Janus Pannonius Múzeum Évkönyve 26 (1981) (Pécs, 1982)

Művészettörténet - Körner Éva: Nyolcak és aktivisták

202 KÖRNER ÉVA ten years, including their own preliminaries - and of two, three years in the narrower sense - the whole fate of Hungarian art was transformed. Even if later everything worked against such influence. The short period between 1916 and 1919 was an unparalleled situation in Hungarian history and art history. Art could organically adapt to the rising arch of social drive and found its concrete functions. When Kernstock formulated the above cited program, these functions had only existed in insecure outlines. In spite of all inner conflicts, intellectual life was constantly on the rise - and fell to pieces before its culmination, together with the historical explosion, leaving behind an enigma of „what would have been". The period of activism which now rose from the ruins - a stage of a mere six years, from 1920 to 1926 - was not at all a movement which could, if not unite, so at least group all positive forces, as the earlier movement had been. It was not possible. History had then forced convergence, now it compelled divergence; a state of intra-possession was substituted for one of extra-possession - in the narrowest sense of the word, as well: Emigration. Then, in 1920, Kassák wrote in the re-lauched Viennese journal Ma (Today) : „Someone has torn up the tracks leading to our destiny and today we stand before a crossroad. In this upeaval we can see what the wordl war and the unfinished revolutions have left us. Not without unfounded fear and a befitting bitterness today, s man asks : which way? where to? The gushing waves have broken into the valleys and after a struggling rise the infinite motion has suddenly been broken. No political oreconomic reorganization could prevent it: there was man before the revolution and there was man after the revolution." That activism whose flag Kassák now again unraveled differed from the earlier one not intits goals, in creating a humanity who would strive toward the wholeness of life, but in its historical presumption. Political mass revolution and the individualitistically revolting masses had then, before 1919, a program which complemented and divergence from the original goals and hoped for a liberation of proletarian forces through the development of a collective individual — a movement adhered to only by Kassák and a few followers. All the more remarkable, then, is the force and effectiveness of this fight, this artistic accomplishemnt. It was Kassák, outlaw and destitute, who connected Hungarian art to the international circuit and created - he, and not the educated artitsts the visual-material symbol of the rootless, but unyielding revolutionary ideal: the „Bildarchitektur" (picture architecture, symbolic construction in the picture). The birth date of this picture form is 1921. It obviously derived much from Russian suprematism and Dutch neoplasticism which, though from different starting points, all wanted to show man and his world bared from all frills, im harmonic relationship. Ernő Kállai recognized almost immediately the uniqueness of Kassák's concept. His article of the same year about „Bildarchitektur" appeared in Ma in Vienna: „Objectlessness here does not mean flight from the world, does not mean romanticism; neither does it mean mysticism, a state beyond the body, but andunrelenting revolutionarya will for new laws and a new life. This is the most condensed and most simplified form of active art: Action (Tett). Creation which stakes the borderstones, the triumphant indicators of a coming community in an infinite and shapeless space." Kállai, when using the word „action" in this sense, meant to stress the connection with the first revolutionary take-off, with Tett of 1916. There is a seeming contradiction between the purely geometric „Bildarchitektur" and the pre 1919 figurative composition, opposed were corporeality with non-corporeality, transcendence with sensuality, abstractness with realism. Yet the two artistic conceptions are not opposites but the historisally determined wariation of the same basic concept. In the period untill 1919, the artist, s point of origin had been Cézanne. All that the whole Hungarian intelligentsia wanted - including Lajos Fülep and Georg Lukács as well - the essence of things instead of fake illusions, vagrant impressions manifested themselves in the struggle of a single artist. They sam in Cézanne a key figure, the trustee of the future; but they also realized that, in the words of Fülep, Cézane, s objects „are immanent and autonomous, determined only by the laws of the wordl within the picture". This was such an introverted pictorial wordl which could only serve as starting point for the then very dynamic Hungarian art which wanted to encorporate the outside wordl as well. If they defied those methods which naturalism could offer them, they could not but turn to the greatest model, to the unsurpassed unifying movement of suggestiveness and abstraction, the renaissance. This is the kind of art which spoke to everyone and in which - as Fülep exclaimed - everyone could find himself, and whose monumental construction carried the wholeness of life. The solidness of Cézanne, s paintings and the humanism of the renaissance created that system of coordinates in which the monumental composition of the first period of activism took shape, from still-life to recruiting poster. In Central and Eastern Europe after 1910 there is a constant upheaval in art, as well as in society, from Russia through Italy to Germany. These are the years of suprematism, futurism, and expressionism. Social and artistic movement is, however, nowhere as integrated as in