Technologies for the Revolution. The Czech Avant-garde in Print

The most influential avant-garde group in interwar Czechoslovakia called for a revolution enacted via print. Devětsil, founded in 1920 and comprised of leftist artists, architects, actors, and poets, undertook an ambitious publishing effort, aiming to reach urban individuals on the street and in their homes in the years following the First World War. It was a revolution that explicitly condemned any call to arms; instead, it proposed taking up new technologies that expanded possibilities for the photomechanical reproduction and dissemination of text and image in print. This utopic vision was embodied in thousands of physical revolutions made by the machine of the printing press.