Prokletí básníci [The cursed poets]

Prague: Otto Girgal, 1946. Octavo (21.5 × 15.5 cm). Original cloth boards with title to spine; pictorial dust wrappers by Karel Teige; 130, [2] pp. With many illustrations throughout the text and a sixteen-page appendix of plates reproducing the artworks of Desbordes-Valmore, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, and Teige among others. Dust jacket with light fraying to top and paper restoration to spine extremities; closed tear to front panel of jacket; very good in a good dust jacket. Karel Teige designed the cover and wrote a postscript to this translation of Verlaine's essays "Les Poètes maudits" (1883-1884), from a text published in Paris in 1900. Both the cover and the appendix contain erotic surrealist photomontage imagery by Teige, highlighting his continued artistic connection with Surrealism and the Western art world even as Czechoslovakia came firmly under the Soviet sphere of influence after WWII. Surrealism was seen as standing in opposition to Socialist Realism, the state-mandated Soviet aesthetic from the mid-1930s. Even as Teige endorsed communism, his aesthetic commitment to Surrealism was held suspect by the local communist government. His artistic activity came to be progressively suppressed as a result, with this publication serving as an excellent late example of Teige's allegiances. Pictured in: "Karel Teige a typografie," no. 510. (Inventory #: P5521)