„2 × dada + 2 × aktivizmus = Ma”. Kassák Lajos, a Ma és a nemzetközi dada mozgalom kapcsolata a bécsi emigrációban (1920–1922)

This article focuses on Lajos Kassák and the avant-garde periodical Ma (Today) in the international Dadaist network between 1920 and 1922. My aim is to provide a close reading of the contacts between the Hungarian avant-garde and the Dada movement through documents preserved in the archives of Kassák and other Hungarian and international avant-garde writers and artists, as well as a comparative analysis of the international Dadaist journals and Ma . Based on the methodological framework of cultural history and periodical research, I discuss both literary and art historical aspects. Following the horizontal art-historical framework outlined by Piotr Piotrowski, I discuss the relationship between international Dadaism and the Hungarian avant-garde not as a unidirectional mechanism of influence, but as a series of interactions. For Kassák, from the first year of his Vienna exile after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the exposure to the works of Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters was a decisive factor, as well as a radical influence on the orientation of the periodical Ma . The issues of Ma published in 1921 and the first half of 1922 undoubtedly featured the most artists of the international Dada movement, and Kassák, Sándor Barta and Erzsi Újvári also started to use Dadaist techniques in their poetry at that time. In my 2022 article, I argued that Kassák’s autobiographically inspired epic poem The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away was written in his Dadaist period at the end of 1920, just like his first so-called numbered poems (however, the long poem was published only two years later, in October 1922, and so it was interpreted in a different literary context). 219 In this article, I present the theoretical background of the visual sources of Kassák’s geometric abstract art genre called Picture-Architecture which, in my view, can also be directly linked to international Dada. I argue that Dadaism had an impact on the art of Kassák and the Ma- circle, just as significant and decisive as the introduction of Russian and Western European Constructivism a few months later, in 1921. Kassák interpreted the ideas behind of Dada and Constructivism just as freely as he had earlier in his Budapest years interpreted Futurism and Expressionism, but it is undeniable that these trends had as great an influence on Kassák’s literature and art. It is therefore important to detect the Dadaist and Constructivist artistic techniques adapted by Kassák and other Activist artists during the first years of their Vienna exile, and to establish a chronology of this process. In the first section of this article, I present the relationship between Kurt Schwitters and Kassák, who was the first Dada artist to be published in Ma . In this context I elaborate on the Dadaist origin of Picture-Architecture, by analysing the relevant and surviving visual artworks and writings of Kassák and Sándor Bortnyik. In the second chapter, I explore the extensive French and German Dadaist contacts between Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy. In particular, I discuss the editorial relationship between Kassák and Tristan Tzara in the early 1920s, and the Dadaist artists who were introduced to Kassák through Tzara. Kassák’s only personal Dadaist contact was with Hans Arp, through his partner and later wife Sophie Taeuber. In the next subchapter I reconstruct the contacts between the Arps and Kassák during 1921 and 1922. In the part exploring international Dadaist contacts, special emphasis is given to László Moholy-Nagy, who moved to Berlin at the end of 1920 and, as the German correspondent to Ma , played a significant role in bringing Kassák’s Vienna periodical into direct contact with the committed left-wing Dadaist group around the Berlin-based Malik-Verlag. In the final section of this article, I present the relationship between Kassák and Dada from the perspective of the history of their reception in the contemporary press to stress that, even though Kassák distanced his own art and Ma from the international Dada movement, Kassák’s movement was still received as the Hungarian Dadaist group in the press of the Vienna Hungarian emigration during the early 1920s.