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)

tical visual world parallel to the numbered poems, and found his answer in the form world of geometric abstraction. We may locate the models for Kassák’s earlier fine arts creations in Schwitters’s Dadaist works, the Abstract Expressionism of Der Sturm, and the Russian art presented by Umansky. Kassák called his own works “picture architecture", whose aim was the “creation” of a new world on the flat surface. “Picture architecture” is a “creation which lays the foundation stones and triumphant predictions of the community of the future into infinite and shapeless space” - wrote the art critic Ernő Kállai.29 30 Kassák laid down the theory of “picture architecture" in a Dadaist-toned manifesto published in autumn 1921. Its platform was significantly different from his revolutionary and propagandistic-tone writings on the role of fine arts. Kassák favoured geometric abstract art that created “subject-free form", a “force demonstrating itself" and "the beginnings of a new world”. “We must erase the rules from our heads" - he wrote - because [“picture architecture”] is

MŰVÉSZEK KÖNYVE

[21.] Lajos Kassák-László Moholy-Nagy (eds.), Új művészek könyve [The Book of New Artists], Julius Fischer Verlag, Vienna, 1922, [front cover with Lajos Kassák’s illustration]

29 Péter Mátyás [Ernő Kállai], Kassák Lajos, MA, 7/1., 1921,139. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 425-427.

30 Lajos Kassák, Képarchitektúra [Picture architecture], MA, 7/4., 1922, 53. Originally published as Lajos Kassák, Bildarchitektur [Picture architecture], translated by Pál Aczél, MA, Vienna, [September] 1921. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 427-432.

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