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)
avant-garde artworks with modern technical innovations, such as photographs of modern industrial buildings, aircraft and other machinery.24 This direct connection between modern art and technology was most successfully realised in Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy’s joint publication of September 1922, the Új művészek könyve [Book of New Artists].25 Kassák originally perceived the volume as a literary and fine arts anthology before deciding on the album format. With the publication, he wanted to secure his status as an internationally formative figure of the avant-garde canon. The volume presents the evolution of ‘isms’ from Kassák’s perspective, with a series of futurist, expressionist, cubist, Dadaist and constructivist works. The picture essay, containing more than 120 reproductions, emphasises the parallels between modern art and modern technology: Futurism and the automobile, Cubism and film (and montage techniques), and Constructivism and light-frame industrial architecture. At the apex of this artistic-technological progress set forth in the anthology, in the closing pages of the book, were Kassák’s own “picture architecture” works, aircraft, and frames of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling’s abstract films. [Figs. 20-21] Over the course of the eighteen-month editorial process, Kassák was certainly inspired by Tzara’s ambitious plans for the Dadaglobe anthology, which was never realised, and thus Kassák’s book became the first comprehensive anthology of “new art". Kassák learned first-hand of the international formations of Constructivism, and also acquired a large amount of reproductions from Moholy-Nagy, who was living in Berlin.26 The Új művészek könyve did not receive much critical attention, although it did significantly inspire the creation by Hans Arp and El Lissitzky of their anthology Kunstismen [Isms of Art] by providing something of a model.27 KASSÁK’S ART BETWEEN DADA AND CONSTRUCTIVISM Naturally, MA not only published artists of the international avant-garde movement, but also works by Kassák and his circle. Kassák's own work underwent significant transformation in 1921-1922: under the influence of Dada and Constructivism, he redefined his earlier poetry and, in parallel, began 24 For more details, see Merse Pál Szeredi, MA/De Stijl, op. cit. 25 For more details, see Krisztina Csaba, Kassák Lajos-Moholy Nagy-László, Új művészek könyve [Lajos Kassák-László Moholy-Nagy, Book of new artists], BA Thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2016. 26 Ferenc Csapiár, A“Karaván’’-tól az “Új művészek könyvé"-ig [From “Karaván" to “Új művészek könyve"], in Idem, Kassák körei, op. cit., 7-13. TI El Lissitzky-Flans Arp (eds.), Die Kunstismen, 1924-1914 [The isms of art, 1924-1914], Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Zürich-Munich-Leipzig, 1925. 122
