Local Contexts | International Networks Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe Local Contexts / International Networks Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe Edited by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum Kassák Foundation Budapest, 2018 THE AVANT-GARDE AND ITS JOURNALS 2 Proceedings of the International Conference “Local Contexts / International Networks – Avant-Garde Magazines in Central Europe (1910–1935)” held in the Kassák Museum, 17–19 September 2015 kassakmuzeum.hu/en/index.php?p=kutatas&id=104 Editors Gábor Dobó, Merse Pál Szeredi Assistant Editor Sára Bagdi Proofreading Alan Campbell Cover design Klára Rudas Prepress Bence György Pálinkás DigiPhil Coordination Zsófia Fellegi, Gábor Palkó Publisher Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum Kassák Foundation Responsible Publisher Gergely Prőhle, Edit Sasvári ISBN 978-963-12-5972-8 © Essays: the authors and editors © Design: Klára Rudas and Bence György Pálinkás © Reproductions: the heirs of the authors CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 Published under the Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 Generic (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5). The publication was published as part of the research project of the Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum ‘The Avant-Garde Journals of Lajos Kassák from an Interdisciplinary Perspective’ (NKFI-K 120779). PB 2 Contents 5 Gábor Dobó – Merse Pál Szeredi Introduction 7 Eszter Balázs Artist and/or Public Intellectual? Hungarian Avant-Garde Polemics on ‘New Art’ and the Writer’s Role and Responsibilities during the First World War 25 Jindřich Toman Permanent Synthesis: László Moholy Nagy’s Idea of a Synthetic Journal 45 Appendix. László Moholy-Nagy: Guidelines for a Synthetic Journal 50 Gábor Dobó The Self-Description of Lajos Kassák’s Avant-Garde Magazine Dokumentum (1926–1927) 62 Piotr Rypson Tadeusz Peiper’s Strategy for Zwrotnica 88 Michalina Kmiecik Zwrotnica shows the Way? Journals of the Kraków Avant-Garde in the 1930s 116 Przemysław Strożek The Chapliniade, Proletarian Art and the Dissemination of Visual Elements in Avant-Garde Magazines of the 1920s 134 Klára Prešnajderová Slovenská Grafia: The Magazine that brought New Typography to Slovakia 146 Sonia de Puineuf ‘Die Syntetische Zeitschrift’ – Study Cases Nová Bratislava and Nový Svet 3 4 156 Michał Wenderski Between Poland and the Low Countries – Mutual Relations and Cultural Exchange between Polish, Dutch and Belgian Avant-Garde Magazines and Formations 178 Dušan Barok Body of Thought – Artists’ Texts and Their Contribution to Theory 183 György C. Kálmán – András Kappanyos Avant-Garde Studies in the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Past, Present and Future 188 Irina Denischenko Whither Comparative Avant-Garde Studies? Conference Roundtable and Concluding Remarks 3 4 Gábor Dobó – Merse Pál Szeredi Introduction The present volume consists of papers based on the presentations held at the conference of the Kassák Museum entitled Local Contexts / Interna- tional Networks – Avant-Garde Magazines in Central-Europe (1910-1935) in September 2015. The Kassák Museum is the only Hungarian muse- um devoted entirely to the avant-garde and its documents. The Museum launched a programme centred around the presentation of archives and private collections, contemporary reflections on the avant-garde, and a reconsideration of Kassák’s oeuvre. The institution preserves the highly significant avant-garde archive and collection of Lajos Kassák which is the starting point for various research projects of the museum, including periodical research. Coordinated with the avant-garde periodical research projects and the Signal to the World – War ∩ Avant-Garde ∩ Kassák exhibition (about Kass- ák’s first avant-garde journal), with the support of the International Viseg- rad Fund and CEFRES, the Kassák Museum organized an internation- al conference between 17 and 19 September 2015. Under the title Local Contexts / International Networks, the conference had as its subject the ‘Central European avant-garde journal’, arguably the most important me- dium of communication for progressive literature and visual arts in the re- gion during World War I and the interwar period. The conference brought together researchers of different disciplines and approaches to analyse the multifaceted nature of the avant-garde journal. It aimed to draw attention to the tensions between national/local and international/cosmopolitan and offer possible answers to the question: how did the different cultural and historical characteristics affect the local avant-gardes of Central Europe? It emerged at the conference that recent studies of Western periodicals have useful lessons for work on the avant-garde journals of East-Central Europe. A complex approach to Slovak, Czech, Polish and Hungarian avant-garde journals has discovered what made these journals distinc- tive. The historical avant-garde periodicals of the ‘Visegrad countries’ imagined and defined themselves as parts of an international network, publishing artworks from different countries, using various languages, and employing a layout that involved a supposedly ‘universal’ visual code. However, as was pointed out in several conference presentations, many of these magazines went beyond their ‘universal’ messages and also dealt 5 6 with local problems such as the potential of town planning, nationalism (or opposition to it), folklore, and resistance to the hegemonic discourses of cultural life in the country. The conference was based on cooperation among research institutes in all four Visegrad countries. In a break from the usual form of academic projects on this subject, typically established via national or bilateral part- nerships or directly hosted by Western institutions, the Local Contexts / International Networks conference was aimed at promoting the partici- pation of young researchers from the Visegrad countries, supplemented by established experts in the field. Our cooperating partners were the Charles University, the Jagiellonian University, Adam Mickiewicz Univer- sity, the University of Warsaw, Masaryk University, the Institutes of Art History of the Academies of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Poland, the National Museum in Warsaw, the newly established Slovak Design Museum, Monoskop.org, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eöt- vös Loránd University. The main outcome of the conference was a new regional discourse in avant-garde periodical research, a field that is interdisciplinary by its na- ture. The speakers had backgrounds in applied and theoretical literary and art historical studies, anthropology as well as intellectual history. They presented their research in English at the conference sessions and plenaries, which were all followed by extensive conversations and de- bates. At the roundtable discussion, representatives of all participating institutions provided each other with a broad overview of their current avant-garde projects. The conference audience included members of the Hungarian academic community, researchers from as far afield as Esto- nia and the United Kingdom, and university students from diverse fields of the humanities. As we originally envisaged, the conference provided an excellent starting point for regional cooperation. 5 6 Eszter Balázs | Kodolányi János University of Applied Arts – Kassák Museum, Budapest Artist and/or Public Intellectual? Hungarian Avant-Garde Polemics on ‘New Art’ and the Artist’s Role and Responsibilities During the First World War and the Subsequent Revolutionary Regimes (1915-1919) Did the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century consider them- selves intellectuals? This question has emerged in debates on artistic ideas and ideologies in the avant-garde movement. After the Dreyfus Affair, writers, scientists and artists in France demanded to have their voice heard in public affairs purely on the grounds of their intellectual ca- pacities.1 This model of the modern intellectual emerged in an irregular way at points all over Europe, including the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early twentieth century.2 The French origin of the phenomenon showed up in the adoption of the word intellectual throughout the conti- nent.3 Dissidents During WWI The early years of the First World War saw a diminution in Hungar- ian intellectuals’ resistance to political and economic forces. As in oth- er European countries, Hungarian modernism became the target of a 1 The essay was prepared as part of the research project of the Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum NKFI-K 120779. See Christophe Charle, Naissance des ‘intellectuels’, 1880-1900, Seuil, Paris, 1990. 2 Christophe Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle. Essai d’histoire comparée, Seuil, Paris, 1996. 3 For the Hungarian case see: Eszter Balázs, ‘En tête des intellectuels’. Les écrivains hongrois et la question de la liberté et de l’autonomie littéraires (1908–1914), Thèse de doctorat, EHESS, Paris, 2008. See also as a book published in Hungarian: ‘Az intellektualitás vezérei’, Viták az irodalmi autonómiáról a Nyugatban és a Nyugatról [At the Head of the Intellectuals. Debates on Literary Autonomy in Nyugat], Napvilág, Budapest, 2009. 7 8 national backlash, and intellectual and cultural life was dominated by positivism.4 The Hungarian press and periodicals overtly supporting the Great War trumpeted their moral victory over the ‘intellectuals’. In period- icals that had been defending literary autonomy and modernism, writers abstained from portraying