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

Teige's poetism of the everyday must point to the importance of the Prague Linguistic Circle as a crucial structuralist development out of what had once happily been called formalism in Moscow. Too often the plainspeak of functionalism has been filed away under logical positivism, without a consideration of the pertinence to Czech functionalist architecture of the Prague theoreticians' concern with the linguistically commonplace, and even the "poetics" of prose. Notably, the esthetician Mukarovaky--a member of the Prague circle who even produced a study (1932) of the Czech president Masaryk's prose style--published in one of the last numbers of Teige's journal Stavba (Building) an essay "On the Problem of Functions in Architecture" (1937-38), in which there is such a thing as an "aesthetic function," as "the dialectic negation of functionality," though clearly utility cannot be subordinated to architectural art without a result, "according to Karel Teige's correct formulation," tantamount to sculpture. (28)

Beginning in 1935, poetism seems to have nurtured a category of production in which Teige should be better known as a practicing artist: photomontage. With an obviously inclusive sense of the public domain, he was in the habit of mining for source images other modernists' already synthesized photo-images. (29) The practice raises a special question of parasitic, secondary origination--as is commonplace in jazz, for instance. In one case, the hand pointing a pistol with a smiling woman popping up from behind in Teige's design for the cover of Ilya Ehrenburg's History of One Summer (1927) derives from a book-cover photomontage by John Heartfield for Franz Jung's Conquest of the Machine (1923). And in Collage no. 243 (1942), one of at least two photomontage recapitulations of the same source, Teige raids Moholy-Nagy's Dinghy Being Towed by a Sailboat (1927) for the image of the cropped stern of a sailboat, substituting the head of a woman for the original dinghy in tow.

Sometimes photomontage seems like the Dali-surrogate of the intellectuals, but despite his antiformalism in architectural theory, and thanks, surely, to his Constructivist typographical commitment, Teige sustains a sense of the image as very much a nonnatural construct. The photomontages repeatedly present terse conjunctions of shapely female body parts, sometimes with architectural accompaniments. At least one features a monument of Czech functionalism. In Collage no. 196 (1941), the head of a nude female torso resting on a diving platform turns to watch an air-show-like sequence of three figures diving off another platform above. The photographed platforms belong to a little gem of functionalist-modernist Prague, the diving tower--rather like a factory-style "mushroom" column that sprouts great polygonal leaves--of Vaclav Kolator's 1929-30 competition swimming pool on the Barrandov Hill. Over all, the photomontages, which took the place of painting in something like the way functionalist building was supposed to displace fine-art architecture, became for Teige both solace and poetist delight.