On what grounds do we speak of ’the avant-garde’ in interwar European culture? Why do we understand the conflicts and quarrels among these diverse movements as expressing a shared attitude—the culture of the manifesto, the drive to reject, to explore, to renew—that trumps the conflicts and quarrels themselves? Why do the stern rationalism of a functionalist building and the irreverent irrationalism of a Dadaist performance seem heralds of a similar spirit?
The Czech avant-garde art theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951) regarded architecture and film as providing the key to formulating a unified theory that would capture this ‘integrity of the avant-garde’. Teige—whose thought has many points of contact with celebrated figures such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, and who was a close associate of Le Corbusier, André Breton, and Hannes Meyer—reveals how a vibrant ‘alternative’ avant-garde tradition can raise central questions for understanding European modernism.
Peter Zusi is Associate Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
The introduction raises the question whether ‘the avant-garde’ should be regarded as a coherent cultural phenomenon or whether it is simply a loose, catchall term for competing and conflicting programmes. The Czech theoretician Karel Teige (1900-1951) is presented as a thinker who made one of the most compelling cases for an integrated avant-garde ambition underlying the apparently contradictory ideals of rationalism and irrationalism, as well as for the ‘medial holism’ uniting various avant-garde practices (painting, literature, architecture, film, photography, typography, theatre). The introduction also situates this now lesser known figure within the wider context of the interwar avant-garde, both with figures with whom he collaborated directly (e.g., Le Corbusier, André Breton, Mosei Ginzburg) or to whom his theoretical writings can be productively compared (e.g., Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Jan Mukařovský).
Chapter 1 provides a detailed account of Teige’s intellectual career over the 1920s and 1930s. His political commitment to Marxism in this period did not prevent him from being labelled persona non grata in Czechoslovakia following the 1948 installation of a Communist regime there. The major phases and programmes he developed and defended (Proletarian Art; Constructivism/Poetism; the Left Front; Surrealism/Functionalism) are discussed in the contexts both of interwar Czechoslovak cultural history and of the wider background of relevant European trends.
Chapter 2 provides two different frameworks for understanding the historical and contextual material provided in Chapter 1. First is a theoretical framework focused on the question of ‘dualisms’, a surprisingly persistent feature of Teige’s thought. The chapter argues, however, that more significant than the dualisms as such is Teige’s ambition to integrate such dualisms, and places this within an argument for the importance of holistic drives within the interwar avant-garde. Second, the chapter argues that a feature of Teige’s thought is his remarkable expansion of the notion of ‘historicism’. Placing this within a philosophical framework drawing on Herder, Hegel, and Nietzsche, the chapter argues that the notion of ‘historical integrity’ is fundamental to Teige’s thought.
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Chapter 3: Tendentious Modernism: Functionalism and Mass Culture Peter Zusi doi:10.59860/vc.c6b574f
Chapter 3 discuss Teige’s earliest theoretical writings through the question of ‘tendentiousness’. Following a brief initial embrace of the notion of tendentiousness, Teige then turned sharply against all forms of direct political messaging or ‘agitation’ in culture. The chapter argues that this should not be understood simply as an about-face or stage in Teige’s development towards more radical avant-gardist positions, but that it reveals hidden logical continuities linking avant-gardism to the agitprop ideals that many left-wing thinkers used to attack the formal and intellectual experimentation of the avant-garde.
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Chapter 4: The Style of the Present: Constructivism and Poetism Peter Zusi doi:10.59860/vc.c7c4b96
Chapter 4 discusses in detail Teige’s famous polemic in which he accused Le Corbusier’s ‘Mundaneum’ design of retrograde monumentality and historicism. Background context includes not only their previously friendly and mutually supportive relationship, but also deep sources for Teige’s thought such as Nietzsche and the Czech literary and art critic F. X. Šalda (1865-1936). The chapter argues that the dominant account in architectural histories of this debate requires amendment in the light of aspects of Teige’s thought that those histories have generally overlooked: in particular, the combination of Teige’s stern Constructivist rigour with the ludic freedom represented by Poetism.
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Intermezzo: ‘Greetings from my Journey’: Pictures, Poems, Picture-Poems Peter Zusi doi:10.59860/vc.c8d3fdd
Brief, close interpretation of some major works of visual design by Teige, focusing on the innovative genre of the ‘picture-poem’ (obrazová báseň). The ideal of uniting visual and verbal modes of presentation and reception is placed in the context of overlapping Linguistic and Pictorial Turns.
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Chapter 5: Functions of the Aesthetic: Ars Una and the Five Senses Peter Zusi doi:10.59860/vc.c0599bc
This chapter examines the emergence of the ideal of Ars Una and the shift in Teige’s understanding of Poetism at the end of the 1920s towards adoption of a psychoanalytic vocabulary of drives, which ultimately prepared the ground for his acceptance of Surrealism in the mid 1930s. Two particular conceptual shifts stand out here: a move from monofunctionalism to polyfunctionalism, and an embrace of aesthetic autonomy (in contrast to the previous ideal of integrating art and life). These shifts are analysed by comparison with Mukařovský’s Structuralist aesthetics and his efforts to define a specifically aesthetic function.
The interwar avant-garde has traditionally been understood as a radical undermining of Realism, whether in its traditional 19th-century form or in the shape of Soviet Socialist Realism. While the clashes between proponents of ‘Realisms’ (of different stripes) and ‘modernisms’ usually seem irreconcilable, this chapter develops perspectives on these debates that underscore how much these two camps share. First is the commitment to art as cognitive tool for understanding the present (implicit in avantgarde claims to address a ‘deeper’ realism), and the second is a rejection of ‘historicisms’ as a misunderstanding the true nature of the present. Teige and Georg Lukács’s reflections on realism and the historical novel are compared with an eye to the analogies rather than incompatibilities between their positions.
A striking number of the main claims in Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility’ can be found either explicitly or implicitly in Teige’s writings from the early and mid-1920s. This chapter explores these parallels, not in order to claim primacy for Teige but rather to move away from the common emphasis on the ‘Work of Art’ essay as having invented such liquidationist claims. Rather than a prognosis of a future ‘vanishing of the aura’, the chapter presents Benjamin’s essay as a diagnosis of his own present moment, for which the ‘vanishing of the aura’ can be understood as a ‘wish image’ or elusive ideal rather than forecast of the future.
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Chapter 8: Aura and Ornament: The Wish-Image of Integrity Peter Zusi doi:10.59860/vc.c47bd27
The chapter expands the argument of Chapter Seven by contrasting Benjamin’s liquidationist claims about a ‘vanishing of the aura’ in the ‘Work of Art’ essay with his fascinated devotion to ‘historical detritus’ in The Arcades Project. Linking such historical detritus with the sort of ornament and decoration that Teige (following a widespread architectural discourse) derided as historicist baggage to be shed, the chapter asks how one should reconcile these two conflicting dynamics in Benjamin’s thought. The convoluted legacy of Nietzsche and his conception of historicism (explored in Chapter Two) are brought in to argue that the avant-garde rejection of historicism must not be conflated with the rejection of History.
The Introduction announced that the book would explore Teige’s intellectual career on three registers: biographical, theoretical, and philosophical. The Conclusion summarizes the trajectory of the argument on each of those registers and elaborates on their interconnection.
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Bibliography entry:
Zusi, Peter, The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition, Visual Culture, 2 (Legenda, 2024)
First footnote reference:35 Peter Zusi, The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition, Visual Culture, 2 (Legenda, 2024), p. 21.
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18 March 2024 • 320pp