Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)

III. KATALÓGUS - 1. VÁROS. TÖMEG. GÉP. A MODERNIZMUS ARCAI - - Expresszionizmusok: formisták és a poznani Bunt csoport Lengyelországban, aktivisták Magyarországon

Expressionisms: The Formists and the Bunt group from Poznań in Poland, the Activists in Hungary Katalin Bakos "The new painter is a moral individual, full of faith and desire after union. And his pictures are his military equipment."

1 The patriotic slogans and the thought that the war might be a process of revitalizing and purifying the declining societies carried away a lot of artists at the outbreak of World War I. There was a single group of artists that consistently opposed the war from the start: the circle around Lajos Kassák's periodical Jett [Act] launched in 1915. The paper soon banned for its antimilitarism was replaced by MA [Today] in 1916 of a similarly international orientation. MA was in close contact with kindred German periodicals, Aktion and Der Sturm, and published works of artists from countries at war with Hungary. Its program fused aesthetic innovation with social transformation. The contributors to MA professed solidarity with the socialist workers' movement, hailed the Russian revolutions and advocated the idea of the proletarian revolution. They vowed social commitment but rejected the idea of "tendentious art". Their artistic credo was predominated by a more general ideal of progress, the development of a new, free and self-conscious human being or "collective individual", to use Kassák's term. During the Hungarian Republic of Soviets (1919) they came into conflict with the social democratic press representing conservative tastes and with the communist political leadership. MA was stopped in June 1919 and it only reappeared in May 1920, now in the Vienna emigration. Kassák first called their movement "activism" in February 1919. MA informed the readership of various avant-garde trends, acknowledging their right to existence. It presented works by French and Czech cubists, Italian futurists and German expressionists. Kassák and his circle were not in search of new styles; what was of paramount importance for them was world view, for the expression of which liberation from conventions and radicalism, the common trait of all avantgarde trends, were imperative, they claimed. Kassák urged for a synthesis of formal innovations, no matter how stuttering the new language may be at first. He picked works from the crop of the first Hungarian avant-garde group, Nyolcak (the Eight; Lajos Tihanyi, Róbert Berény, Károly Kernstok) and another group, Fiatalok (the Young Ones; Péter Dobrovits, Béla Uitz, József Nemes Lampérth, János Kmetty) to be reproduced in the periodical. He also recognized kindred traits in the work of already established artists such as János Vaszary, and kept an eye on the very young, too, e.g. Gizella Dömötör, who did not belong to any group. Graphic art, which was well suited to the dissemination of ideas via multiplication, and especially easily reproduced relief printing played an important role in the activity of the MA circle. The artist whose works were most frequently reproduced in MA was János Mattis Teutsch, and MA's exhibiting place was also inaugurated with a Mattis Teutsch exhibition in 191 7. MA was the publisher of the artist's album of twelve linocuts, too, in 1918. Mattis Teutsch, a student - and from 1909 a teacher - of the high school for woodworking in Brassó (Bra§ov, today Romania) had a penchant for wood. He also made wooden sculptures, and he transferred his experience gained in wood carving to the technique of linocut. His development took him from planar decorativeness through emotionally saturated symbolism to expressionism. The undulating hills, groves and forests around Brassó provided the central motifs for his sheets. His linocuts are characterized by the contrast of black and white patches into which he stylized reality, and by the wavy motion of the contours. Via the suggestive, concentrated depiction of the experience of nature and the human figure united with the landscape, Mattis Teutsch gave outlet to his innermost events and at the same time he visualized a cosmic existential experience fed by absorbed contemplation. With the tools of expression of black-and-white graphic sheets he was capable of suggesting the interplay of the inner and outer worlds, the micro- and macrocosms.