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)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

ty to see the current tendencies of their age and draw conclusions about the future.5 This group was not tied to a particular social class but shifted dynamically from one class to another and facilitated communication between them. Members of the group were aware of their own intermediate position, and were capable of critically interpreting the world around them, from the outside. Their syntheses meant both a critical stance towards prevailing conditions and a broad-based, innovative programme to change them. A good example of this was László Moholy-Nagy, who soon became a major figure of the European avant-garde. He embodied this sovereign type, and took an interest in the question of synthetic thinking as early as 1925. Moholy-Nagy was already a professor in the Bauhaus and contributed to several avant-garde journals, including Dokumentum. His essay on synthetic journals appeared in Pásmo [Zone],6 published in Brno, a mediumsized town but a place of significance for modernism and a local centre

[2.] Lajos Kassák, The New Russian Art [Malevich, Tatlin], Dokumentum, 1/2., 1927,3., 6., Budapest

5 On “synthesis” and the “bearers of synthesis”, see Karl Mannheim, Why there is no Science of Politics?, op. cit., 97-104.

6 The journal of the Devétsil group, edited by Artus Cernik between 1924and 1926.

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