While still in his 20s, influential Czech modernist Karel Teige (1900-1951) turned from painting to book design, theoretical writing, and the editing of avant-garde journals. Influenced by cubism, expressionism, constructivism, and surrealism, he was a Marxist who believed everyone could be an artist–who wanted to end the idea of “art with a capital A.” But as the current retrospective at the Smart Museum demonstrates, it’s not easy to document his work: books in cases can’t really be examined, there are many labels to read, and an installation illustrating his architectural ideas, including a floor plan and furniture made for this exhibit, is more informative than affecting. But the photo collages he began to make in his mid-30s–of which there are 22 examples here, echoing work by Man Ray, Hannah Hoch, and others–have an aesthetic power that can be grasped without extensive explanation.
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But by 1935, when Teige began making collages, Germany had fallen to fascism and Teige had grown disillusioned with the Soviet Union; a year later he condemned the notorious Moscow trials that began Stalin’s Great Terror. By 1939 Czechoslovakia was ruled by Hitler, and in Teige’s last years by Stalin, forcing the artist into public silence. These circumstances likely influenced the collages, which often have a strangely cramped, inward quality at once poetic and stultifying. Many include parts of women’s bodies, but any erotic effect is undermined by a dehumanizing fragmentation. Collage Number 358 (1948) includes legs that become breasts at the knee, placing them on a convex bricklike floor; behind the legs, the floor and ceiling–a concave brick surface–meet, creating the impression of a cavern whose curves are crushingly confining.
The strongest pieces here combine spatial constriction with a dizzying variety of discordant elements. An untitled collage from 1939 includes a nude woman whose torso is wrapped with rope, suggesting that her innards are being compressed. In place of her head there’s thick smoke, with thinner smoke to her left; whether it’s come from an explosion that’s decapitated her or is just part of the landscape, it suggests war. An eyeball sits on the pavement, and to the left of that an oversize baby’s head with empty eye sockets. The labyrinth of possibilities suggested has none of the evocative clarity of de Chirico or Magritte, producing a bewilderment that denies meaning rather than opening it up.
Other pieces are even more surreal. A woman superimposed on the Hancock Building looks at us with a faintly disdainful air; her spiky hair echoes the building’s soaring lines, and its vertical and diagonal supports, visible through her image, penetrate her face and body. In the strangest print here, a woman fills the tall, ornate entranceway of a ComEd building. Voltattorni says he whited out the door because it was distracting from the figure, but that choice together with the camera angle suggest looking into an open coffin–and the model’s pose is unnaturally stiff and straight.
