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

split among constructivist artists throughout Europe.40 It also caused a split between Kassák and other editors of MA, who started new journals, Akasztott ember [The Hanged Man] and Egység [Unity], promoting “proletarian art”. Kassák countered their move by a single-issue journal entitled 2*2, certainly not accidentally to be found in the middle of his first chart in MA in October 1922.2*2, co-edited with Andor Németh, contained the Hungarian translation of an article by the German anarchist Gustav Landauer. Published originally in Landauer’s journal Der Sozialist [The Socialist] in 1911 as a polemical contribution on the question, whether engaged art should subordinate to proletarian taste - an issue in the socialist movement already a decade before.41 42 Landauer’s stand was unequivocal: he rejected any “dilettantism” to meet the popular taste of uneducated masses, proletarian or otherwise. Landauer had been People’s Commissar for Education and Cultural Affairs [Volksbeauftragten für Volksaufklärung] in the First Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and was murdered by a right-wing militia during the suppression of the communist ruled Second Soviet Republic in the same year. Landauer had always been very critical about Marxist Socialism and authoritarian tendencies in the socialist movement. Both Németh and Kassák were undoubtedly aware of Landauer’s political stand and the choice to translate his article from 1911, reprinted in 1921 in the book Der werdende Mensch [The Expectant Man], edited by Martin Buber, was certainly consciously chosen.41 No less consciously chosen were the names of threejournals in the advertorial ensemble of October 1922, which did not have a constructivist character: Die Aktion [The Action], Der Gegner [The Opponent], and Clarté [Clarity], All were devoted to socially engaged art and all three representing different strands of left-wing politics with a revolutionary tendency. Der Gegner as journal of the Malik Press was closely related to the German Communist Party, Die Aktion, originally an expressionist journal, had transformed itself in a platform for a council-communism critical of the authoritarian course in Soviet Russia. Clarté was the journal of a French40 Cf. Hubert van den Berg, The Import of Nothing, How Dada came, saw and vanished in the Low Countries (1915-1925), G. K. Hall, New York, 2002, 163-171. Oliver A. I. Botár, From the Avant-Garde to ‘Proletarian Art’. The Émigré Hungarian Journals Egység and Akasztott ember, 1922-23, Art Journal, 52/1., 1993, 34-45. Whereas Botar’s title suggests an opposition between “avant-garde” and "proletarian” art, also the proponents of the latter understood their conceptions of art as "avant-garde” - even more “avant-garde” than the “pure art” proposed by their opponents.

41 Gustav Landauer, Vom Dilettantismus [On dilettantism], Der Sozialist, 3/2., 1911,13-16.

Gustav Landauer, A dilettantizmusról [On dilettantism], 2*2,1/1., 1922, 3-4.

42 Gustav Landauer, Der werdende Mensch [The Expectant man], Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1921, 311-341.

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