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karel teige
Karel Teige (Prague, 1900 – Prague, 1951), an avant-garde artist and writer, critic, experimental typographer, and cover and book designer, was one of the most important figures in
interwar Czech modernism. His activity spanned the Devětsil group in the 1920s, whose monthly review ReD he edited and designed, to Surrealism in the 1930s
and immediate postwar period. An indefatigable author of numerous essays on art and design, encompassing Romanticism to Constructivism, he is perhaps best known for
authoring both Poetist Manifestos and his writing on functionalist architecture and the politics of housing, such as The Minimum Dwelling. Though an avowed Marxist, he was
repeatedly pilloried in the communist press as a "degenerate Trotskyist," and with the growing Stalinization of Czechoslovakia after 1948, complete with show trials and executions,
Teige had reason to fear eventual arrest by the secret police (the journalist and film/theater historian Záviš Kalandra, a fellow Surrealist collaborator, was executed in 1950 as a
Trotskyist following a show trial). Teige died of a heart attack in 1951 that was likely precipitated by the stress from the campaign launched against him.
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published by TSP:
Dreamverse [Intro]
Surrealism Against
the Current
[forthcoming]
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