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)

not painting in the academic sense of the word".31 The artist creating “picture architecture” needs neither technical knowledge nor indeed a subject for their creation to be at once "an American-calibre city, a look-out tower, a resort for lung patients, and mass entertainment”.32 [Fig. 23]

Kassák did not conceptualise his visual experiments as stand-alone artworks, but published them in MA primarily in the context of his theoretical writings and poems. His vision for the “new world” was presented with pictorial and textual elements that complemented one another. Hardly any of these early painting and collages have survived; most of the pictures were lost or destroyed.33 Artists around Kassák’s journals and movement imbued the theory of “picture architecture” with the greatest success. Sándor Bortnyik was the first to commit himself to the geometric abstract form language of “picture architecture”. Next after him came László Moholy-Nagy who, after long experimentation, exhibited his constructivist-Dada compositions in the Der Sturm gallery in a joint exhibition with László Péri, a sculptor who also started out with Kassák.34 For a while, even Béla Uitz became a follower of Constructivism: after his trip to Moscow in 1921, he experimented with abstract painting, and his works were shown with great success at an exhibition in Vienna in 1923.

THE ALLURE OF TYPOGRAPHY

In October 1922, Kassák refined his theory of “picture architecture”, and presented his works not as relatives of Dada but of El Lissitzky’s Proun series, which represented a form of transition between the flat plane and space, between the fine arts and architecture.35 In 1924, Kassák's work also departed the flat plane for space. He created spatial “picture architectures" that were on the one hand “dynamic”, and on the other, he reflected on their practical application, and this is how the constructivist advertising kiosks and stage set designs using collage techniques were born. [Fig. 24] From 1922, Kassák found the most innovative opportunity to use the constructivist form

31 Sándor Bortnyik, Képarchitektúra album [Picture architecture portfolio], with an introduction by Lajos Kassák, MA, Vienna, 1921, [1.]

32 Lajos Kassák, Képarchitektúra, op. cit., 54.

33 For more details, see Merse Pál Szeredi, Kassák Lajos első kiállítása (1924) [Lajos Kassák’s first exhibition (1924)], Ars Hungarica, 43/2., 2017,189-214.

34 For more detail, see Merse Pál Szeredi, Budapest-Berlin-Budapest, Magyar művészek Berlinben az 1920-as években [Budapest-Berlin-Budapest, Hungarian artists in Berlin in the 1920s], in Gábor Kaszás-Merse Pál Szeredi, Berlin-Budapest, 1919-1933, Képzőművészeti kapcsolatok Berlin és Budapest között [Berlin-Budapest, 1919-1933, Artistic contacts between Berlin and Budapest], Virág Judit Galéria, Budapest, 2016,11-147.

35 Lajos Kassák, Bildarchitektur [Picture architecture], MA, 8/1., 1922, [6.]

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