On the Needles of These Days, by Jindřich Heisler and Jindřich Štyrský; translated by Jed Slast. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2024. 62 pages.
ORIGINALLY ISSUED as an illicit samizdat publication in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941, On the Needles of These Days combines photographs by Jindřich Štyrský, taken in his home city on the Vltava in the more carefree years of the mid-1930s, with an extended prose poem by Jindřich Heisler, a Jewish poet and visual artist who would spend most of the Second World War hiding out in the bathroom of the apartment Štyrský shared with the artist Toyen. A collaboration between two central protagonists of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group, Needles appears in a new translation by Jed Slast courtesy of Twisted Spoon Press, a Prague-based publisher that puts out translations of the storied avant-gardes of Central and Eastern Europe in exquisite, highly collectible editions.
Alongside Vítězslav Nezval and Toyen, Štyrský was one of the original founders of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group in the 1930s. His rabid interdisciplinarity quickly helped establish the course for Surrealism in Prague, with his prolific outpouring of paintings, poetry, criticism, and graphic art, and his editorship of several key reviews, including the notorious erotica publication Edition 69. Heisler, younger and less established, was only twenty-four when he joined the group in 1938 at a time of encroaching political turmoil for the country, but was already following in the elder artist’s vein. Though he was better known at the time as a poet, he similarly pursued visual art, much of which was first discovered in Toyen’s archives after her death in 1980.
In On the Needles of These Days, Štyrský’s black-and-white photographs showcase unintended collages of scenery and objects captured as he wandered the streets of Prague in Surrealism’s pre-repression heyday. Fragmentary details of the city’s famed Art Nouveau architecture, window displays, religious icons, and even an occasional graffito evoke a kaleidoscopic portrait of this magical and mysterious city that will still ring true to contemporary visitors.
Presented opposite Štyrský’s photos, Heisler’s prose sings in Slast’s elegant translation:
Maybe these tumescent subterranean veins have already begun to create a disturbance and the trembling Earth slowly wipes away the thick dust with thousands of manure nests. Maybe it’s the fingers of these days unraveling monstrous snarls, homespun skeins tousled by worsted waves and matted with seaweed, freely displaying their vast expanse of hope.
Surrealism of course claimed both visual art—in all its manifestations—and literature as vehicles of expression. In collaborative works like Needles,the point is not to assert the autonomy of a given medium (though the works of each of the contributors might naturally stand on their own); rather, it becomes an exercise in mutual illumination. At times, the juxtapositions are rooted not in complementariness, but in a fruitful and sublime dissonance. The two bodies of work were created just a few years apart, but in drastically different circumstances: Štyrský’s photos in the still-freewheeling and decadent years of the mid-1930s, Heisler’s poem in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War, while he was under the threat of his very life being taken away.
In collaborative works like Needles, the point is not to assert the autonomy of a given medium (though the works of each of the contributors might naturally stand on their own); rather, it becomes an exercise in mutual illumination.
It is up to Heisler, then, to summon the war in words, and he doesn’t shrink from the task. No mere exercise in escapism, Needles, in Heisler’s ultimate imagining, illuminates the völkisch conceits animating a photograph of cheap knickknacks captured by Štyrský, endowing them with the morbidity that, his prose seems to imply, had always been their animating force:
One day, when these towns and villages, alive today only through the big eyes of cows, can no longer be expanded, then the entire feline band will go and merrily play over the coffins of that gilded rabble, and from our eyes that have been targeted by the phantoms of this war, and from all eyes that escape with their health intact and chance to observe this carnivalesque spectacle, not a single tear will be shed.
Surrealism, as suggested by the very name of its famous game, the “Exquisite Corpse,” was and has always been preoccupied with death. The same is true of the photographic medium itself, as some have argued. “Death is a photograph,” Susan Sontag famously wrote in her early novel The Benefactor, 1968, arresting the very life force that it captures in situ. Sadly, Needles would unwittingly serve as one of its collaborators’ swan songs. Štyrský did not outlive the war: He died of pneumonia in Prague in 1942 at the age of forty-two, just a year after On the Needles of These Days was published. Heisler managed to survive until the end, but didn’t last much longer. In 1947, just a year before the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, he and Toyen moved to Paris, where he died of sudden heart failure in 1953, at just thirty-eight years old; we can only speculate as to what extent the stress of those wartime years contributed to his early demise.
Death, of course, embraces all of us; cities live much longer; and art is eternal. Needles manifests as a paean to Prague at its darkest hour, and as a defiant and harmonious assertion of life by two of its most distinctive voices.
Travis Jeppesen is senior editor of artforum.com.
