'Searching for the Missing Picture Poem': Contemporary Artistic Engagements with the Historical Czechoslovak Avant-Garde

• In Event: Reframing Interwar Legacies: The Politics of Memory in Central and Eastern European Art

Abstract

With the “picture poem,” the Czechoslovak avant-garde group Devětsil aimed to produce a form of montage, cinematic in scope, that eschewed the aura of the original. Karel Teige, the group’s leading protagonist, proclaimed that the original work ought to be discarded once it had been reproduced, since in fact the actual artwork depended precisely on its photomechanical reproducibility to exist. The contemporary Slovak artist, Dezider Tóth, however, has intentionally undermined Teige’s notion of the picture poem, by painting in 2021 the “lost original” of one well-known picture poem, “What is most beautiful in the café?” which first appeared in Vítězslav Nezval’s 1925 book of poems Pantomima, co-signed by Teige. Tóth’s painting, a copy of copies, is now on display in the Moravian Gallery in Brno. This paper considers this work and other contemporary interventions into historical practices, as a process of remembering, reanimating, and re-interpreting the historical avant-garde a century on.

Author

• Meghan Leigh Forbes, Independent Scholar & Curator