Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)
Ferenc Csaplár: Kassák the Book and Advertisement Artist
Another graphic element used to arouse interest was the circle, another fundamental shape in Supremacism. It appeared as a circular contour on the cover of a volume of poems called Ma - asszonyomnak ( Today : For My Lady ) and published in 1921 ; 3 4 circles as plane figures with black, red or blue surfaces were placed on his sales-oriented posters and book covers in the second half of the 1920s. Kassák often employed combinations of squares and circles. One variant of this was a red square enclosed in a black circle on the cover of the 15 April 1924 issue of Ma. The two plane figures appeared on the leaflet Tolo Porzellanwaren, a special edition of Tisztaság könyve ( The Book of Purity), and the large-scale poster made for the literary magazine Nyugat {The West). 3 5 The pursuit of arousing interest and intensifying effect was also manifest in his textual arrangement. Kassák employed vertical or diagonal type-setting and the changing of typefaces or type sizes within sentences in some of his poems written as early as the 1920s. In his typographical composition beginning with "Destroy...", he achieved a mobilising effect by increasing the sizes of characters phrase by phrase. On the cover of the 15 September 1923 issue of Ma, he created a visibly agitative effect by dividing lines and words and changing typeface in such a way that the word "Create" set vertically also functioned as an element joining the parts of the composition. The vertically set text on the cover of the volume entitled 1924 had a similar function. Another characteristic of Kassák's graphic art in advertising which could be tied to Contructivism was the frequent use of rules, beams and columns. Their role was to arrange the various elements of a composition, to highlight certain elements of disclosure, information, and to create structures within which graphic figures or texts could be placed. An example of the latter is the cover of the 15 September 1924 special issue of Ma on theatre and music where the horizontal and vertical rules form a structure filling the whole makeup. A structure created by rules joins the texts and the graphic on the cover of Tisztaság könyve. It was by way of construing structures out of rules that Kassák was able to have chapter headings appear as full-page compositions. One could compile a series of the cover designs made in 1927-28 whose graphic elements were constituted of various systems of horizontal and vertical rules. 3 6 The Constructivist cross, horizontal and vertical lines or rules intersecting Typographical composition: "Destroy in order to build, and build in order to triumph", Ma 1 (1922), 310x310 mm 70
