Avant-garde and center: Devetsil in Czech culture, 1918--1938
Abstract
This dissertation offers a panoramic analysis of avant-gardism in interwar central Europe, grounded in four “case studies” connected with the Czech movement Devětsil (1920–1931). Avant-gardism here means an internationally informed but locally conditioned practice that is pedagogical and highly public; less interested in commodity culture than performance as an arena of intervention; and attached to history and commemoration as legitimating structures for radical ideas. The 1926 book Alphabet allies humorous verses by Vitězslav Nezval with a constructivist layout by Karel Teige featuring photomontages of the dancer Milča Mayerová. Text and typography express a utopian belief in universal communicability fundamental to this “era of the ABC.” Mayerová, however, subverts that ideal through her performance of gender—and she responds as well to her teacher, Rudolf von Laban, author of a dance notation system he called an “alphabet of movement.” As Alphabet shows, the Czech avant-garde engaged with popular culture not dialectically but indirectly, via the medium of spectacle (film, cabaret, dance). Two avant-garde artists turned star performers, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, developed an analogous strategy; their work triangulates the international constructivism, dada and surrealism of their Devětsil mentors and the nationalist expectations of their popular constituency. Photographer Jaromír Funke, meanwhile, epitomizes avant-garde efforts to lay claim, belatedly, to the status of “modern,” by fashioning a historical narrative that in the case of photography derives loosely from periodizing art histories proposed by Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and their disciples or popularizers. With history comes a renewed commitment to commemoration, highly fraught in countries where the reward of modern statehood issues directly from the calamity of World War I. Cremation, a thoroughly modern form of commemoration in Europe, is allied in Czechoslovakia with both avant-garde architecture (e.g., Devětsil architect Bedřich Feuerstein) and official sentiment. At the Monument to National Liberation in Prague-Žižkov (1927–38), vast columbaria consecrate cremation as exemplary memorialization—yet these rooms are impenetrably blank, as if in anticipation of the perversions effected with the aid of further crematoria during World War II. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Slavic and East European|Art History|Dance
Recommended Citation
Matthew Stephen Witkovsky,
"Avant-garde and center: Devetsil in Czech culture, 1918--1938"
(January 1, 2002).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3073073.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3073073
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