Prague meets Paris:the Reception and Representation of the “Eiffelka” Martha Kuhlman (bio) The tower was built by Alexander Gustave Eiffel with the assistance of M. Koechlin, E . Nougier and architect Sauvester for the World's Fair in 1889. It was long regarded with distrust, and at the conclusion of its construction, Eiffel himself was the first to ascend to the top. Verlaine, who usually doesn't venture beyond the limits of the Latin quarter, let himself be conveyed there by carriage. But upon seeing it, he fled from the "monster." Later the Eiffelka's praises started to be sung by poets. Cocteau calls it a "lace giraffe, " Apollinaire the "shepherd of bleating bridges; " it appears on the canvases of the Douanier Rousseau, Delaunay, etc. Beneath the Eiffelka is the only plot of land about whose measure experts in the academic world are engaged in an endless dispute. In addition to serving as the setting for children's parties, during which thousands of balloons are released around it, the Eiffelka is also used for various acrobatic attractions. Recently, there was a huge aviation accident when a plane crashed into one of the bottom arches. The Eiffel Tower was leased by Citroën, which erected an advertisement in lights that spanned its entire height, and was lit every night of the year 1926.1 Intended for Czech visitors to the Eiffel tower, this idiosyncratic and mildly insouciant citation appeared in the 1927 guidebook to Paris written by the Czech painter and photographer Jindřich Štyrský in collaboration with the painter Marie Čermínová, who went by "Toyen." Both members of the Czech avant-garde movement Devětsil, Štyrský and Toyen served as cross-cultural ambassadors enticing their fellow Czechs to venture west to Paris, "the center of knowledge and art, the focus of contemporary culture, the cradle of modern architecture," as the advertisements in the Revue Devětsil or ReD, boasted [End Page 291] [Figure 1].2 The citation itself is a remarkable illustration of the degree of Francophilia present in the Czechoslovak First Republic (1918–1938), for the authors assume that their Czech readers are entirely familiar with names such as Henri Rousseau, Jean Cocteau, Robert Delaunay and, above all, Guillaume Apollinaire.3 And they would have been correct, because the Czech avant-garde journals of the 1920s—Pásmo (1924), Disk (1923–1924), Život II (1922), ReD (1927–1931)—were replete with articles devoted to the European avant-garde, with a particular focus on the Parisian cultural scene, and included reviews of exhibits, debates, polemics and manifestos, sometimes in the original French.4 For shifting constellations of painters (Josef Šíma, Toyen), photographers (Jaroslav Rössler, Štyrský), poets (Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval) and writers (Karel Čapek, Karel Teige) eager to participate in the international avant-garde and to assert their position on the world stage, Paris was considered the "model of the modern metropolis."5 Although connections between France and Bohemia have a long and illustrious history, the interwar period marked an especially intense period of contact between Prague and Paris.6 From the most elevated politician to the ordinary Czech high school student, France was regarded as the spiritual center of European intellectual life—even more so than Germany, despite the significant German-speaking population.7 In the context of the early 20th century, the reasons for this predilection were as political as they were cultural, since the German language connoted the dominance and suppression of the Czech language under the Habsburg Empire. By contrast, France was a powerful ally, and distinguished itself from the rest of Europe as the first country to recognize Czechoslovakia as an independent state.8 President Masaryk, in cooperation with Ernest Denis, established an Institute of Slavic Studies in Paris, which was formally linked to the Sorbonne in 1922.9 By 1938, Czechoslovakia had the highest number of chapters of the Alliance Française compared to the rest of Eastern Europe.10 Given the French interest in Czechoslovakia and the cultural context of the avant-garde, it is not surprising that Czech artists considered living in Paris necessary as a mark of their cultural sophistication.11 No landmark is more emblematic...
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Nov 1, 2008
Domenico Tosini 
Open Access