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

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)

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)

Teige and architectural functionalism have lately become timely, for in the new Czech Republic there has been confusion (oddly like the old Marxist worries about skipping "inevitable" historical steps) about the fate of modernism and the possible claims of a postmodernism that might seem at once obligatory, ill informed and belated. A frustrated former instructor at the main architectural school in Prague, for example, complained that since a "non-practical approach to designing buildings was encouraged in the Czech Republic under the communist regime," this somehow "left Czech architects mired in Functionalism and communist-modernism style" [sic]. (6) The hopeless categorical contradictions in this diagnosis indicate the urgency for the Czechs now of figuring out where they stand. Although there is far too much of what I for one consider modernophobic, Home Depot postmodernism, a sophisticated Czech "neofunctionalism" is currently under way, (7) reinforced by the excellent historical exhibitions and catalogues of the Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera (named for the functionalist builder Fragner) and the journal Zlaty rez (Golden Section). For the new appreciation of Czech functionalism, we are indebted, more than to any other individual, to the tireless scholar Rostislav Svacha, author of The Architecture of New Prague (1984; English trans., 1995) and coeditor, with Dluhosch, of the volume that accompanies the Teige exhibition. (8)

Graphic Design

El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy were kindred Constructivist spirits of Teige, and if he seems dwarfed in that company, he did much on the theoretical front for architecture--despite his denying it traditional glory--as well as being a significant participant in a great Czech florescence of modernist graphic design between the wars. Teige had set out to be a painter, even exhibiting his works at the age of 16, but from 1922, when he designed the cover of the first Devetsil publication, he found his metier in print, as an editor as well as a writer, a graphic designer and, shall we say, a "fine" artist of photomontage. He produced a ceaseless flow of art writing while pursuing a political life as an artworker-activist, dwelling for much of that time in "minimum" (an interesting term, to be explained) functionalist quarters of his own design--just as he preached. Teige, the exhibition serves to show, wasn't just a relay;, he was a critical transformer, as one sees in tracking him back and forth between social-scaled theory and different but complementary individual practice.

"Dreams and Disillusion" afforded an extensive survey of Teige's graphic work, from pragmatic, "productivistic" typography early on to accomplished Surrealist photomontages in the latter part of his abbreviated life. In the earlier '20s, his book covers and related layouts, whether simple or complex, consist of flat graphic elements. Following the singularly plain Devetsil anthology cover--with a coolly centered disk, the word "DEVETSIL" above and "PRAHA 1922" below--this generally means balanced asymmetrical linear compositions. The early graphics are so firmly Constructivist that one can imagine Teige denying that their structure was essentially much more artistic or "formal" than what any savvy master printer would know to do simply to make a layout look right. Yet the double-page spread of frontispiece and title page for Konstantin Biebl's collection of poems, With a Ship Importing Tea and Coffee (1928), would have been a winner in the Bauhaus. Speaking of which, you have to love the sheer functionalist fanaticism that led Teige to take Herbert Bayer's "Universal Grotesque" typeface (1925-26), which is already sans serif, and further simplify four of the letters. Then there are Teige's interpositions of photographic elements within asymmetrically balanced rectilinear compositions. By the mid-'30s, essentially Surrealist, juxtapositional photographic elements are integrated into the book jackets or cover designs, while Teige also develops fully independent photomontages, as assuredly Surrealist in their makeup as the earliest book designs were forthrightly Constructivist. It was vitally dialectical of this publicly committed rationalist to develop a Surrealist side in his most private work, which is well represented in the exhibition.

Not quite Surrealist yet already too marvelous for any utilitarian purpose, and certainly not for teaching children the alphabet, was one 1926 project that was extraordinary for involving a kind of crisply eurythmic body movement with typography and photography. For the book Abeceda (Alphabet), with text by Vitezslav Nezval, Teige graphically integrated images based on a performance by the dancer Milca Mayerova (directed by Jiri Frejka at the Liberated Theater, Prague) with large capital letters. Functionally clad in trim satin gym togs, the limber Mayerova had executed kinetic equivalents of the alphabet. One of two quite remarkable features of the exhibition is a fascinating videotape of a reconstruction of that performance by Elaine Wright (produced at the Wolfsonian by Jiri Lamberk and David Burnett).

Critical Functionalism

The Wolfsonian's exhibition represents very well the critical position of Teige without meeting some impossible demand for a thorough visual account of what is an essentially theoretical and, at that, subtly problematic matter: his architectural functionalism. The exhibition honors a great theoretician without (understandably) being able to mount an "ism" in a vitrine, though the essays in the accompanying volume go a long way toward elucidating Teige's outlook. And now that some of his important writings have been translated, Teige's achievement can be more thoroughly considered. What emerges, in view of his critical turn away from Le Corbusier as a bourgeois cultural hero, is Teige's broad development of functionalist thinking, and particularly his new respect for a great middle-class architect much closer to home: Adolf Loos.

In Teige's architectural thinking, stretching the sometimes rather square artistic limitations of Constructivist rationalism seems to follow from a rather swift outgrowing of an early and innocent hero worship of Le Corbusier. Teige had already been enthusiastic for Le Corbusier before the Swiss architect collected his "purist" articles in Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), 1923. But a critical break came when Corbu flashed traditionalist colors with an all too grandiose 1928-33 project for a world intellectual center (Mundaneum) in Geneva. Now, what it had pleased Le Corbusier to consider a modern rationalist reincarnation of classicism (hence not frightfully antihumanist after all) revealed itself to the politically radical Teige as just what, for the general good, modern architecture might better learn to live without. (9)

As Le Corbusier came to be celebrated, for better or worse, as the very Moses of functionalism, it is significant that Teige critically distanced himself from the Swiss architect and, at the same time, affiliated himself with the Moravian-born Loos. Today, after some 25 years of unsympathetic, superficial generalization, too much of it literary and blind to visual form, there is the matter of functionalism's having had a prehistory considerably antedating Le Corbusier. One remarkable moment of that prehistory, no doubt overlooked because it is as "formalistic" as it is functionalist (these usually being thought antithetical terms), pertains to internal artistic function: Vasari praises Giotto's figures (not yet, of course, the height of art) for "fulfil[ling] their purpose" in the sense of doing what they had to do ("obbedivano a quel che elle avevano a fare"). (10)

Teige himself stands at the hard, extreme left end of a functionalist spectrum. On the right are those who tend to think that everything would be automatically beautiful if only it might unobstructedly assume its most economical form. David Hume and Adam Smith both pushed this basically Calvinist, "free-market" view. Toward Teige's end are all those who may care more or less idealistically about art and form and also about utility, yet will not pretend that whatever works must be good. Against Hume and Smith, they have on their side Edmund Burke, who writes in the section "Fitness Not the Cause of Beauty" of his Sublime and Beautiful (1756), that if fitness were the cause of beauty, "the wedge-like snout of a swine, with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of digging, and rooting, would be extremely beautiful." (11) Marx himself, by the way, evidently switched from a position of necessity to one more appreciative of formative judgment in natural building. (12)

In the theoretical hothouse of 1920s Eastern Europe, functionalism was at extreme odds with "formalism." Yet within the English critical formalist tradition, there is a precocious--and pertinent--esthetic responsiveness to unornamented industrial architecture on the part of Clive Bell. Writing in Art (1914) of then-new reinforced concrete buildings in London, he says, "Only where economy has banished the architect do we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges, our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in beauty at thirty shillings a foot." Remarkably, too, Bell enthusiastically extends his architectural thinking to the image structure of modern painting, wherein older painters don't comprehend a definite "willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to conception of the plan." (13)

Teige was just not going to talk that way because he was, in a sense, on esthetic strike. As he wrote in 1925, "With constructivism we must not think about art. If we consider constructivism as the style of the present, as a way to designate our own epoch of culture and civilization, we must emphasize that it does not bring about a new formal system, an a priori aesthetic order, that it leaves aside all traditional forms, forsakes the nine Muses of the classical Parnassus. It is not concerned with form but with function" (14)

The Marxist Teige argued that there is no need to worry about esthetic or spiritual impoverishment with the demise of "fine" art in the bourgeois sense, because such wants would be better satisfied directly by life, once life was better--a principle articulated by William Morris as early as 1877, as well as by many a Constructivist later. Yet Teige also understood the inescapability of art's formal aspect, for even engineers make quasi-esthetic judgments. "Machines are born out of calculations," he wrote, "and a calculation always leaves several possibilities. ... To decide the most advantageous (implicitly the most beautiful) result is the work of mathematical intuition." (15)

Loos Was More

Teige's estimation of Loos seems to have grown as he extricated himself from the gravitational pull of Corbusianism. Loos was a man after his own heart in the way that he kept saying no to "art" yet kept doing it--in a new way, to be sure, but in spades; Loos was an architect who not only "made it" in Vienna, the old imperial capital, but earned the honor of a special state pension back home in the new Czechoslovak state. Two famous Loosisms can be briefly recalled. In the notorious essay "Ornament and Crime" (1908), Loos equates ornament not with tribal tattooing (as is often supposed) but with tattooing among modern antisocial and criminal elements in the West. "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use." (16) The very "absence of ornament," Loos maintains, invoking Beethoven (for not having been distracted by fancy clothes and such), "has raised the other arts to unknown heights," though "the Slovak farmer's wife who embroiders her lace" and the shoemaker who imposes unnecessary "notches and holes" are innocent (only) because "they have no other means of expressing their full potential." By contrast, however, "We have our culture which has taken over from ornament." Hence a principle of sublimation is entailed in the proposition "the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power." (17)

In his other famous text, "Architecture" (1910), Loos further claims that ornament has been confused with style, and that artists and architects are spoiling esthetically superior craft traditions by imposing their would-be "artistic" ideas. Here is one of the significant parallels between the bourgeois-preoccupied Loos and the proletarian-committed Teige, and it concerns a certain neutrality in the exterior of the dwelling. According to Loos, "The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art, which does not. The work of art is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement." Loos is willing to go so far as to say, "Does it follow that a house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included amongst the arts? That is so. Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art." (18) Loos and Teige both seek to separate art and the utilitarian, quite unlike applied-art do-gooders; as such, they are parallel even when pointing in opposite directions.

Now in a more than merely rationalistic way, Loos comes to underpin Teige's Constructivist position. In Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (written 1927, published 1930), Teige, the loose-cannon leftist, claims for a then "neglected Adolf Loos," loose-cannon bourgeois (but cool) architect, definite eminence as a "forerunner" of true, post-Secession modernism, in fact, as "the sole member of that generation to respond to the question of modern architecture in a way that the present fully affirms." He admires Loos's early Viennese shop projects and American Bar (1907) as "swipes at petit bourgeois taste and prejudice." Such technical priorities as Loos's flat roofs are formally consequential, and Teige, embroiled as his book approached publication in disputing what he saw as Le Corbusier's reactionary monumentalism, is pleased to note that Loos's flat terrace roof idea has been "perpetuated" by Le Corbusier and others. Teige considers that though Loos built only a few buildings, "One can appreciate their value and radicalism within the evolution of new building types (which anticipates much of what later becomes the ABC's of the international style) only if one is aware that Loos's early works of over more than a quarter century ago used the same elements and followed the same principles; those very principles sought for decades by the `purist' (i.e., constructivist and functionalist) architecture of our day." Teige the Marxist even picks up on a political economy of ornament in Loos: "Ornament demanded additional work from the worker. To force workers to perform socially unnecessary work is an expression of sadism on the part of the feudal lord or capitalist." (19)

Ignoring Le Corbusier's sense of the engineer as a second "Hellene," Teige points to Loos's prescient as well as prior notion that the Greeks, with their deference to necessity, adumbrated the modern engineering esthetic. As for Loos's claim about the tomb and the monument, first Teige adopts it, writing, "This statement is fully consonant with the tenets of constructivism, which reduces it to the following: Architecture is not art, because the tomb and the monument, those abstract architectures, are not really part of architecture at all but rather a pure, absolute, even nonfigurative sculpture"; and then he adds the rather positivist rationalization, riffing on Loos, "The tomb and the monument are forms that will disappear with the popular acceptance of cremation (urns will replace tombs) and with the disappearance of the religious and totemic, that is, atavistic sentimentality." (20) (Nobody ever said he wasn't doctrinaire!) Teige readily finds common cause in the fact that "Loos's economy is not the economy of greed. It is a rational social economy that argues that `cheap is twice as expensive.'" Loos did not "think `like an artist,'" yet "he did not touch the problems of standardization and mass production." (21) Even though he was not himself a functionalist--especially with his penchant for luxurious materials, however pure and unadorned--Loos might be at least as vital to the cause as was that crooner of the machine style as such, Le Corbusier.

The last chapter of Teige's Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, "Toward a Theory of Constructivism," is a locus classicus for the theory of Constructivist architectural form as either (a) other than artistic, or (b) reformed-artistic. On almost every page one finds Loosian antipathy, not simply to ornament but toward the decorative arts as pseudo-artistic. "Constructivism negates traditional aesthetics and conceptions of art," Teige declares, and, with the leveling phrase "such special forms of craft--called art," even fine-arts norms are affiliated with prevailing means of production. "The constructivist aesthetic, having shed the superstition of an `art' existing a priori, does not explicate architecture as a symbol but as a craft activity," while "old architecture, architecture as art, ends where the old artisanal building methods end." Teige indulges in a typically Loosian clothing metaphor with an antibourgeois quip about man as "measure of all tailors," in declaring: "We are talking about buildings that are made to the measure of man, about humanizing architecture--not about some new "constructivist art." (22) While he sounds practically Anglophiliac-Loosian in declaring, "To intuit the psychosocial components of the housing problem does not imply satisfying sentimental notions of `hearth' and `sweet home' [in English in the original]," a divergence of sorts opens with one of the better statements of how there is still the possibility of a valid art of architecture: "Architecture in which creative intuition has not divined the unknowns and imponderables--those factors that cannot be addressed by mechanical, rational thinking--is neither architecture nor science but craftsmanship, building without spirit." (23)

Realizing the Minimum Dwelling

I said that there were two extraordinary features of the Wolfsonian exhibition. The second was a brilliant twofold realization of Teige's pet architectural concept, the "Minimum Dwelling"--or Nejmensi byt in the Czech, which is also the title of his 1932 book with a cover photomontage showing a spiffy new collective dwelling beside an old tenement in ruins. The Minimum Dwelling was to be a basic private studio apartment for each adult living a communal life, without bourgeois marriage, in a collective koldom (borrowed Soviet term) with common services, each pair of efficiency units sharing a little galley kitchen and a john with tiny shower. The idea seemed interesting but unrealistic until one was convinced with the help of two effective exhibition devices. Inscribed on the floor was a full-size floor plan of a pair of units with their common mini-facilities--based on a 1932 design by Jan Gillar, related in turn to a double studio that Jaramir Krejcar produced for Teige as an interior remodeling of an existing apartment in 1927-28 (before Teige and his companion were joined by a second woman). (24) One could pace out, without crowding, how compact the little units were. There was also a full-scale, open-sided mock-up of one such interior with furnishings, everything painted a hypothetical white. This was a good way of suggesting the experience of the diminutive interior within the public context of gallery; besides, any thought of today's urban homeless would have to make the Minimum Dwelling only the more plausible.

It happens that the doubled Minimum Dwelling also exemplifies the ahistoricism that readily attends a task-focused functionalism. Teige's Siamese-twinning of studio apartments finds its chief determinant in economy, to be sure; yet, in its avant-garde aspect, it also echoes a series of twinned, semi-detached pairs of artists' houses, such as Josef Hoffmann's double house outside Vienna for Carl Moll and Koloman Moser (1900-01), Theo van Doesburg's project for a double house outside Paris for himself and his wife and Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1927), and (if artisans matter) Loos's twin semi-detached suburban Viennese houses for the Austrian Werkbund (1932). (25)

Poetism and Photomontage

Extending beyond architecture into the life of the metropolis, and thus not wholly divorced from concerns of functionalism, was Teige's theory and practice of "poetism." Not just another easy, would-be scandalous gambit of counting everything art, poetism sought an exhilaration of life in the modern present; it was upbeat in a proletarian, urban way but noticeably more peaceable than Futurism. (26) The notion embraced all sorts of quasi-artistic virtuosity: "Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, [Vlasta] Burian [a Czech film comic], a director of fireworks, a champion boxer, an inventive and skillful cook, a record-breaking mountain-climber--are they not even greater poets?" (27) A critical question remains of how the mundane might become extraordinary except by the idealistic implication "for its own sake." The answer, for architectural functionalism as well as general poetism, seems to have concerned doing things for what the 18th century considered the general "felicity" of the people. The Teige exhibition conveys the flavor of poetism nicely in a quotation (translated as part of a display) from an essay on "New Proletarian Art" in Devetsil: revolueni sbornik (Devetsil: Revolutionary Anthology), 1922, where Teige dismisses aristocratic notions of privileged poetic (or general artistic) inspiration: "The muses of a poet are not a bit more `divine' than those of an engineer or a carpenter. Perhaps the only thing that can be admitted is that they are possibly more human, since art is really a humanizing science."

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.

There have certainly been less complex functionalists; but whatever he said for good polemical reasons, Teige never gave up on art. Then, too, he may also have been an exceptional Marxist, even though in the Czechoslovakia of his day there was nothing exceptional about being a Marxist. The state security apparatus had been hounding him for years when a heart attack claimed Teige at the height of his powers, just when his sophisticated functionalism was needed to counter the bureaucratic pomposity of '50s Cold War philistinism.

(1.) Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style, 2nd ed., New York, Norton, 1966.

(2.) Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed., London, Thames and Hudson, 1992, pp. 251-52.

(3.) Georg von Rauch, A History of Soviet Russia, trans. Peter and Arnette Jacobsohn, 6th ed., New York, Praeger, 1957, p. 370.

(4.) The Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., New York, Columbia University Press, 1963, p. 530. According to Simone Hain, "Under the Banners of Positivism," Rassegna, no. 53 (special issue: "Karel Teige: Architecture and Poetry"), March 1993, pp. 22-29, especially p. 25, Gottwald had attempted to co-opt the Czech avant-garde in 1923, which must already have affected Teige.

(5.) When, at its 20th world congress in Washington in August 2000, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), founded during the Cold War, resolved to maintain a "nonpolitical stance," all I could think, as a Czech-American of the left, was how civilized it was, since some of us can remember that what we saw happening for a few minutes in Prague in 1968 was far more inspiring than anything we have seen in Eastern Europe since.

(6.) Julia Gray and Helen Tomanova, article in The Prague Post, June 18-24, 1997.

(7.) For example, "Ceska a Slovenska Novofunkcionalistica Architektura/Czech and Slovak Neo-Functionalist Architecture," shown at the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, 1991-92, and the Prague National Gallery, 1992, accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Radomira Sedlakova and Klara Kubickova.

(8.) Erich Dluhosch and Rostislav Svacha, eds., Karel Teige 1900-1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999.

(9.) It is ironic that in conservative Anglo-American culture, thanks substantially to Frederick Etchells's antipoetic 1927 translation, Le Corbusier's book actually became notorious for caricaturally dehumanizing life in accord with the formula of the house as a "machine for living." See "Textual Life of the Living-Machine," in Joseph Masheck, Building-Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 77-94. A fresh example of the reaction is Harold Nicolson writing of the poet Jacques de Chaumont, "the war drove the gentle muse of second-rate poetry away from the colonnades and gardens and made her walk the streets. In ... his last volume, de Chaumont accompanied her, and there was a great deal about asphalt and the lovely legs of the Eiffel Tower and the beauties of reinforced concrete: his muse walked the pavements with the others, but she wore galoshes and was terribly afraid of being recognised." (De Chaumont did develop fascist sympathies as well as rappel a l'ordre taste.) See Harold Nicolson, Some People (first publ. 1927), London, Folio Society, 1951, p. 72. There is also broadly anti-Corbusian satire in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928).

At the same moment, in the novel Nadja (1928), Andre Breton sent up this conservative rationalist aspect of Le Corbusier's book. Needless to say, those who mocked Corbusian modernity because they were too square for anything modern have nothing in common with whoever, like Breton, held at least as sophisticated contradictory views. See Joseph Masheck, "On a Crypto-Corbusianism in Breton's Nadja," Annals of Scholarship, vol. 13, 1999, pp. 21-28.

(10.) Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. and ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 33; in the orig. Le Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanese, 9 vols., Florence, Sansoni, 1878-85, 2, p. 102. Vasari also touches on a question that preoccupied Adolf Loos, of a surface that disguises something's nature, in objecting (regarding the painting of Uccello) that "things that appear to be made of stone cannot and should not be tinted with another colour" (Lives, p. 76).

(11.) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, London, Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1958, repr. 1967, p. 105 (III.vi).

(12.) First, in the section on "Alienated Labor" in Marx's 1844 manuscripts, thoughts on human construction versus the building activities of insects and higher animals become conclusively esthetic: "An animal forms things in accord with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to ... apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty." (Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Selections," trans. Martin Milligan, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York, Norton, 1972, pp. 52-103, here p. 62). But then in Capital, Marx compares the work of an architect to the constructive activity of insects, writing, "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality" (III.vii.1). See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902, p. 157.

(13.) Clive Bell, Art, New York, Capricorn, 1958, pp. 148, 157. Bell can only wonder about the reception of the functionalist esthetic: "And the millions ..., how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a locomotive or a gasometer is the real thing?--when will they understand that the iron buildings put up by Mr. Humphrey are far more likely to be works of art than anything they will see at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy?" (p. 174). Teige, however, would have been the first to point out the apolitical implication of Bell's formalism where the latter dilates in a note, "An example of this was the temporary police-court set up recently in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road. I do not know whether it yet stands; if so, it is one of the few tolerable pieces of modern architecture in London" (p. 174, n. 1). But was the temporary court erected to deal with pacifist demonstrators against World War I from Ramsay MacDonald's wing of the Labour Party? Teige would definitely have wanted to know.

(14.) Karel Teige, "Constructivism and the Liquidation of `Art'" (1925), trans. Irena Zantovska Murray in Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2000, pp. 331-40, here p. 331.

(15.) Ibid., p. 339. Sometimes art and form, maybe even beauty, not to mention decoration, may have to be set aside in favor of more pressing tasks--justice being one good reason, mere meanness of heart a bad one. As early as "The Lesser Arts" (1877), Morris acknowledged that, given the spirit-corrupting influence of capitalism, there one day might best be a moratorium on art: "No, rather than that art should live this poor thin life among a few exceptional men despising those beneath them for an ignorance for which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they will not struggle with,--rather than this, I would that the world should indeed sweep away all art for awhile ..."; William Morris, "The Lesser Arts," in his Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, Centenary Edition, ed. G.D.H. Cole, London, Nonesuch and New York, Random House, 1934, pp. 494-516, here pp. 514-15. For a communist-era acknowledgment of Morris's importance for functionalist architecture in Germany, the Soviet Union and Poland (if not Czechoslovakia), see Edmund Goldzamt, William Morris a geneza spoleczna architektury nowoczesnej (William Morris and the Social Genesis of Modern Architecture), Warsaw, Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967, English summary, pp. 327-50. Now there was a decorative artist whom Teige, our utilitarian of theory and communist without portfolio, even more freely than Loos, could approve.

(16.) Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime," trans. Wilfried Wang, in The Architecture of Adolf Loos, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985, pp. 100-03, here p. 100.

(17.) Loos, "Architecture," in The Architecture of Adolf Loos, pp. 103-09, here p. 103.

(18.) Ibid., pp. 107-108.

(19.) Teige, "Adolf Loos," in "Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia" (1930) in Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, pp. 56-304, especially pp. 115-40, here pp. 117, 121, 123, 125. When he comments, "Medieval chests resembled monumental architecture and concealed their true objective substance and function" (p. 126), Teige even echoes a critique already engaged by Alois Riegl, in fin de siecle Vienna, in the background of Loosian ornamental critique. See Joseph Masheck, "The Vital Skin: Riegl, the Maori and Loos," in Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism: Riegl's Work, Amsterdam, G + B Arts International, 2001, pp. 151-82, especially pp. 172-73.

(20.) Teige, "Adolf Loos," p. 129. Teige's functionalist architect friend Krejcar designed constructivist cremation urns in 1920. See Rostislav Svacha, "The Life and Work of the Architect Jaromir Krejcar," in Svacha, ed., Jaromir Krejcar 1895-1949, Prague, Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera, 1995, pp. 28-161, especially p. 37, with illustrations on p. 36.

(21.) Ibid., pp. 132, 135-36.

(22.) Teige, "Toward a Theory of Constructivism," in Modern Architecture, especially pp. 287-99, here pp. 287, 289, 290-91. He continues, "Constructive `art' is in fact a contradictio in adiecto: constructivism is but a manifestation of a change in that form of human work and expression that is called `art.' Constructivism is therefore not an artistic or architectural ism but rather a guideline of universal creativity, a methodology for human work in all disciplines, a means to functionalist dialectical, materialist--in a word, socialist--thinking."

(23.) Ibid., pp. 293, 294. Given that military engineering is part of the prehistory of functionalism, consider this remark of Clausewitz, the 19th-century theoretician of war: "Of course all thought is art. The point where the logician draws the line, where the premises resulting from perceptions end and where judgment starts, is the point where art begins." Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 148 (II. iii).

(24.) For both projects, see Svacha, "Before and After the Mundaneum: Karel Teige as Theoretician of the Architectural Avant-Garde," trans. Alexandra Buchler, in Dluhosch and Svacha, pp. 106-39, especially pp. 122-29; and Dluhosch, "Teige's Minimum Dwelling as a Critique of Modern Architecture," op. cit., pp. 140-93; and Teige, "The Minimum Dwelling and the Collective House" (1930-31), trans. Alexandra Buchler, op. cit., pp. 194-215.

(25.) Because die-hard functionalists don't want to hear about art, they tend not to concern themselves with potentially telling formal connections in the art-historical dimension. I have long thought it strange that the same obliviousness extends even to what one might have supposed excitingly protofunctionalist, as against standard classical, Roman works--beyond the general modernist interest in Roman engineering of a Siegfried Giedion. A good Czech case (by an otherwise more conservative architect), which to my knowledge has not been entertained, is a bakery by Bohomil Hypsman, in the Hostivar district of Prague (1919-22), where, atop a four-cylindered silo, a boxy stack of cubes punctuated by circular openings must surely recall a well-known late Republican tomb, in Rome, of a commercial baker, its cubical upper part studded with evenly spaced, ventlike cylindrical forms.

(26.) Teige wrote a book titled Stavba a basen (Building and Poem), which was published in 1927 with covers he designed. In itself, the sporting of advertising typography on the facades of commercial buildings, indulged with modernist enthusiasm by the Devetsil (e.g., Jaromir Krejcar's Olympic department store in Pragne of 1925-26), was really a spiffy modernist inversion of former grunge: advertising lettering had been such a commonplace eyesore in Central Europe that around 1918 architecturally worthy older buildings were actually having their painted advertisements expunged by preservationists. See Werner Oechslin, "The Evolutionary Way to Modern Architecture: The Paradigm of Stilhulse und Kern," in Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Santa Monica, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993, pp. 362-410.

(27.) Teige, "Poetism" (1924), trans. Alexandra Buchler, in Dluhosch and Svacha, pp. 64-71, here p. 70.

(28.) Jan Mukarovsky, "On the Problem of Functions in Architecture," in Structure, Sign and Function: Selected Essays, trans, and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner, Yale Russian and East European Studies, 14, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 236-50, here pp. 244, 246.

(29.) Karel Srp, "Karel Teige During the Thirties: Projecting Dialectics," trans. Karolina Vocadlo, in Dluhosch and Svacha, Karel Teige, pp. 256-91; Vojtech Lahoda, "Karel Teige's Collages: The Erotic Object, the Social Object and Surrealist Landscape Art," trans. David Chirico, op. cit., pp. 292-323.

"Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde" was organized by The Wolfsonian--Florida International University, Miami Beach, where it debuted [Nov. 16, 2000-Apr. 1, 2001]. It traveled to New York University's Grey Art Gallery [May 1-July 7] and can be seen at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago [Oct. 4-Dec. 30]. The show was curated by Eric Dluhosch with Wendy Kaplan and James Wechsler. Dluhosch and Rostislav Svacha have edited an accompanying 400-page volume, Karel Teige, 1900-1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde, published by MIT Press.

Author: Joseph Masheck is a professor of art history at Hofstra University.

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