ABECEDA: A JAZZ-AGE ALPHABET FROM PRAGUE, 1926.

Here is the alphabet imagined as never before. Choreographed by the beautiful dancer Milca Mayerová into a brilliant photo-ballet in twenty-four hypnotic poses. Each move in the dance is made to the visual counterpoint of Karel Teige’s astonishing typographic music: as angular as jazz, as syncopated as Stravinsky!

Karel Teige (1900-1951) was the brightest star in the brilliant constellation of Czech avant-garde artist-writers of the 1920s and 30’s. A constructivist and a surrealist, a poet, collagist, photographer, typographer and architectural theorist, his 1926 photomontage designs for the alphabet are a uniquely elegant and witty invention, and one of the enduring masterpieces of Czech modernism. They enact the letter-titles of the twenty-five experimental poem sequence, ABECEDA, by his friend Vítĕslav Nezval, and feature the third collaborator on the project, the dancer Milča Mayerová. It was Mayerová’s idea to choreograph the poems, creating a pose for each letter, and then to publish it as a book of twenty-five images with Teige’s title designs. Karel Paspa’s photographs of Mayerová are at once sexy and chastely gymnastic: they present a young woman who is assertively modern and wittily self-possessed.

Magma presents in association with Redstone Press this limited run screen-print.
Dim: 56cm X 76cm
One colour silk screen
On Somerset Velvet white – 250gsm
100% Cotton rag paper