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)

[4 ] Dada, [2]/3., 1918, [front cover with Marcel Janco’s illustration], Zürich

[5.] Sophie Tauber-Arp, Dada, 1920, photograph, PIM-Kassák Museum, Budapest

MA IN THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF AVANT-GARDE JOURNALS

In the rivalry of contemporary art, one important criterion was an up-to- date knowledge of international art phenomena, being well-informed, and gathering information from the enormous range on offer. Kassák envisaged his own journal within this free, border-transcending force field of art, and thus regarded the compulsion to absorb a rapid stream of information as a huge challenge. Sitting at a table in Viennese coffee houses, he would systematically flick through the journals available, collecting illustrations and selecting articles to translate. This network based on reciprocity played a large role in MA's international positioning: it was not only Kassák who advertised papers of a similar mindset, MA also regularly featured in lists of journals representative of the “new art".12 Kassák’s most important international contacts during the earlier Viennese years of MA were Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm, Tristan Tzara’s Dada movement, Berlin constructivists he knew through László Moholy-Nagy, the Parisian publications La Vie des Lettres et des Arts [The Life of Literature and the Arts] edited by Nicholas Beauduin and Michel Seuphor’s

12 For more detail, see Hubert van den Berg’s essay in this volume, as well as Krisztina Passuth, Les avant-gardes de I’Europe centrale, 1907-1927 [Central European avant-gardes, 1907-1927], Flammarion, Paris, 1988. Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes, Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Los Angeles, 2002.

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