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)

PORTRAIT GALLERY OF THE NEW ARTISTS

The first cycle of Kassák’s numbered poems was written in 1920-1921, and shed light on MA’s new orientation, which Kassák published together with poems by international Dadaist authors.1 In some pieces of the cycle he named himself, the “new Kassák", alongside other representatives of the “new art". [Fig. 22] In his poems he incorporated other “MAists” who appeared under the still-unified banner in Vienna: the painter József Nemes Lampérth, who went mad after the revolution; the “tin-hatted” painter Sándor Bortnyik; the “bearer of pallid joie de vivre" János Mácza; the “pig-headed relativist" Sándor Barta; and his life companion, Jolán Simon, the “first- class Dadaist actress". But he also presented notable figures from the international scene too: the “customs officer" Rousseau, Paul Klee, Tristan Tzara, and Kurt Schwitters in the figure of “Little Anna", since Kassák had first come across the German artist through his poem An Anna Blume [To Anna Flower].1 2

[22.] Unknown photographer, Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Uitz, Erzsi Újvári, Andor Simon, Lajos Kassák, Jolán Simon, and Sándor Barta, Vienna, Hietzing, 1922, photograph, Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest

1 The first 18 numbered poems were collected and partially renumbered in Kassák’s 1922 anthology Világanyám [The world, my mother], published by the Bán Verlag in Vienna.

2 Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blume [Anna flower], Paul Steegemann, Hannover, 1919. Kurt Schwitters, Annavirágnak [To anna flower], translated by Mózes Kahána, MA, 6/3., 1921,30.

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