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 - - Az építés eszméje. Konstruktivizmus és geometrikus absztrakció

Idea of Construction. Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction KB: "Destroy in order that you may build, and build in order that you may triumph!"

6 Kassák resumed publishing MA against a broader horizon in the emigration in Vienna. He quickly built contacts with Russian, Dutch, German artistic centres and periodicals, informing the audience of the programs and works of the dada, suprematism and constructivism in addition to expressionism. In formulating the aesthetics of constructivism, he had two new partners: the critic active in Germany, Ernő Kállai, and László Moholy Nagy. The contribution of Hungarian artists to the international spread of constructivism was picture architecture. Kassák's coinage was first used in the foreword to Sándor Bortnyik's album of six abstract pochoir sheets; it associated the constructed order of geometric forms and unblended colours with the rational, harmonious society of the future. The artists held that the ideal medium of picture architecture advocating a social utopia in an abstract form was graphic art: pochoir for Bortnyik, and linocut for Kassák, László Peri, Lajos Kudlák and Farkas Molnár. Moholy Nagy used a variety of printing, painting and collage techniques. A picture architecture could become a visual manifesto condensed into a graphic sign, just like a laconic woodcut or linocut of the expressionists, and it proclaimed the program of a group like an emblem in kindred periodicals as did an expressionist graphic piece, wandering from publication to publication to promote the exchange of thoughts and the coherence of the avant-garde movement. That was why Bortnyik, who sojourned briefly in abstraction, Kassák who had come from picture poem to graphic art, Moholy Nagy and Peri had works included among the illustrations of Der Sturm, often on the title-page. Béla Uitz' cycle of 37 linocuts, Analysis, was also created in planar constructivist style but the artist followed the dictates of a different intention from the masters of picture architecture. Uitz was intrigued by a systematic examination of the relations of basic visual elements - balance, spatial shift, overlapping, interpenetration. He sketched the chosen constellation of forms with the liner and compasses and then transferred it to the plate. The varied facture emerging from the movement of the graver stole vibrating motion and pictorial effects into the strict geometric order. Uitz, who only created figurative works apart from this series, was inspired to venture into abstraction by his experiences in Moscow in 1921. He got acquainted with the new works of Russian suprematists and constructivists at major exhibitions. Obviously, he was most deeply impressed by Alexander Rodchenko, two of whose linocuts from 1918 he took with him. The international artistic centres followed by MA with interest included the Bauhaus active first in Weimar, then in Dessau. It carried reproductions and writings by Bauhaus teacher Moholy Nagy, critic Ernő Kállai who was later editor of the Bauhausbücher, and Farkas Molnár, a student at Bauhaus and associate of the architectural studio of Walter Gropius, director of Bauhaus. A graduate of Munich, architect Alfred Forbáth, who worked in Gropius' architectural office in 1920-22, made abstract compositions of parallel strips using chalk drawing and lithography between 1922 and '24. His small drawings condensed spatial relations into the plane with the help of colourful lines and bands. The graphic elements and the active use of the blank paper surfaces created special optic effects, drawing light into the composition. Forbáth's Horizontal Composition is a screenprint replica of an early 1920s work. In a six-sheet lithographic cycle (6th Kestner Album) published by the Kestner Society in Hannover in 1923, Moholy Nagy summed up the achievements of his pre-Berlin period in the graphic idiom. The individual preoccupation of Moholy Nagy reflected in his abstract compositions was the problem of transparency. The formations hovering in a neutral background are relatives of Malevich' suprematism; the forms penetrating, or seen through each other display the influence