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)
of the avant-garde in the 1920s. Moholy-Nagy saw the distinctive feature of “synthetic journals" as their proclamation of the “new way of life” and its manifestations. This covered the areas with the greatest promise for modernism, such as architecture, education and typography. It is the visual appearance of synthetic journals that sets them apart from other periodicals of the period: eye-catching and immediately recognizable, they display developments in avant-garde typography and bookdesign.The reproductions and photographs set amongst the text were more than illustrations for the articles, they had an independent presence. Photographs of technical innovations or modern cityscapes, often published without comment, acted as visual manifestos, declaring that these developments drew the real picture of the age of modernity. Synthetic journals were multi-media, giving space to means of expression across the widest possible range, from text to film scripts, architectural drawings and musical scores. They were also multilingual: articles in the national vernacular were accompanied by abstracts translated into the major European languages.7 Although in many cases they declared quite divergent aims, synthetic journals developed a common mode of communication that bridged cultures, movements and political views. Kassák’s first synthetic journal was MA [Today], produced in Vienna in the first half of the 1920s. It anticipated Dokumentum in terms of the diversity of its subject matter and even its visuality. Another development that took place in the first half of the 1920s was the international network that manifested itself in Dokumentum. Kassák mobilized the contacts he had built up during the period of the Vienna MA, and Gyula Illyés, Tibor Déry and Andor Németh also made use of relationships dating from their years of exile. Dokumentum's links with other synthetic journals, holding opposite views on many issues, like Noi [Us] in Rome, L'Esprit Nouveau [The New Spirit] in Paris, and Manométre [Manometer] in Lyon also date from this period. In contrast with MA, however, which enjoyed the good connections into the European journal network afforded by its base in Vienna, Dokumentum, despite its similar profile, was more isolated, and despite Kassák’s best efforts, never became part of the European avant- garde network. [Figs. 4-6] 7 László Moholy-Nagy, Richtlinien für eine Synthetische Zeitschrift [Guidelines for a synthetic journal], Pásmo, 1/7-8., 1925, 5. More detail on this issue: Jindrich Toman, Permanent synthesis: László Moholy-Nagy’s idea of a synthetic journal, in Gábor Dobó-Merse Pál Szeredi (eds.), Local Contexts/lnternational Networks, Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe, Petőfi Literary Museum-Kassák Museum, Budapest, 2017, [forthcoming.] 212
