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
from C (Material zur elementaren Gestaltung), all titles in the shortlist chart are mentioned in the longlist of “journals received" as well. Already this longlist is only selection, as can be taken from Kassák’s estate, in which many more journals can be found, like e.g. the Danish journal Pressen [The Press], mentioned in longlists in Zenit and other journals, but in Kassák’s eyes apparently not worth mentioning at all. In similar way, several of the journals mentioned in Kassák's longlist can be found in the charts of virtually all other journals, but did apparently not qualify for Kassák either, at least not for a privileged double reference, both in the longlist of “journals received" and in his shortlist chart highlighting his favourites. CENTRAL EUROPE RELOCATED Slightly puzzling from a present-day perspective is the absence of several Eastern-European journals, which could found in many charts, but not in Kassák’s charts in MA: the Polish journals Zwrotnica and Blok, the Romanian journal Contimporanul as well as the Moravian journal Pásmo, nowadays often mentioned in one breath with MA as the kernel of some “Central-Euro- pean avant-garde".33 The latter three appear next to several Hungarian journals in Kassák’s 1924 longlist, but not in his shortlist, which names from (Eastern) Central Europe only the Czech review Stavba. Whereas Zenit was mentioned in the first chart in MA in 1922, it only returns in 1926-1927 in Dokumentum in Kassák’s list of favourite journals, here next to Stavba, Pásmo, Contimporanul and the new Romanian journal Integral as well asthe newSlovakjournal DAV/.34 Polish journals remain unmentioned. Dokumentum appeared after Kassák’s return to Budapest and he, obviously, wanted to connect with avant-garde in neighbouring countries, all with a Hungarian population, next to other journals and groups elsewhere in Europe. Before, still in Vienna, however, Kassák’s network had definitely a “Cen- tral-European" character as well, however, “Central-European” not as it is defined today in old Cold-War Western terms as the satellite states in the former Eastern Bloc (or maybe more precisely: the Eastern Bloc to be) relabelled in recent decades as “Central-Europe" to detach them from Russia. In the first decades of the 20th century, “Central Europe" extended far more to the West, 33 E.g., Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes, Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2002. Remarkable is here, that in Blok, Contimporanul and Pásmo frequent references to MA can be found and texts and reproductions of art works by Kassák and other MA collaborators were reproduced. 34 Dokumentum, 1/1., 1926,52. 23
