The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna

Journal of European Periodical Studies

The first major quarrel and the subsequent secession in the Hungarian avant-garde in 1917-1918 had a long lasting impact on radical modernity and even on the entire Hungarian leftist intellectual and cultural life in Hungary and beyond. This article provides a critical examination of this early and decisive controversy in the avant-garde journal MA (To-day), edited in Budapest, leading to its split into aesthetic and political sides since 1917-1918. It highlights some of the most important issues, such as its main actors, the debated subjects, the arenas in which this controversy took place, as well as the question of its audiences. Also it focuses on its protracted afterlife as well as on historical narratives and their omissions.

This paper deals with the inner conflicts of the Hungarian avant-garde movement during the revolutions after WWI (consecutively in 1918 and 1919), and its conflicts with the Communist power in rule in 1919. Eszter Balázs will offer an analysis of their changing terminology regarding art and the artist and the role of the artist and intellectual in society between November 1918 and July 1919, while Gábor Dobó will detail their conflicts with communist institutions during the period March–July 1919. While in a socially and culturally marginal and a politically dissenting position during WWI, the Hungarian avant-garde progressively gained recognition after the end of the conflict. It obtained a mainstream position only during the 1919 Commune. However, this position was not without contradictions. When the Communists took power on March 21 after the “popular democratic” Károlyi government had collapsed, the editors of the avant-garde magazine Ma (Today), the writer and poet Lajos Kassák and the painter Béla Uitz, took part in the cultural programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat as members of the literary and artistic directorates. For Kassák and his associates, it was evident that activists had to create the lyrical and visual idiom of the art of the ‘new world’ that would follow the proletarian revolution. Their journal, Ma did not, however, become the official cultural organ of the proletarian dictatorship. The activists were committed to the communist revolution and its promises of social change, but they did not conceive of their activity as being in the service of party politics. They were therefore unable to implement their ideas for cultural policy in 1919. Kassák and his associates insisted on their sovereignty regarding art, and this led them into confrontation with the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Their cause became a point of contention in factional disputes within the government (between the Social Democrats and the Communists). Nonetheless, Ma was able to carry on for a few weeks. Its last issue appeared on the first of July 1919. Officially the magazine ceased to be published on the basis of lack of paper (a typical reasoning of power in times of financial crisis, unwilling to admit to the use censorship). What seems to have caused its demise, like that of many other journals at the time, was the increasingly critical shortage of paper.

Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910-1940, 1997

http://digiphil.hu/o:avantgarde_journals.01

Art Journal, 1993

... the Hungarian Activists from Dada to Inter-national Constructivism.5 On November 20, 1920, the Activ-ists sponsored a "Russian Evening," including a slide-illustrated lecture on Russian art by the art-history student and news correspondent Konstantin Umansky.6 Impressed ...

The Kassák Museum is the only site in Hungary which devotes its research to the historical avant-garde. It defines itself as the contemporary museum of the Hungarian avant-garde, and as such, has a broad-based approach to the subject, from the points of view of several academic fields and contemporary art. The Museum addresses the contradictions and tensions that arise when researching and presenting the avant-garde in a museum setting. It simultaneously applies both historical and contemporary viewpoints in presenting its theme. Exhibitions based on historical research also involve the work of contemporary artists, just as the work of contemporary artists exhibited in the Museum reflects on Kassák’s oeuvre and issues of historical modernism and the avant-garde. The Museum examines the issues of the Hungarian avant-garde from an

Organized by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi

Theatralia