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
based, but internationally active movement advocating progressive internationalism in a more independent way, yet close to Communism. In particular, Clarté is not a journal nowadays regarded as avant-garde journal anymore. Again, similar to the case of “Central Europe”, a major difference between artistic “avant-garde” in our present-day understanding (basically following the definition by Greenberg as movements involved in aesthetic “formal” experimentation and abstraction) and “avant-garde" as it was conceived in the early 1920s. AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL AVANT-GARDE RECONCILED? In one of the first comprehensive accounts of the contemporary artistic “avant-garde" as “avant-garde”, published as a series of articles, Revue der avant-garde [Review of avant-garde], in the Dutch journal Het Cetij in 1921— 1922, Theo van Doesburg defines “avant-garde” not a utopian project and an “international of the spirit”.43 “Avant-garde! Vanguard!” was, according to Van Doesburg, the slogan and battle cry “under which all modern and ultramodern groups of the whole world are marching towards a completely new expression in all forms of art". This “unorderly” international, as he put it, “possesses no other code of order than the inner urge, to give life an ideal-realist expression and interpret in art life in a purely aesthetic way”. Here, Van Doesburg's conception might seem close to Greenberg's. However, Van Doesburg believed that “pure art” could and would achieve its utopian mission by advancing a better future to humankind. In other words, “pure art" still had a political mission and was not just self-referential art for art's sake. Moreover, Van Doesburg conceded that he and other artists pursuing “pure art” were just one wing of a much broader movement. In this movement, he argued, “avant-garde" served as “the collective denomination for all revolutionary artist’s groups”, “both on social and on aesthetic terrain”.44 “One can divide the whole avant-garde in two major formations, one constituting the aesthetic, and one the social wing", Van Doesburg stressed, borrowing a distinction made by Maurice Wullens, editor of the French literary journal Les Humbles [The Humble], Wullens referred to the aesthetic wing as “avant-garde of pure art” and the social wing as “avant-garde of ideas” with many artists somewhere in the middle, as Van Doesburg added.45 43 Theo van Doesburg: Revue der avant-garde [Review of avant-garde], Het Cetij, 6/1., 1921, 109-112, here 109. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 110. 30
