in relation to a supposedly formalist modernism. With "Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde," an exhibition organized by Eric Dluhosch for The Wolfsonian--Florida International University, even inveterate modernists got to see who this Teige was. The Wolfsonian exhibition suited its activist-theoretician-artist perfectly, presenting some 100 works, including 21 of Teige's rare Surrealist photomontages as well as posters and book designs.
Background
Teige was a founder and the effective leader of the Prague-based avant-garde group Devetsil (from the word for a tough weed), a critical collective that strove to advance modernism during the 1920s, a period that was the cultural heyday of the Czechoslovak state. Teige was an early enthusiast of Le Corbusier. After a 1922 Parisian visit, another great early influence would be Man Ray, not only as a photographer but as a multifaceted individualist. By 1923, Teige was in touch with the Bauhaus; a month in the Soviet Union in 1925, when utilitarian "productivism" was displacing fine art, confirmed his fundamentally social, Marxist commitment to functionalism, especially as a matter of getting the urban housing job done--let's even say done well, with the question of formalism on hold for the moment. Tellingly, before the 1925 "Art Deco" exposition opened in Paris, with Le Corbusier's L'Esprit Nouveau pavilion (arty front, standard domestic interior), Teige had joined with Theo van Doesburg to boycott that bourgeois trade fair of the modernistic, as on a different front he would actively protest against the autocratic leadership of the Czech Communist Party in 1927. In 1930, Andre Breton's second Surrealist manifesto, by its embrace of Marxist principle, made it possible for Teige to develop in good conscience a personal mode of Surrealist photomontage which he could pursue even later in his life, when he became persona non grata to the Stalinists who were running the country.
A little historical background is necessary to appreciate what made the leftist theoretician and artist Teige a critical figure in the development of Czech functionalism and hence of modern architecture. What is today called the Czech Republic has only had a modern history; for the "Czech lands" of the Austro-Hungarian empire--meaning mainly the old kingdom of Bohemia plus Moravia--became a republic in 1918, joined by Slovakia upon the dismemberment of the empire at the end of World War I. Bohemia's having been the most industrialized part of the empire facilitated Czechoslovakia's great liberal flowering of the 1920s and '30s, as did a democratic constitution and land reform.
The Nazis annexed the Sudentenland, a German-speaking region in northern Czechoslovakia, in 1938 (with Poland and Hungary also seizing territory), and in 1939 they took over Bohemia and Moravia as a "protectorate." Following the Second World War, Czechoslovakia came under Soviet influence in several steps. An attempt at self-liberation failed in Prague in 1945, partly because the U.S. Army stopped shy of the city, having agreed to allow the Red Army to enter as liberators. However, the Czech insurgents themselves "were by no means anti-Bolshevik." (3) And that is an important fact for Teige's place in the later history of the Czech Republic; for while there is sufficient reason to use the term "coup d'etat" for the conclusive change to a Soviet-attuned government in 1948, to infer that Marxist socialization would have disappointed most Czechs would be quite wrong. "In the elections of 1946 the Communists emerged as the strongest single party and became the leading party in a coalition cabinet headed by the Communist Klement Gottwald." (4) But Gottwald proved to be the local Stalin; when he died after attending Stalin's funeral in 1953, Antonin Novotny confirmed the party-state apparatus, with its hostility to modernism and fostering of phony folksy culture--a status quo Teige unfortunately would not live to see challenged in 1968. (5)
