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)

Márton Pacsika: Purposeful Player of the New Instrument - Lajos Kassák and the Budapest MA

blematic engravings propagating communist ideals. The design of the front cover of MA also gradually changed at the same time. Instead of a literary and artistic journal, it presented itself first as activist-artistic and then as an activist, artistic and social journal. Eventually the colour of the main title, MA, was changed from black to red. [Figs. 17-20]

In the febrile political climate, relations between avant-garde art and Socialism again became a central question. “We want socialist art, but we again emphasize, without conforming to any external command", declared Kassák in the “International issue” of MA.29 According to the activist programme, the mission of MA was to create a new socialist humanity through art. Kassák promoted the society-transforming power of culture and art, and not political activity by artists. This was the source of an irresolvable conflict between MA and the Communist Party: Kassák and his circle believed, contrary to Marxist axioms, that consciousness could determine existence, and not only the reverse.

[19.] MA, “4th Worldview issue”, 1919, [front cover with Sándor Bortnyik’s linocut], Budapest [20.] MA, “3rd Worldview issue", 1919, [front cover with Sándor Bortnyik’s linocut], Budapest

29 Lajos Kassák, Tovább a magunk utján [Onward on our way], MA, 3/12., 1918,138-139. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 171-173.

83