Merse Pál Szeredi, Gábor Dobó, Redefining the Role of Art and Artist: The Idiosyncratic Avant-Garde of Lajos Kassák, in Flouquet – Kassák – Léonard: The Architecture of Images during the Interwar Period (EN/NL), ed. Adriaan Gonnissen (Oostende, Mu.ZEE, 2018), 153–183 (invited). (original) (raw)
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The network of European interwar avant-garde united artists and formations from various countries and cultural/linguistic backgrounds – be it in the East or West, North or South. Although the history of the interwar avant-garde has gradually been studied and described, some of its aspects and dimensions are still lacking an in-depth analysis, for instance the relationships between Poland and the Low Countries. The magazines of Polish, Dutch and Belgian provenance, and the correspondence between their representatives, reveal numerous traces of direct contacts and mutual exchange of texts and artworks between them. In this paper I reflect on such traces in order to reconstruct the history and the dynamics of mutual relationships between avant-garde formations from Poland and the Low Countries as an example of supranational cultural mobility within the interwar avant-garde network.
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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.
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
Cultural Mobility in the Interwar Avant-Garde Art Network: Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands
2018
This book explores the issue of cultural mobility within the interwar network of the European avant-garde, focusing on selected writers, artists, architects, magazines and groups from Poland, Belgium and Netherlands. Regardless of their apparent linguistic, cultural and geographical remoteness, their mutual exchange and relationships were both deep and broad, and of great importance for the wider development of interwar avant-garde literature, art and architecture. This analysis is based on a vast research corpus encompassing original, often previously overlooked periodicals, publications and correspondence gathered from archives around the world.
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In January 1924, Flemish avant-garde magazine Het Overzicht published a list of its congenial modernist formations named ‘Het Netwerk’. It named nineteen magazines from Europe, the United States and Brazil, including the Polish magazine Zwrotnica. It exemplified the close and direct relationships within the supranational network of the avant-garde. Various formations belonging to this network, both bigger and smaller nodes, were linked to each other, often directly through befriended artists and writers. It did not only concern places such as Paris or Berlin, but also less pivotal nodes of the avant-garde network. In this paper I will present a case study of two countries, namely Poland and Belgium, as an example of European interwar cultural mobility. Joined in their pursuit of modern art, and crossing national and linguistic frontiers, Polish, French and Dutch-language magazines exchanged and re-printed each other’s texts and artworks, a practice also discussed in the correspondence between their representatives. Based on such tangible traces I will describe the cultural mobility and mutual exchange between the Polish and Belgian modernist journals, and attempt to shed light on the features, dynamics, and key figures of the network.
Brücken, 2022
Translating and interpreting the work of the Belgian francophone poet Émile Verhaeren in Bohemia between 1880s-1920s was a way of being Czech, Francophile modern, and certainly not German-not always in the same order or with the same understanding of what 'modern' means. The study analyzes Czech reception of Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916), in critical discussion with the German (Austrian) appropriation and in the context of debates on modern art. Jaroslav Vrchlický needs to be given credit for introducing to his Czech aesthetic adversaries of the 1890s their Belgian symbolist models. The trajectory that leads Verhaeren, a "Rubens in words" of Vrchlický's 1888 interpretation, to Šal da's recognised representative of Belgian symbolism of the 1910s and the proto communist collective author of Neumann's and Hilar's appropriation of 1921 guides us through the complex development of Czech modernist art from early modernism of the 1880s to its avant garde peak in the 1920s. Verhaeren served as a catalyzer and a guiding figure for the Czech artists, who helped to steer them, through complex meanders, towards the modernity of the 20 th century.