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)

Márton Pacsika: Purposeful Player of the New Instrument - Lajos Kassák and the Budapest MA

the Kassák circle attempted to resolve this contradiction as follows: “For us, art is not an instrument of business. Business is an instrument to liberate art”.6 7

MA AND THE HUNGARIAN CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

Lajos Kassák and MA often referred to themselves as the voice of radical youth, even though Kassák himself was hardly younger than the artists of the Nyolcak painters' group or the contributors to the leading modernist literary journal, Nyugat [West], Nonetheless, MA represented the only channel open to progressive-minded young people denied access to existing journals and galleries. Accordingly, the gallery exhibited previously little-known artists. Its first exhibition displayed works by the Transylvanian János Mattis Teutsch, a painter who adapted a nearly abstract expressionist style in the Munich circles of Der blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] before the First World War. Without an established institution standing behind it, however, MA faced special challenges. Illustrative of this is a letter from the National Hungarian Art Society rejecting a request by the editorial board of MA for a permanent complimentary ticket for their annual exhibitions.

A further problem was that the avant-garde language used by Kassák and his circle held few attractions for either the traditional workers’ movement or left-wing students. A shocking example of this conflict was a talk that Kassák delivered to the Galileo Circle, with the title Jegyzetek a szintétikus irodalomról [Notes on synthetic literature]. There, Kassák admitted that “the literary movement that has concentrated its strength in the journal MA [...] is, with a few exceptions, regarded by the public as deranged eccentricity or artful humbug”.8 Kassák also pointed out, however, that MA was constantly expanding and was finding great sympathy among young people. The event itself underlined the truth of both statements. Kassák’s talk was interrupted by constant heckling, but one of the most vocally enraged objectors in the audience, the young Sándor Barta, soon joined the journal himself.

MA made serious efforts to be taken seriously in the Hungarian cultural and political milieus. Kassák and MA sought out contacts with well-known artists

6 Propaganda, MA, 1/1., 1916,15-16. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, A Sourcebook of Central-European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2002,162-163.

7 MA, 1/2., 1916, 30.

8 The Galileo Circle was a community of free-thinking university students that was active between 1908 and 1919. Kassák delivered a talk on synthetic literature to Galileo Circle members on 3 December 1916, later published as Lajos Kassák, Szintétikus irodalom [Synthetic literature], MA, 1/2., 1916,18-21.

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