The Persistence of Poetry in Karel Teige’s Outlook
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The Persistence of Poetry in Karel Teige’s Outlook Tanya Silverman University of Michigan, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures [email protected] SYNOPSIS 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, acentral figure of the Czechoslovak avantgarde, demonstrated throughout his voluminous theoretical pieces acontinuous fixation on poetry. He wrote and published rationales for his earlier textual-visual works, yet left alack thereof concerning his 374 Surrealist photomontages. Though Teige declared himself aSurrealist 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 alucid Poetist style present harmonized layouts of words, symbols, and cut-outs arranged into semiotic order. As atypographer, 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— amatter 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. KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA / KEYWORDS Karel Teige; avantgarda; poetismus; surrealismus; dějiny umění; fotomotáž / Karel Teige; the avant- -garde; Poetism; Surrealism; art history; photomontage. DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/23366680.2021.1.3 The widely varying forms of the avant-garde can be threaded together by anumber of specific themes. In the transnational context, individual artists share acommon orientation towards group activity as well as arejection of conventions and the integration of visual art and text. The European avant-garde of the twentieth century frequently worked at the intersection of text and image, as we see in the case of Russian concrete OPEN ACCESS
TANYA SiLVERMAN 65 poetry and the cut-up method of the Dadaists. Czechoslovakia flourished during the interwar period, amid exchanges between East and West that produced everything from critiques of architecture to cultural events with their Parisian counterparts. Karel Teige, acentral figure of the Czechoslovak avant-garde scene, demonstrated throughout his diverse, decades-long trajectory in the visual arts afundamental interest in poetry. This helps explain his effort to promote his textual-visual works— an effort he did not make later in his career in the case of his Surrealist photomontages. Though not generally known as apoet, Teige worked extensively with the written word, editing journals, translating, and writing numerous theoretical articles, as well as books on everything from interior design to cinema. He painted in his youth but eventually redirected his artistic energies to graphic design, typography, and photomontage. At atime when various arts and cultural movements were blossoming, Teige borrowed from the tenets of Russian Constructivism to develop adistinctly Czechoslovak artistic program in the form of Poetism, which was also alifestyle and state of mind characterised by enjoyment and self-expression. Teige participated in group and joint projects, many of which involved graphic treatments of Czech poetry, applying visual arrangement to the typography and incorporating other media. This essay aims to understand why Teige offered written explanations for his early verbal-visual works but remained curiously silent on his hundreds of Surrealist photomontages. It seems as well that Teige found Poetism— and the techniques he borrowed from artistic movements in Russia and Germany— to be more engaging than Surrealism. Examples of Teige’s 1920s visual poetry and typographic work will be examined in contradistinction to his 1930s–1950s Surrealist photomontages. The selections from his oeuvre will be analyzed using statements from his writings pertaining to topics such as Poetism, typography, Surrealism, Constructivism, photomontage, and photography. VARIED INTERPRETATIONS OF KAREL TEIGE’S PHOTOMONTAGES In Teige’s Surrealist photomontages one finds certain thematic continuities with his pre-1935 visual work. Esther Levinger writes that Teige’s Poetist picture poems ‘marked the ultimate distrust of words’ and played on the arbitrariness of sign and signifier. According to Levinger, Teige considered art as ameans to harness the nonobjective word ‘liberated […] from its representational function to become aself-sufficient element of poetic structure’ (Levinger 1999, p.514). She continues her case about ‘Teige’s refutation of amechanical accord between object and sign’ (Levinger 2004, p.402). While acknowledging the ideological and thematic differences between Teige’s Poetist and Surrealist works, Levinger discovers asimilar engagement with semantics based on the placements of signs and connections formed among them (ibid., pp.413–414). This essay offers an alternative approach to understanding Teige’s individual and collaborative picture poems by highlighting certain Czech terms and semiotic sequences that form amatrix of meaning-making absent from his later photomontages. The argument will also refer to Teige’s own view on his work with typography to underline amarked preoccupation with language systems. The following analysis OPEN ACCESS
66 SLOVO A SMYSL 36 will also suggest that the 1920s picture poems by Teige and his Czechoslovak contemporaries offered the most characteristic manifestation of Poetism, aprogram that eventually grew too diffuse to be sustained, in spite of Teige’s dogged rhetorical efforts. Vojtěch Lahoda argues that Teige’s photomontages could be classified as poetic artworks that reveal proto-Surrealist tendencies, pointing out various parallels between René Magritte’s paintings and Teige’s photomontages to demonstrate that, for the latter, ‘collage was ameans of representing “poetic images” and visual conceptions’ (Lahoda 1994, pp.14–15). He elaborates this claim with respect to Teige’s ‘poetic images’, comparing the arrangement of pictorial fragments with poetic techniques that make use of the ‘“alphabet” of the female body’ and ‘“script” of the object’ as material for collages. He also cites Teige’s work on Alphabet (1926), featuring photographs of the dancer Milča Mayerová posing in the form of letters, as aprecursor of his later collage techniques (Lahoda 1999, p.299). Notwithstanding Teige’s breadth of corporeal (and erotic) imagery, it can be noted that both the dance moves and the graphemes Teige designed respect the Latin alphabet system and correspond with Vítězslav Nezval’s poetry. While Teige speaks proudly of his graphic ‘typofoto’ techniques, he generally has little to say about his numerous solo Surrealist works. This essay will deal more with Teige’s engagement with (and regard for) poetry, and less with the ‘poetic’ imagery and Poetist tendencies of his visual works, with analysis based primarily on those aspects of poetry that characterise it as aliterary form and that, as much as the boundaries between text and image may blur, comprise its fundamental linguistic and semiotic structures. The concept of the ‘inner model’ will be applied as atheoretical paradigm for understanding Teige’s concurrent contemplations as he was creating his Surrealist photomontages. This essay will also build on Josef Vojvodík’s assessments of Teige’s periodic references to the ‘inner model’ and continuous emphasis on the ‘dominance of poetry’ that was considered to be the ‘universal art of the spirit’ vis-à-vis Teige’s pictorial output (Vojvodík 2015, pp.30, 39). Furthermore, analysis will focus on Teige’s enduring interest in photography, also outlined by Vojvodík. One could argue that the political circumstances that dominated Czechoslovakia from 1934 to 1951 played an important role in Teige’s transition from his earlier Poetist period, characterised by his participation in group projects, to his later Surrealist photomontages, on which he predominantly worked alone. There is also the fact that Teige began to circulate his photomontages via publication and exhibition more frequently starting in the mid-1940s. But these observations do not fully explain why he so often chose not to give titles to his photomontages, or why he ceased to write about these works during his later career. It is then curious that Teige, as aperson of letters and typographer, very seldom used text in his Surrealist images. Teige produced hundreds of works over aperiod of sixteen years, spanning the Second World War and Stalinist era (beginning with the 1948 Communist coup), as well as times of Czechoslovak sovereignty. Certain thematic continuities in the works of Teige’s Surrealist works— severed body parts, landscapes, and architecture, all mixed together with erotic subject matter— compel us to approach the photomontages from aholistic perspective. OPEN ACCESS
TANYA SiLVERMAN 67 KAREL TEIGE: APOLYVALENT AVANT-GARDE FIGURE Teige’s career has many of the characteristics of an avant-garde working in 20th century Europe. His inclination towards group activity dates back to his work with the Devětsil group, which he helped to found in 1920. Anumber of prominent members of the Devětsil were poets and writers: Jaroslav Seifert and Vítěslav Nezval, for instance, whose output in the early 1920s reflected the forward-thinking attitudes propounded by Teige, the group’s most prominent theorist (Srp 1999a, p.23). Several collaborations with these poets in the 1920s would leave alasting impact on Teige’s outlook on artistic expression. Teige also embraced the avant-garde tendency towards the international exchange of ideas and radical politics. It was also in the 1920s that Teige travelled through Europe extensively, establishing contacts with such prominent figures as Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and André Breton of the Paris Surrealists. A1925 trip to Moscow and Saint Petersburg made astrong impression on Teige, familiarising him with the Constructivist principles to architectural theory and typography that he would borrow in his own work (Frampton 1999, p.6; Srp 1999b, p.23). Aconsummate modernist, Teige embraced progress and technological advancement while criticizing the formalist aesthetics and classicism of the pre-war period. In terms of his politics, Teige was acommitted believer of Marxist theory, adevotion that can be clearly seen in his own theories, even if it would eventually grow conflicted when he experienced communism first hand. Notwithstanding his faith in the proletariat and calls to upend the bourgeois lifestyle, Teige never joined the Communist (or any other) political party, expressing disapproval of Socialist Realist aesthetics, publicly denouncing the Stalinist trials of 1936, and becoming himself the target of Czechoslovak Communist government’s denunciations, late in his life, as arebellious ‘Trotskyite’ (Srp 1999b, p.274; Aulický 1999, p.385; Dačeva 1999, p.381). POETISM AND TYPOGRAPHY The first manifesto of Poetism, written by Teige in 1924, is atypical example of his attempt to make amark on the progress of art and to explain the significance of the integration of text and image. The program of Poetism advocated for an elevated universal human consciousness through a‘reign of pure poetry’ and love of lyricism. Not strictly pigeonholed to aparticular style or discipline, Poetism called for ‘visual excitement over the modern world’ as acomplement to Constructivism (Teige 1999c, pp.67–70). Acting as representative of the Czechoslovak Republic, which had only recently been founded in 1918, Teige aimed to disseminate the ideas of Poetism in the international context (Bydžovská 1999, pp.48–49). One of the purposes of the first Poetist manifesto was, according to Teige, to ‘put in words the aims of amovement brought to life by several modern Czech authors’ with respect especially to their integration of artistic and literary techniques. He mentions the ‘fruits of poetry’ that Poetism has engendered, such as picture poems, poetic puzzles, and anecdotes (Teige 1999c, p.71). Teige personally produced anumber of veritable picture poems in the 1920s that correspond to the optimistic tone of OPEN ACCESS
68 SLOVO A SMYSL 36 the first manifesto (Srp 1999a, p.26). Teige’s Greetings from aJourney (1923; Fig. 1), for instance, exemplifies awork of ‘purely artistic poetry without literature’ comprised of words, symbols, lines, dots, and cut-outs (ibid., p.32). Reading in sequence from the top-left corner down, we find the symbol of aflag, aseaside photograph, and the words ‘Pozdrav zcesty’ on the background of astarry sky and the cut-out of amap. At the bottom we find astanza of poetry in the format of the front and back of asealed, stamped envelope addressed to Jaroslav Seifert, fellow poet and member of Devětsil, in the Žižkov district of Prague. Teige created Greetings from aJourney around the time he journeyed to Paris, Vienna, and other major European cultural hubs, which suggests that it was inspired by his travels and international exchange of ideas, juxtaposed with ahyperlocal reference to Seifert’s neighbourhood. By directly including Seifert in the Greetings, Teige may also be alluding to the collective synergy of the Devětsil group. Teige’s interest in the expressive power of text and image extended to his professional typography work as well. Whereas his fellow Devětsil poets expressed themselves through language, he, the typographer, would effectively give their work its final form. In his 1927 article ‘Moderní typo’ (‘Modern typography’), Teige gives examples of his typographical accomplishments: ‘In the design of Nezval’s Pantomima (‘Pantomime’; Fig. 2) of 1924, and Seifert’s collection of poems Na vlnách TSF (‘On the waves of TSF’) of 1925, it was important for the typography to complete the poetic process and transpose the poems into the visual sphere’ (Teige 1999b, pp.104–105). Fig. 1.Karel Teige: Pozdrav zcesty (Greetings from aJourney), 1923, 331 × 235 mm. Collage picture poem. Image courtesy of Prague City Gallery. OPEN ACCESS
TANYA SiLVERMAN 69 In Nezval’s Pantomime, poems are presented in ahighly stylized fashion: the lines of ‘What Is Most Beautiful in aCafé’ appear atop rectangular, triangular, striped, and solid shapes; in ‘Adieu’ the line ‘birds are flying away’ is accented with letters arranged to resemble bouncing waves. In his experimental layout of the poems Teige makes good on the more concrete tenets of ‘Poetism’, giving an impression of playful ‘poetic puzzles’ whose piecing together emits ajoyful radiance from the page. Teige emphasizes his preoccupation with the aesthetics of poetry in ‘Modern typography’, suggesting that they must be treated with extreme caution. Among his numerous proposals for the ‘progressive simplification’ of type— balanced layout, legibility, clarity, liberation from academism and decoration— one finds various statements concerning the challenge of poetry to Teige in his practice as atypographer. According to him, the task of putting poetry to print differs markedly from managing the content of advertising billboards, commercial posters, and scientific books. The organization of the poetic text must correspond to ‘the nature, rhythm, and flow’ that the poem emanates. Teige expressed his frustration in dealing with publishers’ insufficient stock of typefaces, especially in the case of ‘poetic texts, which require acomplicated visual image and rich typesetting full of contrasts’ (ibid., pp.102–105). In ‘Modern typography’, Teige also refers to his collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk with Nezval, Alphabet, as asignificant textual-visual accomplishment, writing: ‘Itried to create a“typofoto” of apurely abstract and poetic nature, setting into graphic poetry what Nezval set into verbal poetry in his verse, both being poems evoking the Fig. 2.Vítězslav Nezval: Pantomima. Verše 1922–1924 (Pantomime. Poems 1922–1924), for Ústřední studentské nakladatelství aknihkupectví, Prague, 1924. Cover design by Jindřich Štyrský; typography by Karel Teige. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts inPrague (UPM). OPEN ACCESS
70 SLOVO A SMYSL 36 magic signs of the alphabet’ (ibid., p.105). In 1922, Nezval had been searching for away to distance himself from the fervent ideological atmosphere and from debates over true ‘proletarian poetry’. He found asolution by turning to ‘the most abstract poetic object— the letter— as apretext for the gymnastics of the mind’ (Nezval 2001, p.7–8), composing a‘cycle of rhymes’ for Alphabet working with the ‘constructive base’ of the letters’ sound, function, and shape. The arch of the A, for example, represented the physicality of ahut (Fig. 3–4). In Alphabet Teige not only set the typeface for the 25 poems but also designed striking Constructivist graphics to render the Latin letters as components of photomontage images (Fig. 5–6). Interspersed or integrated with the letters are photographs of avant-garde dancer Milča Mayerová, posing in the shapes of the letters. The textual-visual work Alphabet has atwofold nature. On one hand, it makes use of the most elementary unit of language, the letter, as basis for awhimsical poetry removed from the social and political reality of its time. In spite of this, the work would subsequently become the ‘constructive base’ for an experimental project combining text, photomontage, and modern dance. Moreover, Teige de scribed Alphabet as an example of ‘typofoto’, aterm coined by Bauhaus artist László MoFig. 3.Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (Alphabet), 1926. “A” typofoto. Poetry cycle with dance composition by Milča Mayerová; typography and graphic design with photomontage by Karel Teige; photography by Karel Paspa. For J.Otto, spol. sr.o., Prague, 1926. Image courtesy of Museum of Czech Literature/Památník národního písemnictví (PNP), Library. Fig 4.Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (Alphabet), 1926. “A” cycle. Typography by Karel Teige. Image courtesy of Museum of Czech Literature/ Památník národního písemnictví (PNP), Library. OPEN ACCESS
TANYA SiLVERMAN 71 holy-Nagy to describe the ‘visually most exact and complete communication’ (Teige 1999b, p.99). Teige champions Czechoslovak artistic achievements throughout ‘Modern typography’ as well as the second Manifesto of Poetism (1928). Many of these arguments point to innovations in the integration of text and image. For example, in ‘Modern typography’, Teige considers Seifert and Nezval, in their efforts to create an ideal typography, on par with Apollinaire and Marinetti (Teige 1999b, p.102–103). In the second Manifesto of Poetism, however, Teige censures Marinetti’s and other Futurists’ turn towards phonetic poetry, quoting Nezval’s claim that it represented acertain backsliding: ‘the stock of the auditory poets is falling with the slump in romantic contemplation.’ Teige further names Nezval as atrue vanguard force in his work on graphemes: ‘Now that Nezval is versifying his Alphabet we stand on the threshold of anew pictorial poetry’ (Teige 2002, p.594). Afaith that should be seen to derive in part from his own typofoto work for Alphabet. In his work in typography, where he incorporates various international influences, Teige may have also seen himself as playing arole in advancing the Czech language, especially as he lived and worked in the context of the westernmost of Slavic languages, one moreover that uses the Latin alphabet in combination with the caron háček and other diacritics. While asection of ‘Modern typography’ takes the form of amanifesto-esque list explicating the tenets of Constructivist typography, Teige also Fig. 5.Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (Alphabet), 1926. “K” typofoto by Karel Teige. Image courtesy of Museum of Czech Literature/ Památník národního písemnictví (PNP), Library. Fig. 6.Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (Alphabet), 1926. “G” typofoto by Karel Teige. Image courtesy of Museum of Czech Literature/ Památník národního písemnictví (PNP), Library. OPEN ACCESS
72 SLOVO A SMYSL 36 lists Russian script among the writing systems he believed were bound to become obsolete to make way for astandardized format of international communication.1 He also paid respect to typography principles put forth by Bauhaus figures such as László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer (Teige 1999b, p.103), and even took on the task of updating the Bauhaus typeface (Bayer’s universal font), publishing his proposals for the letters A, G, K, and X in ReD magazine (1928–1929). While the captions for the lowercase A–Zare written in Czech, the letters themselves are in basic Latin script without Czech diacritics— or German umlauts for that matter (Michalová 2018, p.60 in Image Index). Similarly, Alphabet renders the Latin letters without diacritics. It is possible that Teige viewed his work with the alphabet as part of aconcerted effort to streamline Czech orthography in view of amore universal format of communication. PIVOT FROM POETISM, ONGOING FIXATION ON POETRY Teige continued to write about poetry, poets, and poetic rhetoric even as his own endeavours gradually steered away from Poetism. By the end of the 1920s, several other prominent Devětsil members, such as Toyen, Josef Šíma, and Jindřich Štyrský, made headway in their painting pursuits as they took their cues increasingly from Paris. Teige’s support for their creative development frequently involved comparisons of their painting styles to his own means of expression: poetry. When Toyen and Štyrský developed an abstract painting style known as Artificialism, Teige interpreted their use of elementary shapes and automatism as testimony to an aesthetics that had emerged out of agenealogy distinct from Surrealism and its Romantic lineage. Artificialism, according to Teige, could thus be considered as an analogy to poetry and its departure from the outdated formalist commitments of literature (Bydžovská 1999, p.52). Even as the domestic press, towards the end of the 1920s, dismissed Poetism as outdated, Teige pointed to new developments in Czechoslovak art as proof that Poetism had matured (ibid., p.48). Teige would continue to regard Poetism in this way throughout his transition to Surrealism. In the article ‘Surrealisté vČeskoslovensku’ (‘Surrealists in Czechoslovakia’) published in spring of 1934, just weeks before joining the newly formed Czechoslovak Surrealist Group, he stresses the importance of Poetism in the group’s formation and how its leader, Nezval, and members (including Štyrský, who often clashed with Teige) were continuing in the traditions of Poetism. Teige added that he chose not to join the group because he neither considered himself aSurrealist nor identified with the ideology. His cooperation with its members, he argued, rested along the lines of solidarity with the intellectual left. 1 Teige’s typography for Konstantin Biebl’s poetry— in the collections of poems With the Boat that Imports Tea and Coffee (1928) and Rupture (1928)— bring to mind the style of Russian concrete poetry books, such as Vasily Kamensky’s Tango with Cows (1914) and El Lissitzky’s For the Voice (1923), especially with the integration of text and shape. Even if Teige’s aesthetic treatment of Czech poems for these books appears rather Eastern, it could simply be that he considered the use of Latin script in these cases as an improvement on the Cyrillic. OPEN ACCESS