Derek Sayer - Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century

Derek Sayer

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century

A Surrealist History

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Frontispiece. The letter A from Vtzslav Nezval, Abeceda (Alphabet). Dance composition Mila Mayerov; typographic design Karel Teige. Prague: Otto, 1926. Archive of Jindich Toman. Courtsey of Olga Hilmerov, Karel Teige - heirs c/o DILIA.

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2014

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16631-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Sayer, Derek.

Prague, capital of the twentieth century : a surrealist history / Derek Sayer. pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-04380-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. SurrealismCzech RepublicPrague.

2. Prague (Czech Republic)Civilization20th century. I. Title.

NX571.C92P777 2013

700.9437120904dc2012023215

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

eISBN 978-1-400-86544-4

R0

To Jindra Toman

All the past we leave behind,

We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

WALT WHITMAN, PIONEERS! O PIONEERS!

FROM Leaves of Grass, 1900

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, DOVER BEACH, 1867

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

T his book has been long in the making and I have accumulated many debts along the way. I can acknowledge only the most outstanding of them here. I would ask anyone I have inadvertently left out to forgive me; my memory is not all it once was. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded the initial research for the book in Prague and elsewhere in 20002003. I also benefited from the generous research support provisions of the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program during my time as a CRC at the University of Alberta from 2000 to 2006. A period of two terms of research leave from Lancaster University in 20089, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, gave me a much-needed break from teaching and administration and the time once again to focus on writing. Without such external research fundingwhich is getting increasingly rare, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the lone scholar in the humanities doing work that has no immediately measurable impactit is unlikely that this book would have seen the light of day at all. I would also like to express my gratitude to the History Department at Lancaster University for helping defray the considerable cost of the illustrations.

Some passages in the book rework parts of articles previously published in Past and Present, Common Knowledge, Bohemia, and The Grey Room and of essays published in Timothy O. Benson, editor, Central European Avant-Gardes, and Mark Dcimo, editor, Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism. Full details can be found in the bibliography. Preferring wherever possible to let my protagonists speak in their own words, I quote extensively from primary sources, but such quotations are in my view covered by the provisions of fair use. Sources and copyrights for illustrations are provided in the captions. I am grateful for help with permissions and reproductions to Alena Brtov of the Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM, Prague); Magda Nmcov of the National Gallery (NG, Prague); Jana tursov of the Museum of National Literature (PNP, Prague); Karel Srp and Eva tpnkov of the Prague City Gallery (GHMP); Tom Pavlek of the National Technical Museum (NTM, Prague); Markta Janotov of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (DU AVR, Prague); Alena Bernkov of the Severoesk galerie in Litomice; Pavla Obrovsk of the Moravian Gallery in Brno; Zuzana tpanoviov of the Oblastn galerie in Liberec; Veronica Keyes of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); Tracey Schuster of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Kerry Negahban of the Lee Miller Archive, England; Philip Hunt of the National Gallery of Scotland; Ivana Simonov of DILIA, Prague; and Elizabeth Walley at the Design and Artist Copyright Society (DACS, London).

At Princeton I have been fortunate to have the support of Mary Murrell, my editor from The Coasts of Bohemia who originally commissioned this book; Hanne Winarsky, who inherited the project when Mary left the press and who steered the final manuscript through the review process; Brigitta van Rheinberg, who reassured me of Princetons commitment to producing a beautiful book after Hannes departure in the summer of 2011; and Alison MacKeen, my present editor. Kelly Malloy, Larissa Klein, and Sara Lerner, who oversaw the nuts and bolts of putting the book into production, have been great to work with. The presss illustration specialist, Dimitri Karetnikov, was both patient and very helpful in advising on questions of image quality, and Jennifer Harris did a sensitive as well as a scrupulous job of copy-editing. I would also like to take the opportunity here to thank participants in Czech Cultural Studies Workshop meetings in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at lectures and papers I have presented at McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Universit dOrlans, Universitt Regensburg, the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, and Lancaster University. It is not just their direct comments on my presentations but the conversations in the bars and restaurants afterward that left their mark. Jonathan Bolton, Peter Zusi, and Kimberly Elman Zarecor in particular gave me much to think about, some of which has no doubt crept into these pages. I got as much stimulation from viewing Mary and Roy Cullens magnificent collection of Czech avant-garde and surrealist art in Houston, Texas. I cannot overstate my appreciation to Mary for both her kindness in inviting me into her home and the way she gave so generously of her time.

Among those I am fortunate to count as personal friends, Lucie Zdkov (ne Bartoov) kindly supplied me with transcripts of interviews she did as a journalist for Lidov noviny. Ji Lukas surprised me one day with a gift of hard-to-obtain Devtsil and Skupina Ra exhibition catalogues. Jindich Toman has been characteristically generous in giving me access to rare books and magazines in his personal collection and taking the time to provide me with superb scans of covers and illustrations. He has also read the entire manuscript at various stages in its evolution, offering valued advice and correcting not a few errors, orthographical and otherwise, along the way. I dedicate this book to him as an expression of gratitude on the part of all of us in Czech cultural studies whom he has helped and inspired over the years. Others who were kind enough to read the manuscript in full or in part include Michael Beckerman, Craig Campbell, Karen Engle, Dariusz Gafijczuk, Colin Richmond, Tereza Valny, and Alex Wilkinson. They will probably never know how important their encouragement was in times when I doubted the wisdom of the whole enterprise. Yoke-Sum Wong, on the other hand, knows exactly how much she has contributed to this bookup to and including a holiday in Paris where we spent our days wandering Batignolles and Pre Lachaise cemeteries in search of surrealist graves and she devoted large chunks of her evenings to reading a typescript that was then even longer than it is now. For good or ill this book is my resolution of what we have for years laughingly referred to as the problem of form. Sum can have her dining room back now.