Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde

November 16, 2000–April 1, 2001
The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue

Graphic artist and architectural theorist Karel Teige (1900–1951) was the most important Czech proponent of the European avant-garde during the 1920s and 1930s. A tireless visionary, Teige attempted to create a modern, international culture for post-First World War Czechoslovakia—one that would fulfill the new country's practical, intellectual, and spiritual needs. A committed revolutionary, Teige envisioned a better world in which class distinctions did not exist, where artists, poets, architects, and engineers played a vital role in society. He read extensively and traveled to art centers of Europe including Paris, Moscow, Vienna, and Weimar, establishing a dialogue between artists there and his Prague circle. His broad exposure to modern thought was incorporated into the artistic agenda of the Czech avant-garde. Teige lectured widely at home and abroad at prominent institutions such as the Bauhaus school of design, and helped arrange for leading figures such as the architects Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Hannes Meyer, and the Surrealist poet André Breton to speak in Prague.

Extremely active in the 1920s and 1930s, Teige was forced to retreat into internal exile by the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. At war's end in 1945, Czechoslovakians welcomed the Soviet army. But, as the cold war intensified in the late 1940s, the Russians imposed a Soviet-style government that repressed all forms of dissent. Outspoken in his criticism of Josef Stalin's leadership of the USSR, Teige was constantly harassed by the secret police after the war, contributing to his premature death in 1951.

Traveled to:
Grey Museum of Art, New York University, New York, August 30–July 7, 2001
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, October 4–December 30, 2001