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)
platform, and thus his attention was increasingly drawn to the latest developments in international avant-garde art. in the summer of 1920, MA first made close contact with the Dada movement.7 Dada was a cultural phenomenon characteristic of the First World War, which produced new paradigms, a new language, and a new artistic attitude. In 1917, these sporadic phenomena organised under the leadership of Tristan Tzara to address all the avant-garde artists of the world, to whom Kassák would also later dedicate his 1920 manifesto.8 At the time, Tzara was working on a large-scale anthology of post-war art entitled Dadaglobe, and thus warmly welcomed the approach from a Hungarian avant-garde group he was previously unaware of.9 [Figs. 4-5] At the same time, Kassák also began corresponding with the eccentric Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose collages of garbage and waste paper entitled Merz and reproduced in Der Sturm [The Storm], certainly impressed Kassák.10 [Fig. 6] Kassák dedicated the January 1921 issue of MA to Schwitters’s art, and later gave priority to publishing other artists of the international Dada movement as well. The left-wing German Dada group greatly influenced Kassák’s younger sister, Erzsi Újvári, who experimented with expressionist verse, and her husband, the poet Sándor Barta. The encounter with Dada’s emancipated, political yet also anti-art stance was an important moment in the history of MA: from 1921 onwards, Kassák and his colleagues experimented with increasingly bold visuals and texts. Despite Kassák’s initial sympathy, however, he did not commit himself to Dada. He stated as early as the spring of 1921 that “Dadaists have nothing in common with MA [...], since they are a conservative school, and I have absolutely no inclination to belong to their ranks or to allow MA to come under their control”. 7 For more detail, see Gábor Dobó, Dadául írni és újraírni, Kassák Lajos és Tristan Tzara eddig kiadatlan leveleiből [Dada writing and rewriting, From the formerly unpublished correspondence of Lajos Kassák and Tristan Tzara], Helikon, 63/1., 2017,143-156. 8 For more detail, see Adrian Sudhalter (ed.), Dadaglobe Reconstructed, Scheidegger and Spiess-Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 2016. 9 Letter of Lajos Kassák to the Zürich Dada Movement, Vienna, 6 December 1920. Published by Ferenc Csapiár, Kassák az európai avantgárd mozgalmakban, 1916-1928 [Kassák in the European avant-garde movements, 1916-1928], Kassák Múzeum és Archívum, Budapest, 1994,18. 10 Schwitters’s works and poems were published in the April 1919 issue of Der Sturm. See the Letter of Lajos Kassák to Christoph Spengemann, Vienna, 25 Duly 1920. Published by Ferenc Csapiár, Kassák az európai avantgárd mozgalmakban, op. cit., 18. As well as the Letter of Lajos Kassák to Kurt Schwitters, Vienna, 30 October 1920. Published by Dulia Nantke-Antje Wulff (eds.), Kurt Schwitters, Die Sammelkladden 1919-1923, De Cruyter, Berlin-New York, 2014,12-13. 11 Letter of Lajos Kassák to Ödön Mihályi, Vienna, [Spring] 1921. V. 2293/113. Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest. Ill Ill
