Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

The Street and the Advertisement

THE STREET AND THE ADVERTISEMENT If one returns to Pest after a longer sojourn in, say, Berlin or Vienna, the first thing that strikes one is the external image of the city. One need not even make a critical examination to immediately see the obvious architectonic, aesthetic and hygienic differences between the latter cities and Budapest. The world famous skyline of Budapest can only be seen with its panoramic features from a bridge across the Danube at night, otherwise the whole city is run-down, chaotic and drab. The buildings, which are not really old, are shabby, or else, over-decorated like a parvenu (which is another form of being shabby), the streets are continually dug up, giving the observer the impression of inept and disorganised management, the pavements are filled with wastepaper and fruit peals, advertisement pillars are not conspicuously colourful, they are cheap and gaudy, shop windows are jam-packed, poorly measured, and, with their mess or over-complicated decoration, impose upon the passers-by. This external image of the city is probably determined by the inner disorder of the life of the city's inhabitants. But we should not deviate from our subject matter. A serious factor in the aesthetic image of city streets is the advertisement pillars and shop windows along the streets. Though we are forced to criticise these two factors harshly, we must say that the 10 to 15 posters fashioned according to a modern vision and produced with good printing technology that were posted in the streets of Budapest in the past year can bravely compete with those posted in Vienna or Berlin; furthermore, if we consider the ratio of industrial and commercial volume and of poster production in the three cities, we shall find that Budapest takes the lead among them in both ratio and modernity. Measuring them by the standards of art criticism, these Hungarian posters certainly represent the high quality of European poster art, but the streets of Budapest, as a milieu, cause them to lose their colour, smother their formal composition, and thus whatever qualities the individual artist may have, their ability to convince and inform is weakened. All phenomena are connected with the circumstances around them, and these phenomena are either supported or suppressed by those circumstances. In the clean and well-kept streets of Vienna, a good poster is placed as though on a grandstand by its colours and forms, while in Hungary, it is only the professionals that take note of such quality posters. The large amount of lumber and the disorganised dumping of posters next to each other hide even the most exquisite value before the lay public. After seeing the illuminated advertisement pillars of Vienna, one would think of the quasi-illuminated pillars of Budapest, which are supposed to serve the same purpose, as lamentably poor, as a squandering of money to no avail, as profanely simple, their colours kitsch. What is regarded as an honourable means of fostering industry and commerce in Vienna and an almost indispensable element of the aesthetics of the streets, is hardly more than Balkan gaudiness in Hungary. It can be stated that these two extreme approaches dominate the field of advertising, just as they do many other areas of life. The public will not understand, so why bother about changes, and if we do something, well, let us show we are no beggars. Naturally, Shop display at the Mentor bookshop designed by Kassák, 1928 both approaches imply a misunderstanding of the function of advertising and therefore a useless squandering of money. While advertising is supposed to mean attentive and dependable information for the buying public and business rationale to the producer and the tradesman. The advertisement is a significant mediating factor between producer and consumer. And the shop window is also such a factor. But generally speaking, the same criticism holds true for shop windows as well. A few luxurious shops in the city centre are the exception, just as a few posters are the exception in the deluge of lamentable posters. There is one thing to be kept in mind when discussing such matters of public interest, if one wants the general public to make use of his critical remarks. If, for instance, an artistic exhibition is at stake and the critic finds one picture, which by way of its aesthetic 17