Tomas Winter1; 1 Institute of Art History, CAS, Czechia
Discussion
The paper focuses on the exceptional position of caricature in the interwar avant-garde movement in Czechoslovakia. In the 1920s, a number of theoreticians and artists of the Devětsil group were interested in caricature. Karel Teige emphasised the revolutionary potential of caricature and linked its emergence to the time of the first appearances of the proletariat, in the direct connection with his programme of a new proletarian art that was to participate directly in the revolutionary change of the social order. Teige prophesied a great future for caricature, even though the original programme of proletarian art had been abandoned and had begun to reorient itself towards poeticism and constructivism. An important role for caricature at that time was its easy reproducibility. The Czech avant-garde did not lose interest in caricature even in the 1930s, when a content of caricature changed significantly as a result of political events in Europe. The former artists of the Devětsil switched from poeticism to surrealism. At that time, the poet Vítězslav Nezval wrote probably the only existing text that deals in detail with the relationship between surrealist principles and caricature. This relationship can be illustrated by specific examples of cartoons using surrealist creative principles (the same is true of cartoons from the 1920s working with the poetics of constructivism and poetism). A critical look at caricature and its relationship to the avant-garde reveals several moments that illustrate the fundamental split between avant-garde theory and practice.
