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)
Gergely Prőhle: Introduction
INTRODUCTION On the occasion of Lajos Kassák’s 130th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his death, the Petőfi Literary Museum commemorated this versatile master with a series of three interrelated exhibitions. In the past decades, the Kassák Museum has played an important role in familiarizing the public with certain periods of Kassák’s oeuvre. However, its limited gallery space has not allowed for a presentation of the scope that has now been realized in three different but interlinked institutions (Petőfi Literary Museum, Kassák Museum, Gizi Bajor Actors' Museum), connected by an overarching theme. It has never been easy to capture the versatility of Kassák’s work. While Kassák “the artist” was almost invisible in socialist Hungary after 1945, he was famous in Western Europe, where, in turn, Kassák “the poet" remained unknown. His impact on avant-garde theatre was also relegated to the background. There are a number of reasons why his political work is still lesser-known: he was isolated during the Horthy regime, his relationship with the Social Democrats was always controversial, and from the Communist turn onwards - with the exception of the “coalition years" between 1945 and 1948, when he played a significant role in Hungary’s intellectual life - the authorities were increasingly incapable of grasping and assessing the work of this independent thinker. Vienna was a peculiar place in the 1920s. Once the globally significant center of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, it had become the capital of small Austria, more and more regarded as the periphery of Western Europe. Everything was in transition: once secure ways of life collapsed, a great number of clerks and employees became impoverished, while social security improved the living conditions of the working classes. The young republic’s capital was quick to break with the traditions of the old imperial city, and this made a mark on political relations as well as Vienna’s cultural and artistic life. The still familiar expression “Red Vienna” was coined around this time, as the city was under Social Democratic leadership from the May 1919 council elections until the party was banned in 1934. Following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Leftist politicians and artists fleeing to Western Europe found themselves on an island when they arrived in Vienna, as the “red" city was isolated even within Austria itself. At the same time, there it was possible for Hungarian emigrants to carry on with a Central European way of life and connect to Western artistic and cultural trends with the mediation of the German-language context. This colorful 7
