Devětsil Dissolves

JAN 01 1931 · 12:00

Toyen (Marie Čermínová) and Karel Teige in 1925, at the height of the Devětsil years, before Poetism gave way to Surrealism and the group disbanded. Place: Mánes Union of Fine Arts, Smíchov embankment · the magazine ReD Figures: Karel Teige, theorist · Vítězslav Nezval, poet · Jaroslav Seifert, poet · Toyen (Marie Čermínová) · Jindřich Štyrský · Konstantin Biebl · Vladislav Vančura Devětsil (the name a plant, butterbur, but read by the founders as nine forces) is founded in October 1920 in the Union café on Perštýn by a group of writers and painters aged between 17 and 24. Their first manifesto demands proletarian art; within two years they have inverted themselves into Poetism, an aesthetic of joy, circus, jazz, neon, and the picture-poem. Karel Teige is the theorist; Nezval, Seifert, and Biebl are the poets; Toyen and Štyrský are the painters; the architecture wing includes Jaromír Krejcar and Bedřich Feuerstein. Through the 1920s they publish Disk, Pásmo, and from 1927 ReD (Revue Devětsilu), in which Czech avant-garde meets the Bauhaus, the Soviet Constructivists, the French Surrealists. Le Corbusier prints in ReD; so do El Lissitzky, Hannes Meyer, and Walter Gropius.