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
telling subtitle The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art. For sure, De Stijl played an important role in the European avant-garde of the 1920s. However, there can be little doubt either that its prominent position in the historiographic narrative of the “historical avant-garde” as “avant-garde” was facilitated as well by the circumstance that De Stijl had influential promotors, when this narrative was formulated by art historians in the Western hemisphere. Likewise, some artists from the countries in “Eastern Europe" received most attention, when they had moved westward at some point, as several had done to escape fascism in the 1930s. In this respect, apart from other factors, there can be little doubt that this contributed not only in Seuphor's book to the foregrounding of László Moholy-Nagy, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and had an entry of his own in Seuphor's compendium. The fact that Kassák returned from his Viennese exile to Budapest in 1926 and stayed in Hungary the rest of his life, had also its impact on his role in the historiographic narrative of the "historical avant-garde”. Not only could he be overseen or ignored easily from the other side of the “Iron Curtain", Kassák’s difficult stand in communist Hungary also contributed to quite some delay before Hungarian art history started to acknowledge and highlight Kassák and MA in similar way as Jaffe and other Dutch art historians had done for De Stijl some twenty years earlier. Kassák’s late inclusion in the meanwhile well-established and as such in its basic storylines already fixated avant-garde narrative was definitely not conductive to the role attributed to him in the still prevailing (Western) story of modern abstract art. Instructive for this persistence is a large network diagram to be found on the website of the Museum of Modern Art in New York that accompanied a major exhibition Inventing Abstraction in 2012.11 12 It presents some hundred key actors in the avant-garde favouring an abstract idiom in their work with the suggestion that the diagram presents the main protagonists and impresarios of the avant-garde network involved in the development and promulgation of abstract art in the 1910s and early 1920s. Neither Kassák nor MA can be found in the diagram or could be seen at the exhibition with their point of gravity in Western Europe and the United States. As in Seuphor’s book, the only Hungarian artists mentioned are Moholy-Nagy and Vilmos Huszár, close associate of Van Doesburg in De Stijl group. Old wine in new bottles, it seems. 11 H. L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl 1917-1931, The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1956. 12 See www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/inventingabstraction/?page=connections [consulted 21 December 2017]. 15
