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
network character of the avant-garde. Yet, already in the 1920s Kassák's sample was copied in several other journals partaking in what Seuphor in the late 1950s in a history of abstract art described as “a kind of ‘International’ of modern art".5 In this retrospective, Seuphor named some thirty journals, many of them already mentioned in the network list in Het Overzicht in 1924, which, according to Seuphor “were particularly remarkable for their courage and their independent stance: Der Sturm [The Storm] and C (Gestaltung) [C (Material for Elementary Design)] in Berlin; De Stijl [The Style], Mécano [Mechanic] and The Next Call in Holland; Het Overzicht and Qa Ira! [It’ll be fine] in Antwerp; Anthologie in Liége; Sept arts [Seven Arts] and L’Art libre [Free Art] in Brussels; La Vie des Lettres et des Arts [The Life of Literature and the Arts], L'Esprit Nouveau [The New Spirit], Les feuilles libres [The Blank Pages], Orbes [Orbs], L'oeuf dur [The hard egg], Cercle et Carré [Circle and Square], 391, Le Bulletin de TEf- fort Moderne [Bulletin of the Modern Effort] and Le Mouvement accéléré [The Accelerated Movement] in Paris; Zenit [Zenith] in Belgrade; Contimporanul [Contemporary] and Punct [Point] in Bucharest;Zwrotnica [Switchpoints] and Blok [Block] in Warsaw; MA in Vienna; Merz in Hanover; Pdsmo [Zone], Disk [Disc] and Stavba [Building] in Czechoslovakia; A. B. C. in Zurich’’.6[Fig. 2] “AVANT-GARDE” AS A WESTERN COLD-WAR NARRATIVE Michel Seuphor's account of the “International” of modern art has its geographical centre of gravity in Western Europe, and in Western Europe in particular in Paris and the Low Countries. According to Seuphor in a following paragraph, Paris was “the centre of abstract art”7 and to underpin the importance of Paris, his list mentions nine journals published on the shores of the Seine. Paris is followed immediately by the Low Countries, though. Belgium and Holland are represented by eight journals. Apart from Berlin, mentioned at the start, the rest of Europe follows at the tail end of his line-up and certainly not accidentally. In respect to MA and Lajos Kassák, it is noteworthy that MA is named as one of the last journals. Moreover, Kassák has no entry of his own in the encyclopaedic panorama of some five hundred abstract artists that follows in Seuphor’s survey of the avant-garde in pursuit of abstract art. Kassák 5 Michel Seuphor, Knaurs Lexikon abstrakter Malerei [Knaurs lexicon for abstract painting], Droemersche-Knaur, München-Zürich, 1957, 60. 6 Ibid., 61. Seuphor located two journals in the wrong place: A. B. C. was published in Basel, Zwrotnica in Krakow. 7 Ibid. 12
