The Persistence of Poetry in Karel Teige’s Outlook
The Persistence of Poetry in Karel Teige’s Outlook

Summary/Abstract: Karel Teige’s enduring interest in the essence of poetry may help explain the outward promotion of his 1920s textual-visual works in contrast to his more muted treatment of the Surrealist photomontage collages that he produced from 1935 to 1951. Teige, a central figure of the Czechoslovak avantgarde, demonstrated throughout his voluminous theoretical pieces a continuous fixation on poetry. He wrote and published rationales for his earlier textual-visual works, yet left a lack thereof concerning his 374 Surrealist photomontages. Though Teige declared himself a Surrealist in 1934, Surrealism may not have interested him in the same way as Czechoslovak Poetism or the implementation of aesthetic concepts borrowed from his counterparts in Russia and Germany. In this essay, Teige’s proclamations about pictorial matters, poetry, modern art ideologies, typography, and the ‘inner model’ theory have been applied towards his pre-Surrealist, textual-visual works, in contradistinction to his later photomontages, to suggest why he did not promulgate the latter artworks to the same extent as the former. Examples of his 1920s picture poems in a lucid Poetist style present harmonized layouts of words, symbols, and cut-outs arranged into semiotic order. As a typographer, Teige stressed the importance of the ‘nature, rhythm, and flow’ of poetic texts, and his works also reveal careful reflection on the design of graphemes. It is, however, his fascination with linguistic matters, e.g. poetry and letters — a matter in which many of his Surrealist collages appear not to have taken much interest — that remains most obscure, lacking any contextual explanation. Suffused with fragmented corporeal forms and erotic imagery amid variegated scenery, Teige’s vivid post-1935 photomontages have drawn the attention and speculation of many art historians.

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