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)

Hubert van den Berg: Lajos Kassák, the Viennese Edition of MA and the “International” of Avant-Garde Journals in the 1920s

reproductions of their respective work circulated from journal to journal, wandered from one review to another, sometimes in the original language, sometimes in translation. To facilitate this circulation and to reach a wider international audience directly, in particular journals mainly written in so-called “small" languages and, hence, with a limited readership, be it Czech, Dutch or Hungarian, often contained contributions written or translated in the major European lingua francos of the period, German and French. Yet, periodicals, which were basically published in these lingua francos, like Kurt Schwitters’s Merz and Émile Malespine’s Manométre [Manometer], contained contributions not only in German and French, but in other languages as well, sometimes mixing up different languages in one single texts to underpin their trans- or, as in the case of these reviews even explicitly “polyglot and supranational" character.2 3

Transgression of national boundaries was undoubtedly one of the essential programmatic features of the constructivist network as transnational conglomerate of artists throughout Europe and beyond - in pursuit of a borderless transnational culture. Although “network” is rather a notion of the late 20th and early 21st century, the term can found occasionally already in the 1920s. In one of the major journals involved, the Flemish review Het Overzicht [The Overview], the editors Jozef Peeters and Fernant Berckelaers (the latter better known under his pseudonym Michel Seuphor) presented a list of journals under the caption Het Netwerk [The Network] in one of the last issues of theirjournal in January 1924.

In as much as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square might be seen as the iconic hallmark of the constructivist avant-garde, a likewise square-shaped design by Lajos Kassák of the backside cover of the journal MA [Today] in October 1922 could well be regarded as a likewise iconic hallmark of the network of avant-garde journals promoting constructivist abstraction in the 1920s.4 [Fig. 1] At least in more recent avant-garde historiography, Kassák’s advertise- ment-like arrangement is often reproduced in publications to illustrate the

2 N. n. [Émile Malespine], ABCD, Manométre, 1/2., 1922,1-3. This and all other translations from Dutch, French and German by the author. Cf., for Schwitters: Hubert van den Berg,‘Übernationalität’ der Avantgarde, op. cit., 260-263. The same phrasing can be found as well in the editorial of Zoltán Csuka in the first issue of Hungarian journal Út, published in Novi Sad. Cf., Dubravka Djuric-Misko Suvakovic (eds.), Impossible Histories, Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 7978-7997, MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2003,307.

3 Het Netwerk [The network], Het Overzicht, 2/20., 1924,136.

4 MA, 8/1., 1922, [12.]

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