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Teige, Karel
(b Prague, 13 Dec 1900; d Prague, 1 Oct 1951). Bohemian critic, theorist, collagist and typographer. He was one of the founders of Devetsil (1920–31) and was the spokesman and theorist of the Czechoslovak Surrealist group (1934–51), inviting André Breton and Paul Eluard to Prague in 1935. His early works were influenced by Cubism. During the 1920s and 1930s he was an enthusiastic typographer, while in the 1940s he devoted himself primarily to making Surrealist collages, concentrating in particular on the female nude. As a theorist he was active from 1920, becoming the spokesman of his generation and its main interpreter, editing the journals Disk (1923, 1925) and ReD (Revue Devetsilu; 1927–31). At first interested in utopian prototypes, he developed an interest in Constructivism after a visit to Paris in 1923. In the late 1920s he became an internationally acknowledged theorist of modern architecture. He delivered a cycle of lectures at the Bauhaus on the sociology of architecture (1931), carried on a polemic with Le Corbusier and exchanged ideas with Theo van Doesburg. Teige’s leftist position became more radical in response to the rise of Fascism in Germany and the gathering economic crisis, but this stance prevented him from recognizing the true nature of Soviet ideology and the background of the Moscow trials. In the 1940s, when he could no longer publish his work, he undertook a systematic examination of philosophical aspects of the development of modern art, especially its relationship to phenomenology and Cubism.
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