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)

“TO THE NEW ARTISTS OF THE WORLD” - MA’S VIENNESE PLATFORM

In 1919, Kassák and his circle had committed themselves to the Hungarian Soviet Republic that promised social changes, and it appeared that MA's platform would embody the new regime’s notions of culture. Kassák and colleagues believed that they could create the lyrical and visual language for the art of the new world that followed the proletarian revolution. They did not, however, envision their activities in the service of party politics. This led to conflicts with the leaders of the Commune; nevertheless, after the collapse of this Soviet Republic, Kassák and his circle were forced to flee the political reprisals of the subsequent counter-revolutionary Horthy regime. Kassák was imprisoned in the summer of 1919 for some months, and only managed to escape following the intervention by an acquaintance of Jolán Simon, Kassák’s life companion. After his imprisonment, he reached Vienna illegally in the winter of 1920, stowed away in the bowels of a ship.2

In the Austrian capital during the first half of the 1920s, a sizeable Hungarian colony came into being, consisting mostly of political and intellectual érmi- grés, who set about establishing Hungarian-language journals, including several dailies. The earlier Budapest intellectual circles now reformed in Viennese coffee houses, where communist, social democrat, and independent leftist intellectuals discussed the reasons for the failure of the Budapest revolutions and planned possible ways to begin afresh. They seized the temporary circumstances of exile and continued to target their activities at the Hungarian public. After the Horthy administration announced a general amnesty in the autumn 1926, the Viennese Hungarian émigré community of 1919 disbanded, with many members - including Kassák - returning to Budapest.

In May 1920, Kassák relaunched MA. [Fig. 2] In the first issues, he promoted the revolutionary expressionist platform, but his long-term aim was to integrate into the international avant-garde movement, and to bring about a form of cooperation that would span national frames and borders. This also defined the spirit of MA in Vienna, whose programmatic texts in Hungarian and German Kassák addressed “to all the artists of the world".3 According to his utopian vision, the aim of the “new art" was to “revolutionise the culture" of

For more detail, see Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man], voi. II., Magvető, Budapest, 1983, 636-673.

3 Lajos Kassák, An die Künstler aller Länder! [To the artists of all nations], MA, 5/1-2., 1920, 2-4. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, A Sourcebook of Central-European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2002, 418-420.

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