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)

Hubert van den Berg: Lajos Kassák, the Viennese Edition of MA and the “International” of Avant-Garde Journals in the 1920s

In his essay, Greenberg identifies abstract “avant-garde art" as the only true art, true to itself as art, only defined by (abstract) form. According to Greenberg, the aesthetic avant-garde as artistic elite represented genuine, essential culture in the early twentieth century and more than just that. It was “the only living culture we now have”, Greenberg wrote in 1939, “demonstratively uninterested in politics" and as such opposing to any use or abuse of art for political purposes. Instead, the (true) artistic avant-garde sought “a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence”. “Pure" art, as Greenberg saw it, was not just “abstract” and “non-representational”, but as such also the counterpart and true antidote to any conventionalism accommodating the popular mediocre taste of the masses, in Greenberg eyes represented in particular by the “kitsch” of Socialist Realism in its Stalinist variety - according to Greenberg the absolute opposite of “avant-garde" art.9

In the years after the Second World War, the view represented by Greenberg became the hegemonic narrative of a new history of modern art, initially in a paradox way as the quasi-apolitical kernel of a highly politicized discourse on “the avant-garde” in the Western hemisphere. In the 1950s and early 1960s, abstract “avant-garde" art became an essential element in Western Cold-War cultural propaganda, as artistic token of Western cultural liberalism.10 Whereas abstract “avant-garde” art had quite a difficult stand as despicable bourgeois “formalism” in the Eastern hemisphere under Stalinist rule, the narrative and the consecration of “avant-garde” abstract art as the essential trajectory of European modern art in pre-war period were initially a Western (-European and American) affair. As far as abstract “avant-garde” art was concerned, this led to a historiographic marginalisation of developments in Eastern Europe in the avant-garde narrative. Since history was (and to a considerable extent still is) written in a nationally parcelled way, even without any bad intentions, the East-West divide turned “the avant-garde” into an - initially - Western phenomenon.

In this context, De Stijl, for example, could already advance to one the “most influential of modern art movements” in the late 1950s, when the leading Dutch art historian H. L. C. Jaffe published a monograph on De Stijl with the

9 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Partisan Review, 6/5., 1939, 34-49, all quotations here 36.

10 David Caute, The Dancer Defects, The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, Oxford UP, Oxford-New York, 2003, 539-567.

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