Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Merse Pál Szeredi: Kassákism - MA in Vienna (1920-1925)

the working class, the transformation of whose thinking and worldview would organically bring about the socialist society of the distant future.

Kassák’s political position was criticised by Hungarian left-wing intellectuals as “naively misunderstood hyper-Marxism’’.4 5 According to his earlier editorial colleagues, who considered their art to be closer to the Communist cause, Kassák had betrayed the revolution by distancing himself from the concept of agitative art which demanded direct political changes. Committed communist artists also deserted Kassák, with the final break coming spring 1922 when the painter Béla Uitz, who had spent time in Moscow, and the Dadaist poet Sándor Barta - Kassák’s brothers-in-law and MA co-editors - simultaneously turned their backs on MA. Shortly thereafter, Uitz and Barta set up their own journals, Egység [Unity] and Akasztott ember [Hanged Man]. Barta moved in thedirection ofthe wholly politicised German Dada movement, while Uitzand fellow poet Aladár Komját, following the Soviet Proletkult line, rejected MA and the “bourgeois constructive aestheticism" of Western European artists.

MA’S INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS

In the spirit of international openness, MA forged connections in the early 1920s with a broad number of avant-garde circles, from America, across Europe, and all the way to Japan. At that time, the networks of avant-garde journals reached directly across national and cultural borders, ignoring the hierarchical relationship between the centre (the “West”) and the periphery (East-Central Europe).6 In the first half ofthe 1920s, MA's contents and visuals made it one of the most prominent artistic periodicals of its time, because of which Kassák’s name became well-known throughout Europe.

DADACLOBE - KASSÁK AND DADA

In Vienna, Kassák soon realised that neither the local art scene - which he regarded as “petty bourgeois” - nor the Hungarian political émigré subcultural milieu was an appropriate environment for him to develop his avant-garde

4 Béla Balázs, Befejezésül [In conclusion], Bécsi Magyar Újság, 14 September 1920, 5. [György Lukács], Kassák Lajos, Új Március, 2/11., 1926, 675-678.

5 Ernő Kállai—Alfréd Kemény-László Moholy-Nagy-László Péri, Nyilatkozat [Manifesto], Egység, 2/4., 1923, 51. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 443-444.

6 Daina Teters, Peculiarities in the Use ofthe Concepts Centre and Periphery in Avant-Garde Strategies, in Per Bäckström-Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Decentring the Avant-Garde, Brill—Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2014, 75-95. Merse Pál Szeredi, The international horizon of A Tett, in Gábor Dobó-Merse Pál Szeredi (eds.) Signa/ to the World, War fl Avant-Garde H Kassák, Kassák Foundation, Budapest, 2016, 69-77.

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