Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)
Ferenc Csaplár: Kassák the Book and Advertisement Artist
types and texts and his picture-poems of the period formed part of his work as a typographer. From 1924, he designed advertisement kiosks and accepted commissions from companies to design posters, handouts, brochures, letterheads, and packaging materials. He created ever newer book covers for publishers and fellow writers. He prepared a whole series of advertising materials for his Vienna and Budapest journals and their various ventures. Occasionally, he even took to arranging shop windows. He also sought to popularise his ideas on the art of book design and advertising in Hungarian and foreign-language publications. 7 A heightened interest in the art of book design and advertising and a shift from so-called free art to applied graphic arts, was a tendency among avant-garde artists, especially Constructivists, throughout Europe at the time. The starting point of this change was the recognition that if an artist wanted to participate in political and social reforms, he would have to take up practical tasks. Thus he would not only facilitate the spreading of more modern tastes and the realisation of a new awareness of our surroundings but also secure his own livelihood. In the autumn of 1921, twenty-five Russian artists signed a manifesto declaring that they would stop creating panel paintings and would fully devote themselves to art related to industrial production. 8 Among the Constructivists living in Germany, László Péri, after a short stint working in the fine arts, became a proponent of Productionism, which stressed the importance of creating utility ware and declared the primacy of industrial design. Max Burchartz, not long after having created his first geometric compositions, gave up painting, and together with Sándor Bortnyik and Alfréd Forbát established an advertising agency in Weimar, and two years later, in 1924, he set up a firm called "werbebau" with Johannes Canis in Bochum. 9 Willi Baumeister and Cesar Damela-Nieuwenhuis also founded their advertising agency. 1 0 Similar changes took place in the work of Henryk Berlewi, Walter Dexel, Hans Leistikow, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Neriinger, Karl Peter Röhl, Kurt Schwitters, and others; artists who had achieved fame with their work in the fine arts now appeared before the public as specialists in advertising and typography. Vilmos Huszár and Theo van Doesburg had already started their work in advertising graphics at the end of the 1910s. 1 1 For both reasons of livelihood and his views on the social role of art, Kassák's work as a designer of books and advertisements evolved. Ma, having been wrenched from its vernacular environment after the revolutions, was badly in need of more effective advertising and publicity in order to recruit readers in Vienna and throughout Europe. Kassák needed the income from commissions for advertising graphics in order to start and run his magazines and publishing ventures. He was, of course, also well aware of the fact that advertisements not only popularised goods and services, but, by their aesthetic effect, shaped tastes and minds. He believed that what abstract, geometric panel paintings could not achieve in creating a demand for the ideals of a new social system - balance and harmony, order and organisation, social justice and higher living standards - could very well be done through masses of books, magazines and advertisements which employed the formal elements of Contructivism and reached everyone. He thought of an advertising artist as a "social creator", as someone who, by was laying the groundwork for a new world. The idea of the necessity of shaping the environment and producing utility ware is present in Kassák's manifesto "Contructivism"; in fact, it was the final conclusion to his argument on the historical mission of the -ism. 1 2 A few months later, in his article „Válasz és sokféle álláspont" 1 3 ("A Response and Viewpoints Aplenty"), he brought up the idea that shaping the environment and producing utility ware would demonstrate and create a demand for a better way of life; they would be "psychological agitation" in the interests of the historical goals of the working class. The 15 March 1921 issue of Ma appeared with a new element on the cover - the title Ma and the subtitle Activist Journal printed on top of each other - which to this day is considered an original innovation of Kassák the typographer's by the literature, but, in fact, it had come from the cover of De Stijl designed by Theo van Doesburg. The contention that it was borrowed is also borne out by the dates. It was on the cover of the 1 January 1921 issue of De Stijl that Doesburg used the emblem consisting of the letters NB printed in red and horizontally crossed by the title of the journal printed in black. The big red letters NB stood for the phrase Nieuwe Beelding (A New Shaping), which expressed the artistic trend of the journal. With this new title, Doesburg wished to proclaim the journal's shift towards internationalism. 1 4 Kassák might be said to have followed suit in about two and a half months, with the difference being that the two large red letters were his journal's title and the inscription expressing the trend of his magazine ran across the title on a much smaller scale and printed in black. Like Doesburg, Kassák the typographer also wished to draw attention to changes: the new title design decorated the special issues of the magazine, each of which displayed the work of a Hungarian, German, French, Russian, and Swiss artist, and thereby signified the intensification of its international orientation. Kassák gave up on using the idea borrowed from Doesburg beginning with the very issue that introduced the work of that Dutch artist. 1 5 He achieved the eye-catching effect of the cover by setting the characters of the title Ma in different typefaces and sizes, in fact, deviating from convention by making the second character the larger one. This led to a whole series of typographical games on the covers of issues that followed, which had been anticipated by a composition entitled "Typography" reproduced in the May 1922 issue of the magazine. 1 6 This ensemble of red and black, upper- and lowercase, Latin and Gothic typefaces, words, numbers, parts of words, and typographical symbols, giving the impression of free movement and independence from one another, is part of a series of pieces that function both as works of art and as cover designs for books. The individual pieces of the series represent stages of the transition from Futurism and Dadaism to Constructivism, from exploiting the aesthetic possibilities in the chaotic and the accidental to the employment of the principle of rationality. Some of them invoke Marinetti's world of "free words". There was another borrowing which also suggested the relationship to the Italian movement. The title and textual parts in French of the letter composition "Walls-Noises" 1 7 drew on the text of Carlo di Carra's manifesto, "La peinture des sons, 66
