DREAMS AND DISILLUSION: KAREL TEIGE AND THE CZECH AVANT-GARDE
November 16, 2000 to April 1, 2001
Overview
Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde was the first U.S. exhibition on Karel Teige, the most important Czech proponent of the European avant-garde. A graphic designer and architectural theorist, Teige was an innovator in many artistic areas, including book design, stage sets, and collage. Some 100 objects, including a full-scale model of Teige's ideal apartment for workers, were represented in the exhibition, which ran from November 16, 2000 through April 1, 2001.This exhibition revealed how Teige and his circle made major contributions to the development of modernism and illuminated the social and political forces that affected Czechoslovakia from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.
The exhibition drew from The Wolfsonian's superb and unusual collection of Central European graphic arts. In addition, 21 of Teige's Surrealist collages from The Museum of Czech Literature in Prague were on display for the first time in the United States.
Karel Teige was 18 at the end of the First World War, when the new Republic of Czechoslovakia gained independence from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Faced with the challenges of defining post-imperial culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Teige led the drive among Czech artists and intellectuals to participate in the international, left-leaning avant-garde. An articulate and enthusiastic modernist, he traveled to Russia, France, and Germany, establishing an ongoing dialogue between his Prague-based Devětsil group and well-known Constructivists, Purists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus designers.
During this period Teige's critical and creative output was prodigious. He edited a number of significant Czech avant-garde journals, wrote extensively on graphic design, typography, photography and film, and lectured at the Bauhaus. Putting theory into practice, Teige embraced technology and produced numerous collages, montages, book covers, photomechanical illustrations, collaborative performance pieces, prints, and poems.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Teige remained confident that socialism offered hope. He sought solutions to the economic and political crises through architecture, for example, by offering theoretical housing projects that would challenge the bourgeois status quo and meet the needs of a newly empowered working class. The rise of Stalin, the Nazi invasion, the Second World War, and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, however, effectively destroyed Teige's dreams of utopia. From the late 1930s until his untimely death in 1951, he turned inward, creating edgy, erotic, and disturbing Surrealist collages.
Dreams and Disillusion is accompanied by the publication Karel Teige, 1900-1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (The MIT Press, 1999; 420 pages, $50), edited by Dr. Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Švácha of the Czech Academy of Science. The book is available in the Wolfsonian museum shop.
Guest Curator Eric Dluhosch largely based the exhibition on research conducted during his four-month residency as senior fellow at the Wolfsonian in 1996. He has written on technology and modernism, lectured widely on the role of technology in architecture, and worked for many years as a consultant on low-income housing in developing countries. He is translator of El Lissitzky's Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution (The MIT Press, 1971).
Wendy Kaplan, Wolfsonian associate director for exhibitions and curatorial affairs, along with James Wechsler, Wolfsonian assistant curator, worked closely with Dr. Dluhosch on curating the exhibit. Ms. Kaplan is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century design history; Mr. Wechsler's interest is art of the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S. and Mexico.
This
exhibition was at The Grey Art Gallery at New York University from
May 1 to July 7, 2001, and at The David and Alfred Smart Gallery of
Art at the University of Chicago, from October 4 to December 30, 2001.
The exhibition was sponsored by Northern Trust Bank, The Private Bank; Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support was
provided by the Florida International University's Center for Transnational
and Comparative Studies, Law Offices of Becker and Poliakoff, P.A.; Doris
Benson, Mark Steinhardt, and IOR, Inc.; and Ivelin and Craig Robins, Dacra
and Miami Design District.
The Wolfsonian-FIU receives support from the
State of Florida; Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, Florida
Arts Council; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs through the
Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Miami-Dade County Board of County
Commissioners; the Mayor and City Commission of the City of Miami Beach
and the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council; Continental Airlines; Northern
Trust Bank, DACRA and Miami Design District.
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