Exhibitions 1
Devitsil: Czech Avant-garde Art, Archi- tecture and Design of the 1920s and 30s (Design Museum, until 22 July)
Irresistible forces
John Henshall
If one thing about this exhibition is ironically appropriate, it is that no one, whether Czech or Slovak scholar or Oxford don, can define just why 60 or so avant- garde artists of all disciplines in the new, free, post-1919 Czechoslovakia called themselves Dev6tsil or what it really signi- fies. Literally, in Czech, it is the name of a plant; split into devet and sii, it means 'nine forces' — presumably the nine Muses of Parnassus, goddesses of inspiration in the arts. Equally, the curators admit, those Book cover by gtyrsIgi and Toyen for The Terrible House by Jan Barra, 1925 involved simply may have liked the oddly musical sound of the word.
This rag-bag etymology of supposition and guesswork suits the haphazard melting-pot of pan-European movements — surrealism, purism, Bauhaus and, above all, constructivism — which Devetsil be- came. Czechoslovakia had just emerged from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; perhaps its impatient young artists were intoxicated by freedom. They joined eagerly the movement fired by the painter and theoretician Karel Teige, a gifted artistic impresario, who nonetheless never produced a real manifesto — his Revolu- tionary Manual of Devetsil, 1919, came closest — and who was not unknown to contradict himself during his endless visionary pronouncements.
Devetsil started at the Café Union, Prague, in November 1920 and lasted till 1931, making it the longest-lasting avant- garde movement in Europe. In retrospect, however, Teige's 'leadership' guaranteed Devetsil's eventual demise, because of his insistence on trying to blend an ars una, or Gesamtkunstwerk, in which utilitarian objectives would be wedded to lyrical subjectivity in a pluralist society, with open sympathy with the communism and state- approved art of post-revolutionary Russia. By the mid-Thirties Devetsil was heading 'for oblivion as variants of surrealism led the avant-garde across much of Europe.
Since the last war, Devetsil has been almost forgotten, ignored by repressive governments for whom it smelt too strong- ly of individual expression. This exhibition is its first showing in the West. One has to admire its participants' tireless energies. They staged numerous exhibitions, like The Bazaar of Modern Art (1923) which emphasised their affinities with Dada; they published a stream of magazines and other literature (much now lost) and designed architecture and interiors well ahead of their time. One constant inspiration was constructivism: even their paintings com- bine, however improbably, its rectilinear, geometric diktats with the gutsy cubism of pre-unification Czechoslovakia.
Devetsil artists blended several original styles with constructivism: magic realism or the 'mysteries of everyday life', primitivism or 'art for the masses', and Teige's beloved poetism, inextricably joining art and life, where functional objects 'whose midwife was not art' might reveal their beauty. Latterly, artificialism tried to narrow the gap between Devetsil and increasingly important surrealism. Devdtsil artists also had wide foreign contacts, something Czech and Slovak artists would have to forgo from the Nazi invasion up until last November, when the playwright Vaclav Havel became the country's new leader.
The show includes superb works of art and true surprises. Teige, the seer and theorist, excelled at designing book jackets and magazine covers. His constructivist montages, using new typography devised by the multi-tentacled Devetsil, look fresh as the day they were printed. As a painter, though, the unswerving radical emerges as a pre-unification cubist at heart, easily upstaged by the captivating canvases of Toyen and the unreservedly surrealistic works of Karel Vanek, in whose 'Girl Near a River' constructivist impulses still insist the figure be stretched out, lifelike yet resembling an image in a distorting mirror. The Coloured Music sequences of the neglected composer and artist Miroslav Ponc are both striking art and revealing psychological comment on the physicality and 'colours' which music conjures up.
Devetsil excelled at design: the models of proposed buildings by Josef Chochol, like his design for the Liberated Theatre, Prague, with its domed, porthole- windowed auditorium and sleek, pared- down ancillary blocks, are of structures which would grace any European city today. If Devetsil's interior design is some- times too kitschy for my taste, their tubular steel-framed furniture was quite innova- tory for the period. All this from artists known by few — save the poet Jaroslav Seifert, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. This fine show is co-curated by the Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Galerie hlavniho mesta, Prague. See it now: you may not get the chance again.
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