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• The spring of 1927 sawa rise in the Czech press of a fairly forcetul critica! wave disclaiming Karel Teige and Vitezslav Nezval's poetism as obsolescent and exhausted. There were soon indications, however, that this "burial" was premature. Devetsil had entered a new stage of its development, in which the original conception and possibilities of poetism were intensitied: its proponents were producing original and mature artistic work that was now tree of their earlier dependence on foreign avant-garde models.
• In the autumn of 1927 a new Devetsil forum appeared: the monthly magazine ReD, whose name was coined as an abbreviated form of Revue Devetsil. This alone marked the journal as a "red signalof a new cultural epoch." The content and image of the magazine, published from 1927 to 1931, was determined chiefly by Karel Teige, who edited and designed all three volumes. The introductory declaration of ReD emphasized both its continuity within the Devetsil program, which was shaped by Teige's conception of the tension between constructivism and poetism, and the prevailing interest in universal modern creativity in all spheres of contemporary life.
• [Source: Karel Teige. L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde / edited by Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svácha (MIT Press : Cambridge MA 1999) 48.

• DESCRIPTION
  • ReD = Revue Devetsilu; subtitle Revue Svazu Moderni Kultury "Devetsil", on the cover: Mesicnik pro moderni kulturu.
  • Edited by Karl Teige.
  • Year 1 (1927/28) N°1 - Year 3 (1929/31) N°
  • Published by Odeon, Prague.

• CONTRIBUTORS
• Texts and poems by Philippe Soupault, Vitezslav Nezval, Zpevy Maldororovy, Konstantin Biebl, Julius Fucik, Jaroslav Seifert, Jiri Maranek, Bedrich Vaclavek, Stanislav K. Neumann and others.

• FACSIMILES/REPRINTS
• printed
  Reprinted by Jal-Reprint, Würzburg.

• SECONDARY LITERATURE
• Matthew Stephen Witkovsky
  Avant-garde and center. Devetsil in Czech culture, 1918-1938 (University of Pennsylvania 2002) [Preview].
  • [abstract] 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 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, Jirí 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 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. 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.
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