Authors

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius¹;  ¹ Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Discussion

A constant companion of Devětsil’s activities in interwar Czechoslovakia, caricature served both as the bearer and the record of the avant-garde, and its aims and craft were widely scrutinised by artist and critics, including the Devětsil founders, Karel Teige and Adolf Hoffmeister. While Teige theorised caricature as a political manifesto and the herald of the departure from representation, Hoffmeister was using it to build up a collective portrait of the international avant-garde at the time of its emergence, migration, and exile. From mid-1920s to the outbreak of WWII, Hoffmeister portrayed and interviewed an army of artists and poets, writers and architects, theorists and art managers, incorporating their experiments and provocations into the outlines of their bodies and settings. Coming with a licence for insult and inquiry, caricature was fit for the purpose.
Does Hoffmeister’s portrayals off the avant-garde celebrities, represent more than just a record of the avant-garde? Are they avant-garde works themselves? The paper argues that for Hoffmeister, caricature was not just a product, but an embodiment of critical inquiry, capable of translating the avant-garde aims, matching its irony, humour, poetry and paradox, competing with its use of language and, above all, sharing its inquiring, deconstructing and demystifying principle.