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EN
The aim of these excerpts is to provide the professional public with a wide range of diary notes written in 1912–1925 by Karel Teige, a key figure of the Czech interwar artistic avant-garde. The collection focuses both on the ‘Prague’ writings, which reflect key historical moments during 1918 and 1919 from the personal perspective of the young, sensitive emerging intellectual, and on texts Teige wrote while vacationing in Neveklov that include his reflections on his own artistic activities, specifically in the field of the visual arts. He finds in these activities an expression not only of his artistic but also of his human existence, in spite of which he can often be seen to express a keen skepticism towards them. It is precisely this tension between the two attitudes that leads to the strongly reflective nature of the excerpts, as they gravitate more and more towards the fields of art criticism and art theory. The aspiring artist strives to formulate his dissatisfaction with his own work by drawing on concepts and insights from the contemporary and historical artistic context. Among other things, this tends to strengthen his theoretical knowledge, together with his ability to synthesize a wide range of cultural and artistic connections that are at the young Teige’s disposal. One might draw an apt comparison here to the young poet Šalda who entered the world of art criticism in the late 1880s and early 1890s — a move which may well have been, to use Šalda’s own expression, ‘per nefas’, but would result nonetheless in a truly essential model of art critique. Teige too found himself drawn in the late 1910s and early 1920s towards the field of art-critical reflection, and he too would come to formulate a unique model for the artistic avant-garde from the perspective of a theorist and organizer.
EN
Karel Teige’s enduring interest in the essence of poetry may help explain the outward promotion of his 1920s textual-visual works in contrast to his more muted treatment of the Surrealist photomontage collages that he produced from 1935 to 1951. Teige, a central figure of the Czechoslovak avantgarde, demonstrated throughout his voluminous theoretical pieces a continuous fixation on poetry. He wrote and published rationales for his earlier textual-visual works, yet left a lack thereof concerning his 374 Surrealist photomontages. Though Teige declared himself a Surrealist in 1934, Surrealism may not have interested him in the same way as Czechoslovak Poetism or the implementation of aesthetic concepts borrowed from his counterparts in Russia and Germany. In this essay, Teige’s proclamations about pictorial matters, poetry, modern art ideologies, typography, and the ‘inner model’ theory have been applied towards his pre-Surrealist, textual-visual works, in contradistinction to his later photomontages, to suggest why he did not promulgate the latter artworks to the same extent as the former. Examples of his 1920s picture poems in a lucid Poetist style present harmonized layouts of words, symbols, and cut-outs arranged into semiotic order. As a typographer, Teige stressed the importance of the ‘nature, rhythm, and flow’ of poetic texts, and his works also reveal careful reflection on the design of graphemes. It is, however, his fascination with linguistic matters, e.g. poetry and letters — a matter in which many of his Surrealist collages appear not to have taken much interest — that remains most obscure, lacking any contextual explanation. Suffused with fragmented corporeal forms and erotic imagery amid variegated scenery, Teige’s vivid post-1935 photomontages have drawn the attention and speculation of many art historians.
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