Karel Teige: functionalist and then some: the first exhibition in the U.S. of a leading Czech modernist illuminates the intellectual landscape of interwar Prague while adding new dimensions to the histories of design, architectural theory and the international style

Art in America, Dec, 2001 by Joseph Masheck

Teige himself stands at the hard, extreme left end of a functionalist spectrum. On the right are those who tend to think that everything would be automatically beautiful if only it might unobstructedly assume its most economical form. David Hume and Adam Smith both pushed this basically Calvinist, "free-market" view. Toward Teige's end are all those who may care more or less idealistically about art and form and also about utility, yet will not pretend that whatever works must be good. Against Hume and Smith, they have on their side Edmund Burke, who writes in the section "Fitness Not the Cause of Beauty" of his Sublime and Beautiful (1756), that if fitness were the cause of beauty, "the wedge-like snout of a swine, with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of digging, and rooting, would be extremely beautiful." (11) Marx himself, by the way, evidently switched from a position of necessity to one more appreciative of formative judgment in natural building. (12)

In the theoretical hothouse of 1920s Eastern Europe, functionalism was at extreme odds with "formalism." Yet within the English critical formalist tradition, there is a precocious--and pertinent--esthetic responsiveness to unornamented industrial architecture on the part of Clive Bell. Writing in Art (1914) of then-new reinforced concrete buildings in London, he says, "Only where economy has banished the architect do we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges, our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in beauty at thirty shillings a foot." Remarkably, too, Bell enthusiastically extends his architectural thinking to the image structure of modern painting, wherein older painters don't comprehend a definite "willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to conception of the plan." (13)

Teige was just not going to talk that way because he was, in a sense, on esthetic strike. As he wrote in 1925, "With constructivism we must not think about art. If we consider constructivism as the style of the present, as a way to designate our own epoch of culture and civilization, we must emphasize that it does not bring about a new formal system, an a priori aesthetic order, that it leaves aside all traditional forms, forsakes the nine Muses of the classical Parnassus. It is not concerned with form but with function" (14)

The Marxist Teige argued that there is no need to worry about esthetic or spiritual impoverishment with the demise of "fine" art in the bourgeois sense, because such wants would be better satisfied directly by life, once life was better--a principle articulated by William Morris as early as 1877, as well as by many a Constructivist later. Yet Teige also understood the inescapability of art's formal aspect, for even engineers make quasi-esthetic judgments. "Machines are born out of calculations," he wrote, "and a calculation always leaves several possibilities. ... To decide the most advantageous (implicitly the most beautiful) result is the work of mathematical intuition." (15)