Avant-garde and center: Devetsil in Czech culture, 1918--1938

This dissertation offers a panoramic analysis of avant-gardism in interwar central Europe, grounded in four "case studies" connected with the Czech movement Devetsil (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 Vitezslav Nezval with a constructivist layout by Karel Teige featuring photomontages of the dancer Milca Mayerova. Text and typography express a utopian belief in universal communicability fundamental to this "era of the ABC." Mayerova, 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, Jiri Voskovec and Jan Werich, developed an analogous strategy; their work triangulates the international constructivism, dada and surrealism of their Devetsil mentors and the nationalist expectations of their popular constituency. Photographer Jaromir 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 Wolfflin, 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., Devetsil architect Bedrich Feuerstein) and official sentiment. At the Monument to National Liberation in Prague-Zizkov (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.