Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Katalin Bakos: Sándor Bortnyik's Activity as Graphic Designer and Teacher, 1914-1938

SÁNDOR BORTNYIK'S ACTIVITY AS GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND TEACHER, 1914-1938 BY KATALIN BAKOS The history of Hungarian graphic design is yet to be written. The field to have received most attention in synoptic studies and exhibitions is poster art, while book design has been discussed only with respect to certain of its segments, workshops and personalities. Sándor Bortnyik's activity as a graphic designer also remained uncharted, though the field was important in his career and his works had considerable influence on the development of 20th-century Hungarian book and advertising design. The young Bortnyik made his first posters in 1914, without any formal training. He did not alter the available tradition of commercial posters, used conventional models. These early works, however, already reveal certain talents and qualities of functionality and decorativeness that went on to be hallmarks of his career. After Bortnyik became associated with the journal MA in 1917, his graphics became vehicles for the activists' programme. Motifs freely migrated between his paintings, drawings and engravings, also to appear on book and magazine covers, in illustrations and posters. Bortnyik had a key role in the creation of the journal's design. In 1920 he followed the other artists of MA to their exile in Vienna, where he was chiefly engaged in book design. Constructivism meanwhile came to dominate the new policy of the MA activists, who gave up social struggle in favour of the construction of life, the modelling of a new society. The typical art form of émigré Hungarian constructivism, which was developing parallel with the international Avant-garde trends, was Bildarchitektur (picture architecture), a variety of a constructivist composition, which Kassák named and defined after Bortnyik's 1921 stencil series. The new title page of the Vienna MA which Kassák designed and the cover pages Bortnyik designed for the publishers Falanx were oscillating between autonomous and applied art in the same way the publications of the Budapest MA. Constructivist composition techniques were applied to the layout of the text, and influenced even the type used. In 1922 Bortnyik went to Weimar, where he became associated with the Bauhaus. He learnt the method of elementary typography, which he saw László Moholy-Nagy develop for the advertising campaign of the 1923 exhibition. He came to know such great innovators of contemporary typography, photomontage and collage as El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg. He opened a short-lived advertising studio with Max Burchartz and Alfréd Forbát. Upon his return to Hungary in 1925, he presented the works he made in emigration in the Mentor bookshop. Since first his ambitions as a painter were not rewarded, he concentrated on the design of commercial posters, in which field he could automatically make use of what he learnt at the Bauhaus. Between 1926-1930 he transplanted the order of abstract composition, pure colours used as signs and geometric shapes into stylish figurai posters. Thanks to his work, utility, economy, and the carefully planned combination of image and text became Modiano [cigarette paper], 1929. Poster, lithography, 126x95 m, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest Inv. no.: XY 60.64