Dreams and Disillusion
Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde
Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York
May 1 - July 7, 2001
Dreams and Disillusion provides a long-overdue exploration of the career of the most important Czech proponent of modernism, KAREL TEIGE. Previously overlooked in Western accounts of the European avant-garde, Karel Teige (1900–1951) was a graphic designer and architectural theorist whose innovations in book design, poetry, stage sets, and collage revolutionized Czech artistic production in the 1920s and '30s. The exhibition both reveals the major contributions of Karel Teige and his circle to the development of modernism and illuminates the social and political forces that affected Czechoslovakia from the end of the First World War to the Soviet occupation. It features some 100 objects, including 21 of Teige's surrealist collages— never before been seen in the United States—as well as a full-scale model of Teige's ideal apartment for workers. This exhibition is organized by The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida.
"We are very pleased that the Grey Art Gallery will be able to participate in the tour of Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde," observes Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Teige's multi-faceted accomplishments certainly deserve a wider audience. The broad range of media explored by the artist, along with the important social issues he raises, are still extremely relevant today."
Drawn primarily from the superb collection of Central European graphic arts of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Dreams and Disillusion focuses on Teige's key artistic production between the wars. Faced with the challenges of defining a newly independent Czech culture after the end of the First World War, Teige brought international attention to the Czech avant-garde through his connections to well-known Constructivists, Purists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus designers in Russia, France, and Germany. Karel Teige, who was eighteen years old when the Republic of Czechoslovakia gained its independence from Austria-Hungary, served as a conduit of ideas between East and West in the early days of the Soviet government.
One of the founders of Devetsil, a leading association of young artists and intellectuals in Prague, Karel Teige edited a number of significant avant-garde journals on art and architecture, and wrote books and essays on art, architecture, typography, photography, film, and theater. He also acted in his own plays, designed stage sets, and taught at the Bauhaus. Putting theory into practice, he produced poems, paintings, prints, book illustrations, film scripts, and photomontages. His embrace of technology and the cutting edge of modernist design techniques is evident throughout this remarkable body of work.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Karel Teige remained confident in the potential of socialism to improve conditions for the masses. He sought solutions to the economic and political crisis through architecture, offering theoretical housing projects that rejected the bourgeois way of life and addressed the needs of a newly empowered working class. However, the rise of Stalin, the Nazi invasion, the Second World War, and finally the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia shattered Teige's dreams of utopia. From the late 1930s until his untimely death in 1951, he turned inward, creating a series of edgy, erotic, and disturbing Surrealist collages.
The installation consists of five sections. The introductory section examines the rise of oppositional culture in Prague through photos, objects, and text, and introduces visitors to Teige's role in the Czech avant-garde. The second explores his early work and Devetsil; the third relates to poetism, the movement he founded with poet Vítezslav Nezval; the fourth illuminates his significant influence on modernist architecture. The exhibition concludes with the final phase of Teige's life, from Hitler's closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 to the artist's death in 1951. This section includes his surrealist collages, shown for the first time in the United States, from the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague.
The exhibition was organized by Dr. Eric Dluhosch, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at MIT; Wendy Kaplan, former Associate Director for Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University; and James Wechsler, former Assistant Curator at the Wolfsonian. The exhibition will be touring next fall to the Smart Gallery of Art at the University of Chicago, where it will be shown from October 4 to December 9, 2001.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Karel Teige, 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1999), edited by Dr. Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svachá of the Czech Academy of Science.
GREY ART GALLERY, NYU
New York University
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
www.nyu.edu/greyart
