Heves megyei aprónyomtatványok 8/I

KASSÁK, on the contrary, often subjugated cuttings of magazine photographs to the constructive order of the architecture of his pictures. These two types of photo usage are still to be observed: in the first one, the artist creates a situation which may result in an end-product unknown even to him — in the second he knows the end- result beforehand and collects adequate raw (photo) material to it. There is an almost symbolic significance in the line of thoughts represented by Imre BAK, who half a century after Kassák cuts photos into geometric structures or in the gesture of Tamás SZENTJÓBY — after Moholy-Nagy's photogram— selfportraits: — making a psychedelic copy of his face pressed to the glass of the xerox machine.

The most consistent follower of Moholy-Nagy's photograms is György KÉPES who at the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology later on fixed the light—effects of various energy sources on light-sensitive paper — and Tihamér GYARMATHY in the early 60ies experimenting with the photogenic equivalents of his own geometric

abstract painting and space problems in Budapest.

If we wanted to deduce the following developments at any price from Moholy-Nagy we could connect the photomontages of the 30ies to his "photoplastics" in the late 20ies. However, this period cannot be analyzed in terms of linearity and several aspects still have to be clarified. The activity of Lajos VAJDA is decisive in this period and in his photomontages created in Paris (or collages? — since they are glued newspaper cuttings, and literature is by far not self—consistent in separating these techniques) the effect of surrealism is just as prevailing as that of Russian photomontage and film ("constructive surrealistic schematics"). In his iconography, elements of popular imagery and political up—to—dateness cluster around curious emblems of aggr'essivity and softness. If not in his world of forms but in his way of thinking, it was Dezső KORNISS who stood the closest to Vajda in the turn of the 20ies and 30ies but just like the works of the similarly oriented Sándor TRAUNER, György KEPES and Ernő SCHUBERT — or from the other side: Sándor BORTNYIK — made in this period in Budapest, his ones are also mostly destroyed or latent. In their works photomontage was usually created from picture material of secondary usage — that is, contemporary press cuttings. At this time progressive photographers clustered around the journal of Kassák, "Munka" (Work) — their social commitment is marked by actions like the Szolnok exhibition of the socio-photographers group (1932) which was banned by the police. In the works of one of the organizers of the exhibition, Lajos LENGYEL, the most important tendencies of the pre-war avantgarde photography can be observed: 1. the constructed still life — objective, and closely related to socio-photography and abstract, const- ructivistic compositions, respectively, the optical-experimental aspects of which have also opened the way towards advertisement (e. g. in the work of József PÉCSI). From the point of view of our subject, this is a marginal case, which is only slightly different from the traditional pre-set still life, 2. the glued photomontage — which is