Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Merse Pál Szeredi: Kassákism - MA in Vienna (1920-1925)

Merse Pál Szered i

KASSÁKISM - MA IN VIENNA (1920-1925)

At the start of the 20th century, avant-garde movements across Europe rebelled against the traditional forms and institutions of art. Their aim was to repudiate the “old art" and to seek possibilities for the “new art”. At the centre of the Hungarian avant-garde movement stood Lajos Kassák and the journals he edited. Kassák established his journal MA [Today] in Budapest during the First World War, and it quickly became the leading organ of Hungarian expressionist art. However, rather than affiliating himself with one single ‘ism’ from among the international trends, Kassák instead developed his own art inspired by the phenomena of Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Constructivism, and which he did not identify with any one ‘ism’ in particular. He formed an individual standpoint in relation to the "new art”, which his contemporaries identified with that peculiar, long-haired figure wearing a black Russian shirt: Kassák himself. This striking phenomenon of the Hungarian avant-garde became popularly known at the end of the First World War as “Kassákism".1 [Fig. 1] The collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic represented a new chapter in the history of MA, with Kassák and his circle emigrating to Vienna, where the spirit of the journal was completely transformed with new concepts and new editors. The unified standpoint of the editorial board that had existed in Budapest now broke down. Unlike his colleagues, Kassák turned away from open political activities in the first half of the 1920s, and instead placed intensive networking with the international avant-garde movement at the centre of his activities, thanks to which MA became a defining actor of the European avant-garde scene within a few years. 1

1 On the concept of Kassákism see, for example: [-üst], Megnéztem két képkiállítást [I saw two exhibitions], Pesti Tükör, 15 February 1919,15-16. Dezső Biró, Proletárművészet vagy Kassákizmus [Proletarian art or Kassákism], Népszava, 30 August 1925, 6. For more detail on the Vienna years of MA and Kassák, see Júlia Szabó, A magyar aktivizmus művészete, 1915-1927 [The art of Hungarian activism, 1915-1927], Corvina, Budapest, 1981. Ferenc Csapiár, Kassák körei [Kassák’s circles], Szépirodalmi, Budapest, 1987. Ágota Ivánszky, Kassák és a MA körének osztrák kapcsolatai a bécsi emigrációban [The Austrian contacts of Kassák and MA in the Viennese exile], Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, 100/3., 1996, 294-312. Zoltán Péter, Lajos Kassák, Wien und der Konstruktivismus 1920-1926 [Lajos Kassák, Vienna and Constructivism, 1920-1926], Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2010. Éva Forgács-Tyrus Miller, The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna, in Peter Brooker-Sascha Bru-Andrew Thacker-Christian Weikop (eds.), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III., Europe 1880-1940, Oxford UP, Oxford-New York, 2013,1128-1156.

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