Devětsil was Central Europe's most playful modernist movement — founded in Prague in 1920 by Karel Teige, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský and the poet Vítězslav Nezval, who declared Poetism: the radical notion that modern art should be joyful, technical, and democratic rather than solemn. Teige's magazines ReD and Disk set the template — photomontage, geometric color blocks, sans-serif type, and aggressively asymmetric grids.

The aesthetic fuses Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus rigor with a distinctly Bohemian wit. Scarlet and ink-black on paper white, with mustard as the third chord, form the signature palette. Typography is treated as object, not caption — set at wildly varying scales, rotated, mixed in weight within a single phrase. The result is offset-print modernism: saturated, hand-mixed, slightly off-register, and always asymmetric.