A World of 'Purely Artistic Conception' and a 'Universal Art of the Spirit': Max Dvořák and Karel Teige Between Phenomenology and Surrealism
2015
Abstract
In the early 1940s, Karel Teige, returns to Max Dvořák's concept of history of art as 'history of the spirit'. Starting in the late 1930s, Teige pursued a sustained inquiry into the essence of the so-called imaginative (or 'phantasizing', in Teige's own terminology) art, and his findings, which he intended to synthetize in a broadly conceived Phenomenology of Art (left unfinished), led him to the view that the essence of imaginative art consists in the visualization of 'spiritual forms' of an inner model.
This is where Teige might been influenced precisely by Dvořák's abolition of any antithesis between naturalism and idealism, internal and external image, and his quest for a unity of Kunstwissenschaft and artistic practice.