In the opening years of the twentieth century, the city of Prague hosted exhibits on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, and Cubism. Czech artists absorbed fully the lessons of the machine age, revealing beauty in functional design and finding wisdom in advertising posters. With the Nazi occupation in 1939, however, Czech modern art virtually disappeared as artists fled persecution as “degenerates.” It has only been since the fall of Communism that we have been able to rediscover this particular area of modernism.
“New Formations,” which takes its name from the 1927 Artificialism manifesto published by Jindrich Štyrský and Toyen (Marie Cermínová), opens with a watercolor by Karel Teige. City by a River (1918) is a delicate work in which walls, roofs, and bridges are reduced to a mosaic of blue and rust. Like so much of Teige’s art, it is an amalgam of influences—here, Czech cubism and the mannered figuralism of Purism. Its most conspicuous feature, however, is the eloquent use of white space. Teige demonstrates that, in art, what is inferred by the viewer is just as essential as the artist’s intentions. City by a River is actually a harbinger of just the sort of visual metaphor that Teige and the artists of the collective Dev?tsil would explore so successfully in the coming years.
“Dev?tsil” has two meanings in Czech: it refers to the butterbur flower as well as, literally, “nine forces” suggesting the nine Muses and their concentrated energy.