Meghan Forbes

‘To reach over the border’: An International Conversation Between the Bauhaus and Devětsil

In March 1923 Karel Teige received a letter from Bauhaus director Walter Gropius regarding the International Architecture Exhibition, a section of the first Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar. Gropius wanted there to be strong Czech representation, and Teige aided him in this aim. With Teige’s assistance, Czechoslovakia would be the nation with the third largest number of architects represented, behind only Germany and Holland. The following study shows that it is in this moment that an important, dialogic relationship between the Bauhaus and members of the Czech avant-garde began. Although it is often assumed that such a relationship developed only with the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, contact was already rich and productive under Gropius. And Teige and Gropius would continue to correspond and collaborate past the end of the latter’s tenure as Bauhaus director in 1928. When Meyer came to replace Gropius in leading the Bauhaus, his Marxist politics and interest in Constructivism were more in line with Teige’s own aesthetic and political proclivities, and relations between the school and the Czech avant-garde further flourished. Teige would lecture at the Bauhaus in early 1930, directly following a visit of Meyer to Prague, and that February, a special issue of ReD—an avant-garde Czech magazine edited by Teige—was dedicated to the Bauhaus. The following article posits that productive relations of mutual exchange forged under the first Bauhaus director paved the way for later increased activity under the second, and thus describes the transfer of influence at the Bauhaus from Gropius to Meyer not as a beginning of the relationship of the Bauhaus and the Czech avant-garde but rather as a continuation, and strengthening of previous relations.

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