- Karel Teige
Karel Teige (
December 13 ,1900 –October 1 ,1951 ) was the major figure of the Czechavant-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 likeLe Corbusier ,Man Ray ,Paul Klee ,Vladimir Mayakovsky , andWalter 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." ["Surrealist situation of the object" in cite book | last=Breton |first=André | title=Manifestoes of Surrealism | publisher=University of Michigan Press | year=1972| isbn=0472061828, p256]Although not an architect, Teige was an articulate and knowledgeable architecture critic, an active participant in
CIAM , and friends withHannes Meyer , the second director of theBauhaus . Teige and Meyer both believed in a scientific, functionalist approach to architecture, grounded in Marxist principles. In 1929 he famously criticized Le Corbusier'sMundaneum project (planned forGeneva 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.
References
External links
* [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=5866 Description of recent Teige biography]
* [http://www.ce-review.org/00/7/hearld7.html On Teige's erotic surrealist photomontages]
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