The charismatic, left-leaning Teige was a man of contradictions. He published thousands of pages with self-destructive work ethic. He recited long passages from memory from Apollinaire, Mayakovsky and Breton. He went from proletarian poetry to playful poeticism and then just as easily turned his attention to absurd surrealism.
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Teige believed in a just society without private property and in free love to replace the traditional family. The patriarchal bourgeois household, manifested in the institution of the conjugal bedroom, repelled him.
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If the charming painter Toyen was the muse of the art association Devětsil, Karel Teige was its soul. Publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien characterized him as “a vain, stubborn sprite with piercing eyes and a black brush of hair and with an eternally smoking pipe fire, through the valve of which he seemed to let his excess fighting energy escape.”
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As a passionate debater, Teige determined the artistic direction of the interwar avant-garde. And as a sharp critic he spared no one. He inspired as much admiring love as implacable hatred. The women with whom Karel Teige connected his life loved him literally to the grave. The men whom he provoked with his opinions put him in that grave.
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“… others attract glances, you repel people / with a single wave of your hand / in your presence, no fool sat at our table / that’s why they hate and fear you so much,” wrote his friend Vítězslav Nezval about him.
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The Bipedal Encyclopedia of Art
Teige’s incredibly wide range of activities was largely due to his photographic memory. All he had to do was say the page number in a particular book, and he was able to recite its contents from top to bottom, including the division into columns and hyphenation. However, cartoonist Adolf Hoffmeister also called it “a two-legged encyclopedia of modern art”.
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Little Karel with his parents and sister Hana
Photo: Repro Karel Teige: Captain of the avant-garde
For the avant-garde of the First Republic, Karel Teige was something almost like a god: “Seifert on the right, Nezval on the left, and above them the holy spirit of poeticism, Teige theoretician.” literary critic Josef Knap paraphrased the relations in the art association Devětsil.
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“Teige resists all falls / Teige Teigea Teige Teigete / You can only find ideas for falls / Teige as a member of the front generation / is unyielding for good,” Hoffmeister played with words.
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He succumbed to the universally popular male illusion that a relationship of one man and two women can be happy.
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Karel Teige did not limit his desire for freedom only to art. He believed in a just society without private property and in free love to replace the traditional family. The patriarchal bourgeois household, manifested in the institution of the conjugal bedroom, repelled him. He made this clear in his professional theses regarding architecture.
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“An architect who lives in the imagination of a middle-class marriage and draws two beds next to each other in the floor plans of apartments is not a modern architect. The conjugal bedroom is a lair of low forms of bourgeois sexual life, a manifestation of amazing erotic banality and decadence. The matrimonial bedroom is contagious, it is a hotbed of strife and a source of family disruption and a thousand neuroses,” enthused Teige in the article The Smallest Apartment from 1932.
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A production of Aristophanes’ play When Women Celebrate Something at the Na Slupi Theater in 1926. Karel Teige, bottom middle.
Photo: Repro Karel Teige: Captain of the avant-garde
He did not believe in the “magical power” of the wedding ring or the “warming warmth of the family hearth”. “I think it always suits a man better to be a bird of prey or a migratory bird than a domestic animal, a domesticated fowl,” he wrote to his childhood friend Emma Hausler.
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No, he wasn’t unfaithful…
However, when Emy introduced him to her friend Josefina Nevařilová, nicknamed Jožka, he fell head over heels in love. He completely succumbed to the boyishly direct social worker who spoke excellent French.
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“My dearest, I am so terribly sad today, I miss you endlessly… A month of separation after a month of kisses and tenderness is a terribly sudden fate… I am afraid that my love will not be a burden to You. I am at a loss for the present and the future, I no longer dare to hope… How I thirst for a few kind words from my Princess! You really are my only happiness and comfort and you are so far away! Can I write to you like that? But I can only write to you what I have already written to you, how I love you immensely, how without you I am nothing and how, far from you, I can think of nothing but you… May your unworthy Teige kiss you warmly.” wrote to Jože in the summer of 1926 in France.
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Yet he never married her. For him, the household and family were just another form of private property that destroys vitality and is an obstacle to building communism. He also implemented his opinion on architecture described in the study The Smallest Apartment in his own life: Karel and Jožka lived in the same house – together with his sister and aunts – but they had separate sleeping areas at opposite ends of the apartment.
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“It was Teige himself who alternated his loves – proletarian art, poetry, architecture, surrealism. As soon as he married one and met the other, he again served the new idea just as fully and just as faithfully. No, Teige was not unfaithful. However, he was not able to maintain loyalty himself,” wrote his friend Adolf Hoffmeister about him.
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He did not mean only art. In 1941, Teige, who had just turned forty, was charmed by twenty-six-year-old Eva Ebertová, the stepdaughter of politician Josef Svatopluk Machar. She was – in the words of the poet Jaroslav Seifert – a woman “unusual, charming and interesting” almost as much as Jožka, with whom he had already been living for fifteen years.
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One man, two women
Just as he practiced architectural theories in his apartment, Teige tried to implement ideas about free love in his own life. He sincerely loved his long-time partner Josefina and definitely had no intention of leaving her. When he also looked at Eve, he succumbed to the universally popular male illusion that a relationship between one man and two women can be happy and harmonious. He just didn’t like to admit the fact that loving women don’t know how to share their love.
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His second love, Eva Ebertová, was fifteen years younger.
Photo: Geni.com – Dr. Tomáš Kitlar
His favorite French quote, “Life is bitter and women are dear,” apparently drew heavily on his own experiences. As his friend Jaroslav Seifert wrote about Teige in his memoirs, called All the Beauties of the World, “he did not want to be and certainly could not be an actor in a banal marital triangle… It was a heavy burden on him and it cost him a lot of constant strain… Apparently all three suffered from it.’
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“Night after night, Teige worked at home. He only went to bed in the morning and slept through the morning. At noon he went to his girlfriend. She lived near Arbes Square in Smíchov. He had lunch there and in the afternoon Miss E. helped him with excerpts for his book,” Jaroslav Seifert described the last three years of Teige’s life.
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His youthful streak was long over. The atmosphere in Czechoslovakia changed a lot after the Second World War. The guru of the avant-garde, whose creed was freedom without borders, became more and more salt in the eyes of state propaganda. He had been living in poverty for some time: he received almost no orders, so he sold off everything he could, including watches. Both of his loves – even though they pretended that the other did not exist – stood unwaveringly behind him.
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His heart betrayed him
Already in the early 1930s, it was clear that the once proletarian Teige was not making a big impression on real communists. It will be better “if he applies his temperament, his abilities and his advertising and polemical powers in his own sphere and leaves communism alone,” the poet Josef Hora advised him in Literární noviny. “Teige is about as communist as a cockatoo is a predator,” he added, calling the critic a snob.
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The criticism of Stalin’s political processes in the second half of the 1930s did not add to Teige’s popularity among the left. Then came the war and the coup in 1948. At the work conference of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in 1950, he was called a “hedonistic decadent pest” and a “citizen of the world with an uncreative head stuffed with foreign language reading”.
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Teige in his library in 1948
Photo: Repro Karel Teige: Captain of the avant-garde
Teige withdrew from public life and concentrated on writing the synthetic ten-volume Phenomenology of Modern Art. “I want nothing more than to be left alone. I want to diligently and consistently write my book…” he stated in his notes. He worked feverishly all night, as if he knew he had little time left.
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He tried not to notice the harsh condemnations in the daily press. “What is such a great sin if I already decided during the war that I would renounce political activity forever, because it is at most time for me to consistently sit down to work and do something really of my own in my life?” he complained in a letter to the architect Jiří Kroh.
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However, he could not miss the coverage of the trial of Milada Horáková in the summer of 1950. He was afraid – and he had reason: his friend, critic and journalist Záviš Kalandra was also convicted and executed in the trial.
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And then they came for Teige. The moment he was arrested, he found the strength to reach for the poison and died in front of his house among the police. When Jožka saw it, she committed suicide by jumping out of the window… That’s how the French poet André Breton described the critic’s end in the preface to the monograph on Toyen.
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However, it was not true. Everything happened quite differently, while the real tragedy was no less dramatic than the mentioned rumor. Jaroslav Seifert set it straight in his memoirs.
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The mournful dance of death
It was a wistful October day full of autumn, and Karel Teige headed – like every afternoon – to Eva. When he hadn’t been walking for a long time, his lover started to meet him. They passed, however, and it was only on the way back that she found a pale Teige slumped against a cast-iron column in the cafeteria near Arbesova náměstí. He was reaching out to her, his face already marked with death. He could barely take a few steps, walking was painful. Eva laboriously escorted him to her apartment and ran for the doctor. He could only state death.
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Generational discussion, caricature of Adolf Hoffmeister: from the left, critic FX Šalda with a notebook, painter Jindřich Štyrský under Julio Fučík’s fist, critic Karel Teige hits the poet Vítězslav Nezval with a pipe, and publicist Ivan Sekanina lurks with a pistol.
Photo: Repro Reading about Karl Teig
Karel Teige died on October 1, 1951 of a massive heart attack. He did not finish his life’s work – Phenomenology of Modern Art. According to the doctor František Mach, who performed the autopsy of the deceased, according to medical knowledge, the heart should have given up two years ago.
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“The electrocardiogram lied. The doctor who read it not long before Teig’s death could tell nothing else from the machine’s recording than that his heart was working perfectly normally. It didn’t work. It hasn’t worked normally for a long time. Teigo’s heart was so torn that the doctor performing the autopsy couldn’t believe it,” lamented Jaroslav Seifert.
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“There are women, and they tend to be younger women… who, when they have a misfortune and a man dies, they come back from the funeral and cry. She cries for days. Then they wipe their tears, powder their noses and look curiously around the world. No, I don’t blame them. Such is life,” wrote Jaroslav Seifert in his memoirs. However, both of Teige’s beloved companions chose a different path.
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Karel Teige’s surrealist collages are kept by the National Literature Museum in Prague. Their main theme is the female nude and its transformations in confrontation with reality.
Photo: Repro Karel Teige: Captain of the avant-garde
“Karel is no more, he died today at noon,” Eva wrote a message to Jože that same day. She sent him to her home with a taxi driver. As soon as she read Josefa’s message, she burned all the correspondence. It was not enough for her: although Karel Teige was in daily contact with both women, he wrote them letters almost every day. After this mournful ceremony, she poisoned herself with gas.
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Eva lived for a few more days. She collated Teige’s manuscripts and gave them to friends who talked her out of the decision to die in vain. On October 12, she also opened the gas tap. As Jaroslav Seifert stated, only then “this mournful dance of death stopped”.
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Who was Karel Teige?
- He was born into the family of Josef Teige, Prague’s chief archivist. Johanna’s mother worked in a bookstore before her marriage. He had a sister, Hana.
- He studied art history at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University.
- He worked as an art critic and theorist, translating from French. In 1920, he was a co-founder of the Devětsil art union, where he promoted “casual, playful, amorous, playful and non-heroic” art, suitable for carnivals, dance halls, cafes, variety shows and circus arenas.
- He was at the birth of the Liberated Theatre.
- His sense of humor eventually led him to absurd surrealism, in the spirit of which he also created himself: his disturbing surrealist collages from 1935-1951 have the female body as the main motif.
- He is buried at the Vyšehrad Cemetery.
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