Telehor - reprint of the avant-garde magazine

The Swiss publishing house Lars Müller Publishers issued a reprint of the avant-garde magazine between 2011 and 2013, which was created in collaboration with the Zurich publisher Hans Girsberger in 1936 in the context of the first Czechoslovak Republic. This is a unique, first, and simultaneously last double issue of the magazine Telehor, dedicated by its editor, Brno architect František Kalivoda, entirely to the work of the avant-garde Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy. Particularly beneficial for this endeavor was the fact that both versions were published – one with a color cover, like the original periodical Telehor, and the other with a black-and-white cover featuring insightful commentary from art historians Klemens Gruber and Oliver A. I. Botar, who contextualize the magazine within historical events as well as in comparison with contemporary Western production, bringing it into an overall international context. In their research, they also used materials stored in the collection of architecture and urbanism at the Museum of the City of Brno.
Telehor – international magazine for visual culture would likely not have been created without the collaboration of three personalities – Moholy-Nagy, Swiss architectural historian Siegfried Gideon, and František Kalivoda, who were also involved in the preparation and organization of the Congress of International Architecture CIAM. The magazine was published in Brno only in one double issue, so it faced a similar fate as Kalivoda's earlier project Ekran. Gruber and Botar emphasize the uniqueness of the thematic focus of Telehor – according to them, despite the high popularity of Moholy's work and views in Germany, no extensive publication had been dedicated to him at that time, and they point out the connection between the name of the magazine Telehor (from Greek), Moholy's activities in visual media, and the work of Hungarian scientist and engineer Mihály von Dénes. He named his first concept of television "telehor," and Moholy could have encountered it at a demonstration in 1919 in Budapest. In 1923, Dénes's book Das Elektrische Fernsehen und das Telehor was published in Berlin.
Telehor, especially its second version with a black cover and white grotesque, was long regarded as a catalog for the exhibition that took place in Brno back in 1935. Kalivoda managed to publish the edition only on February 28, 1936, just before the opening of the exhibition in České Budějovice. The more famous color version of Telehor features a reproduction of Moholy's oil painting Construction "from 7", while the second version only has a black cover with the text: l. moholy-nagy. The magazine is entirely printed in the lowercase font Futura by German typographer P. Rener, with both versions formatted in A4 in a ring binder with a transparent cover protecting the front page. Kalivoda was one of the few who used lowercase type and sans-serif fonts in the text. Gruber and Botar managed to find a letter from Moholy to Kalivoda from August 1935 with his own design idea for the cover of the publication, leading them to believe that it was meant to be more of an anthology of Moholy’s work rather than a catalog. Kalivoda himself, however, admits in the text that he primarily wanted to highlight the developmental paths of visual art and that the goal of the publication was not to create a monograph but to focus on a specific problem of light. With this thematic focus on a particular artistic issue, Kalivoda surpassed the content of publications printed after 1929, when the book Foto-Auge by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold was published, which he was certainly formally inspired by.

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