Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)
Ferenc Csaplár: Kassák the Book and Advertisement Artist
alkotás A MAGYAR MUVESZETI TANÁCS FOLYOIRATA FELELŐS SZERKESZTŐ: KASSÁK LAJOS 1948 JANUÁR-FEBRUÁR. II. ÉVFOLYAM 1-2. SZÁM Alkotás (Creation) 1-2 (1948) Cover, 305x240 mm realistic figures was used once only and therefore counts as unique. 10 4 The drawings interspersed within the text of this publication, just like the graphic material of Költemények, rajzok (Poems and Drawings), document the fact that the thematic and formal world of Kassák's post-1948 period as a nature-orientated painter and graphic artist found its way into his art of book design. However, we even have examples of his reviving the Constructivist tradition from the early 1950s. The structure on the title page of the album entitled Az idő múlásában (As Time Passes) resembles Mondrian's structures. 10 5 It is nonetheless this very title page that best demonstrates that Kassák's Contructivism was a independent manifestation. "Kassák's sad, broken colours, his sleazy, free-hand lines, his spot-surfaces like carious walls, the constant mixture of geometry and accident, give a different impression than does anything by Mondrian. These colours evoke the poverty of mass tenements and slums, and also the desire for order, but they evoke the very filth from which, with the purity of crystals, the humane blazes forth." 10 6 Exhibits at home and abroad, which displayed his early pictorial architectures and his abstract paintings in oil made after 1958, older and newer collages, occasioned Kassák to design posters again. On the poster for the 1960 Paris exhibit, he placed, as the work of art advertised, the pictorial architecture that had been published in the 15 November 1921 issue of Ma and the Bildarchitektur folder. He also evoked his early avant-garde period by dividing the plane of the poster into a white field on the right hand-side and another one proceeding right through the lower side, thus creating an asymmetrical structure. On the poster of the 1965 Munich exhibition, the pairing of black and red, the thick black frame enclosing the composition and the pictorial architecture placed in the upper field also recalled the world of early advertising graphics. His last piece of advertising graphics, the poster designed for the 1967 exhibit, which was organised on the occasion of his 80 l h birthday at the Budapest Adolf Fényes Gallery, with the precision and, at the same time, the elegance of its structure and figures, as well as the mollifying effect of the brown of its base form upon the black, promises the realisation of a reasonably functioning, yet humane world. 81
