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

Nowadays accounts of the “historical avant-garde” would rarely refer to Les Humbles, a literary journal with a focus on social critique and a platform of the Clarté movement, as an “avant-garde" journal. Next to Les Humbles, Van Doesburg likewise mentions Clarté, Die Aktion and Der Gegner as journals of the “social avant-garde”.46 Here it might be obvious that Kassák is one of the artists somewhere in between the “aesthetic” and “social” wings, regarding himself a “social artist” creating “constructive art", as he proclaimed in his essay on advertising in Dos Werk in 1926.47 The advertorial chart of October 1922 documents the same ambition to reconcile and reunite both wings in and through his journal. Whether Kassák managed to accommodate the social and aesthetic wings of the “International of the spirit” in MA might seem doubtful. In another way, he was more successful to create some cohesion in the “unorderly International".

The failure to establish a “Constructivist International" after the Düsseldorf congress or in Weimar was certainly not only due to different opinions on politics and aesthetics, but also to a clash of oversized egos and conflicting leadership ambitions. Here, one could argue that Kassák succeeded with his advertorial of October 1922 and the impact it had, where initiatives in the preceding months had failed. Instead of a single organisation, in which individual (groups around) journals had to give up their autonomy and subordinate under some overarching leadership, his chart replaced this impossible project by a first declaration of intent, cautiously avoiding any suggestion to usurp other groups, journals or initiatives. Echoing Kassák’s sample, similar declarations of intent in the form of similar charts in other journals led to the formation of a loosely associated, but still firmly connected “International” with a network character. The fact that Kassák’s sample was echoed in many other journals in the following and the fact that MA can be found in charts throughout the network of constructivist journals, also in journals not mentioned by Kassák in his own charts, are undoubtedly indicative for his pivotal role in this “International". Not in some supreme leadership role as Van Doesburg had aspired in his plans of a “Constructivist International”, but rather by launching an “International” of a different kind in a more subtle way and participating in this “International” as a “social artist” next to others in pursuit of “constructive art”.

46 Ibid., 111. Theo van Doesburg, Revue der avant-garde, Duitschland [Review of avant-garde, Germany], Het Cetij, 6/2., 1921,193-200, here 199.

47 Lajos Kassák, Die Reklame, op. cit., 228.

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