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

KASSÁK, MA AND THE CONSTRUCTIVIST “INTERNATIONAL”

Leaving historiography of the past half century for what is, a more precise look at Kassák’s role in the constructivist network of the European avant- garde in the 1920s learns that he was anything but a negligible player in the field. Even a superficial survey of the network of journals that constituted the backbone of the “International", a term used not only by Seuphor in his retrospective, but also by Kassák in the 1920s,13 MA played a formidable, pivotal role in a manifold way in this configuration of “little magazines" and in transnational Constructivism in the first half of the 1920s. Next to frequent references to MA in other journals, its key role is maybe best illustrated by the fact that the mentioned advertorial chart, which Kassák had designed in Fall 1922, was recreated and imitated in other journals in the mid-1920s. Moreover, MA was not just a journal, but also a press, publishing books in Hungarian as well as in German. As for the international standing of MA as a leading voice in the avant-garde, a panorama of the avant-garde edited by Kassák and Moholy-Nagy and published in 1922 as well, both in Hungarian and German, contributed considerably to the status of MA in European Constructivism: Új művészek könyve/Buch neuer Künstler [Book of New Artists].14 Apart from a brief introduction by Kassák, a mutus liber of “new artists" and “new art", as a picture book understandable even for those readers unable to understand Hungarian or German.

There can be no doubt, that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square was the ultimate icon of Constructivism in its pertinent simplicity, frequently copied in these constructivist journals, not just as a black square, but also in many variations. These variations indicated both allegiance with Malevich and his suprematist version of Constructivism and simultaneously differences in the often indeed divergent understanding of Constructivism by the editors of the single journals. Thus, the Berlin journal G (Material zur elementaren Gestaltung), edited by Hans Richter, as well as Theo van Doesburg’s De Stijl and Mécano alluded to Malevich's icon, but in form of a white square as reference to their own brands of Constructivism. The editors of the Warsaw journal Blok combined this white square with the word “construction”.15 Seuphor would combine the

13 Letter from Lajos Kassák to Theo van Doesburg, 30 September 1922. Published by Ferenc Csapiár (ed.), Kassák az európai avantgárd mozgalmakban, 1916-1928 [Lajos Kassák in the European avant-garde movements, 1916-1928], Kassák Múzeum és Archívum, Budapest, 1994, 22-23.

14 Lajos Kassák-László Moholy-Nagy (eds.), Buch neuer Künstler [Book of new artists], Julius Fischer Verlag, Wien, 1922.

15 Blok, 1/2., 1924, [8.]

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