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

LAJOS KASSÁK AND MA DURING THE HUNGARIAN SOVIET REPUBLIC

When the Communists, in alliance with the left wing of the Social Democrats, took over power in March 1919, the artists of MA put out a pamphlet warning of “slippery, thousand-faced acrobats of principle”, who “want to preserve capitalist culture". In the second last line of the pamphlet, the Kassák circle wrote, “Long live the dictatorship of revolutionary artists over bourgeois artists".3 Of course, the MA artists were referring to themselves, and this aroused antipathy among the left-wing artists and intellectuals who rejected the avant-garde aesthetic. [Fig. 21]

Kassák himself took part in the cultural administration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, but the conflict between his roles as avant-garde artist and workers-movement activist became increasingly manifest. Initially, in his ca 30

pi.] Béla Uitz, Vörös katonák előre! [Red Soldiers Forward!], 1919, colour print on paper,

126x186 cm, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest

30 Activist Artists, Forradalmárok! [Revolutionaries!], Leaflet, 25 March 1919. Under the text of the manifesto, we find the names of nearly every writer, artist and actor associated with MA.

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