Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

The Poster and New Painting

THE POSTER AND NEW PAINTING Let us first of all uphold the old truth that the concepts of the artist and the man are indivisible, and when criticising a work of art an objective result can only be achieved by seeing the "two lives" as one. But in professing this view, we apparently take a deterministic position, we are ready to regard all the voices and colours of life as a predetermined process under perpetual influences - which is equivalent to a theory of total subjection. We maintain that since man is a physical and a highly social being he is perpetually subject to the influences of the external world, but - and it is at this point that we depart from orthodox determinism - his intellectual superiority to all things enables him to ward off at least fifty percent of these influences, to improve the mode of life enforced upon him by making it more conscious and more independent. This is true of man as an intellectual factor, and all the more true of the artist as a human maximum. It is from this vantage point that we view new painting. As opposed to the movement that culminated recently and brought forth the banner of impressionism victoriously, we wish to take a different, more solid route, a totally different direction. Instead of the naive gazes of the impressionists, it is the probing and selective vision of twentieth-century man divested of culture - of all conventional principles and sentimental emotions - that has to come. If the charming truth of the artist as a harp on which life plays its whimsical little songs was held up to our times, then let the harsh truth now prevail that life is only the crude, subjugated material of the artist's creative genius. The model before the eyes of the painter is not a theme to be represented but material evoking forms for the creative will! Material thus can only be a springboard to be tread on by the imagination of the artist; it is only a balancing of the intensive brain-work that perpetually attempts to break free of its milieu, even if that milieu be the contemporary world. It is not the usual gifted or talented artists that we have in mind here but the genius per se, who is always borne to be a vates, a towering individual at the head of the masses. New painting therefore starts out from natura - but this new art can never be: naturalism (not even in its Giottoian sense, where nature is genuinely a god, as compared to the similarly naturalist Jordaens), because its aim is not to approach nature as closely as possible but to swing away from it as far as possible, more precisely, to swing beyond it. Pure naturalism is no more than liberal contemplation, while the true artist is a subversive, revolutionary temperament set against the standard precepts of all times! I, having somewhat opened my eyes to outward nature already, have no need of any artistic product that wangles the literal formalities of a landscape or a body on to the canvas. (This is naturalism.) This might be a bearable piece of decoration on a wall or a keepsake of the copycat abilities of a friend: but the artist's aim points far beyond this. Moreover, he cannot be satisfied with the role of the chronicler either. All the more so today when we can almost exactly copy the events of the world by much simpler, technical means (motion pictures). In summary, new painting, painting modern in our view, will be borne beyond naturalism, beyond impressionism (though incorporating their undeniable values). It is a well known fact that the absolute value left to us by the painting of former centuries is primarily the treatment of a theme - the representational power of the artist. The social value of the wherefore of a theme is always temporary, and what makes the painting critically appraisable for posterity is the how of the realisation.

.. And it is at this point that we conceive of the causal encounter of posters and new painting. Like the salesman, who had until recently been chased away by dogs but has now gained a respectable role in our social life, the poster, which had been excluded from the "holy domain" of the arts, has now attained a genuinely vivid role affecting all the material aspects of our lives. The good poster provides an almost infallible gauge of our commercial, industrial, political and artistic life. Any better enterprise will give birth to its advocate in the image of a poster, which then will be in charge of promoting the goods instead of thousands of human mouths, with its colours and figures it will scream into all seeing eyes, it will fight for the interests of its master day and night. A good poster need not (and does not) even represent the article offered, it works only with its suggestive powers to force out the result. The good poster is always born in the sign of radicalism (its master constantly attempting to break through a silted mass or an inimical current), and it therefore jumps on to the stage not as a mere explaining member of a crowd but as a sole and absolute power. By nature, it is always agitative, but is never really confined within bounds. Since the good poster is not only a business medium, but a readily enjoyable and appraisable artistic product too, just as much as a landscape or a portrait is. Without forsaking its genuine function, it can contain all the values of former painting, furthermore, it can more easily enrich painting with new values than any "artistically" produced picture. I know not whether the latest schools (futurism, cubism, expressionism, simultanism) have realised the immense creative potential and innumerable artistic possibilities in the poster, but their quest, even in this fractured manner of theirs, seems to gravitate toward this free and self-willed style of the poster. There has never been a generation of painters so much troubled by technical difficulties as ours - determinism and the individual's will to freedom. This revolutionary bustle is only novel in its measure and its coming from many directions; as a matter of fact, such simultaneous outbursts did take place in the past evolutionary development of art. And they were never without reason - nor are they now. They have always been the forerunners, at worst organic requisites, of great social reforms. And if they were present in the Christian centuries, in the period of serfdom, then they have to be doubly present in our freely competing age burning with social problems and a desire to save the world. Philosophy, politics and technology have accomplished their revolutionary forward movement, and painting cannot lag behind in a foregone age, it cannot, even if twice as many masters belonging to the past were present. Painters of today have different things to say, thus their means of expression must also be different. 5