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

black square with a black circle in his journal Cercle et Carré. In Kurt Schwitters’s journal Merz, both a black square and a white square appeared next to icon-like square-shaped signs for Dada and for “Merz”, Schwitters’s personal “Monstructivism",l6 17as he occasionally called it - Kassák’s design of October 1922 might well be seen as another example following the same pattern.

The October 1922 issue of MA was the first issue of the journal in a new shape. Instead of the common rectangular journal size used previously, from than on MA appeared in square-shape format. Whereas this quite uncommon paper size already hints in a subtle way at the icon of Constructivism, the backside of the issue proclaims in a likewise sublimated, yet still unmistakable way, Kassák's allegiance to Constructivism. In form of an advertisement-like arrangement of a dozen titles of other avant-garde journals, the association to Constructivism is not only obvious from the choice of titles, but also in Kassák’s design of the arrangement. What might look as an advertisement page, was intended mostly certainly indeed both as a sample experiment in innovative advertising design, neue Werbegestaltung, as it was called in German, and as such from Kassák’s perspective already a sample of "constructive art". Also in its lucid geometrical ordering the collage referred obviously to constructivist-abstract painting and design, evoking in a strongly stylized way arrangements of journals on sale at newsstands, in kiosks or in bookstore win[3.] Advertisement of the St. Koci bookshop in Brno, Pásmo, 1/5-6., 1924,12., Brno

16 Serge Lemoine (éd.), Kurt Schwitters, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1994,160-261.

17 Lajos Kassák, Die Reklame [Advertisements], Dos Werk, 13/7., 226-228, here 228. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, A Sourcebook of Cen- tral-European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2002, 621-623.

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