Karel Teige

Karel Teige (13 December 1900 – 1 October 1951) was a Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic and one of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s movement.

[2] Devětsil-sponsored exhibitions and events brought international avant-garde figures like Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Walter Gropius, among many others, to lecture and perform in Prague.

[4] Although not an architect, Teige was an articulate and knowledgeable architecture critic, an active participant in CIAM, and friends with Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus.

Teige believed that 'the only aim and scope of modern architecture is the scientific solution of exact tasks of rational construction.'

In 1951 he died in Prague of a heart attack, said to be a result of a ferocious Soviet press campaign against him as a 'Trotskyist degenerate,' his papers were destroyed by the secret police, and his published work was suppressed for decades.