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)

Eszter Balázs: Avant-Garde and Radical Anti-War Dissent in Hungary-A Tett (1915-1916)

French citizenship, and his poems sent from the front both applauded and criticized the war.41

On 2 October 1916, A Tett was banned under a 1912 law (Act LXIII.) on the grounds that it “endangered the interests of warfare".42 The offending articles had appeared a few months previously in the “International issue”, an attempt by Kassák “to present the journal as part of an international pacifist network (citing Romain Rolland, Hall Caine and Karl Liebknecht)".43 The inclusion of three Russians (Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Artsybashev, Nikolai Kulbin), two French (Paul Fort, Georges Duhamel), a Belgian (Émile Verhaeren), a “South Slav” (Ivan Mestrovic), a “Brit" (Bernard Shaw), an Italian (Libero Altomare) and a German anti-war activist (Ludwig Rubiner) was in itself a courageous act and a combative stance against the war, because all except one were citizens of countries at war with the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or neutral countries sympathetic to its enemies.44

There were also reproductions of three foreign artworks in the ill-fated issue: The Dispute, a graphic work by the Russian Futurist Nikolai Kulbin, a P/'eto by the Croatian-born Ivan Mestrovic (who was described as “Serbian" in A Tett),45 and an African tribal mask, reproduced after the cover of Negerplastik [Negro Sculpture] by the German art critic Carl Einstein.46 In addition to emphasizing the equal rank and contemporariness of so-called “primitive cultures”, these confronted the ‘war culture’ that pervaded the governments and press of the Central Powers. The press of the Central Powers had been scathing about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers enlisted from the Entente colonies, using them as a means of throwing back the accusation of barbarism. Although the P/'eto was a favourite theme of religious patriotism during the war, the term “Serbian" referred to an enemy against whom fighting was in progress and must have seemed deliberately provocative to the Hungarian censors.

The publication of such scandalous works of art had already resulted in sanctions for A Tett. In the second issue, the Expressionist picture showing the

41 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprits de corps, The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 7974-7925, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, 38-43.

42 On the prosecutor’s ruling that imposed the ban, see 5484/1914 M.E. KM-an. 10/1. Petőfi Literary Museum-Kassák Museum, Budapest.

43 Merse Pál Szeredi, The international horizon of A Tett, op. cit., 71.

44 Lajos Kassák, A magyar avantgárd három folyóirata, op. cit., 221.

45 Ivan Mestrovic supported the Serbian war effort by intermediating between the Entente powers and the South Slavic politicians. He represented South Slavic heroism through religious subjects, and the Pieta published in A Tett was an example of this. Ilona Bundev-Todorov, Ivan Mestrovic, Gondolat, Budapest, 1993,14.

46 Merse Pál Szeredi, The international horizon of A Tett, op. cit., 75.

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