Unwanted by Both the Political Left and Right: Interwar Europe’s Hungarian Migrating Artists

A little known group of Hungarian artists who were students at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest in 1927‐1930, joined by a few artists from outside the Academy, were modernists. They explored the Soviet Russian avant‐garde and abstraction, and therefore were rejected by the mainstream, right‐wing official art in interwar Hungary. However, the strictly principled left‐wing Munka (Work) Circle of Lajos Kassák was not hospitable to them, either. Members of “The Young Progressives” group left Hungary in or by 1930. The increasingly classicist Hungarian avant‐garde did not tolerate bias; thus the idiosyncratic poet and artist Tamkó‐Sirató had to leave Hungary, too and develop his Dimensionism in Paris. Éva Forgács * Art Center College of Design * Éva Forgács is Professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her books include Hungarian Art. Confrontation and revival in the Modern Movement (DoppelHouse Press, 2016), The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (CEU Press 1995), the co‐edited volume (with T. O. Benson) Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant‐Gardes (The MIT Press, 2002). Résumé Parmi les jeunes artistes hongrois qui étudièrent à l’Académie des Beaux‐Arts de Budapest entre 1927 et 1930, un petit groupe rejoignit le modernisme, auquel se rallièrent aussi quelques artistes extérieurs à l’Académie. Ils découvrirent l’avant‐garde russe et la peinture abstraite, et furent donc rejetés par l’art officiel de droite de la Hongrie de l'entre‐deux‐guerres. Le milieu d’avant‐garde socialiste Munka (Travail) de Lajos Kassák, dont les principes étaient très stricts, ne leur fut pourtant pas plus accueillant. Les membres du groupe « Les jeunes progressifs » quittèrent donc la Hongrie vers 1930. L’avant‐garde hongroise, de plus en plus classicisante, ne tolérait aucun écart. Ainsi un poète et artiste aussi singulier que Tamkó‐Sirató dû également quitter le pays pour Paris, où il développa le Dimensionisme. Forgács – Unwanted by Both the Political Left and Right 54 Migrations, Transfers, and Resemantization ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (Summer 2017) Why migrating from Hungary? Although many artists of the avant‐garde traveled and relocated for shorter or longer periods of time, such biographical details have not come down on the same note in history. For example, Picasso’s moving from Barcelona to Paris and settling there, or the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg’s frequent—indeed, almost incessant—travels between various cities and resorts of Europe are never referred to as migration. The term is reserved to moves, which are politically motivated and can be seen as exile. Migrants are artists who relocated because they had to flee their native country or the country of their residence in order to save their life, or have the freedom they needed for creative work. The appearance of nine new states on the map of Europe in the wake of World War I1 as the German, Austro‐Hungarian, and Russian Empires ceased to exist forced many artists, as well as other large groups of the population, to relocate. Besides, the Great War had deepened the rift between those who were eager to retaliate for their defeat and those who had been anti‐war all along. The progressive artists in Central Europe,2 who constituted the avant‐gardes, were internationalist and attached their hopes to the concept of a new, postwar world of supranational fraternity. With the scathing experience of the War behind them, the avant‐gardes of the 1920s were more bitterly anti‐establishment than the pre‐war generations. The shock of the Great War haunted Europe for decades and played a major role in shaping the political outlook and the views on art and culture of the generation that experienced the war period, whether or not they had served in the trenches. Most of the left wing avant‐gardes believed that a new egalitarian society was in the making modeled on post‐revolutionary communist Russia. However, these expectations did not come true. 1 Finland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. 2 Regarding the interwar era Germany can be counted among the Central European countries, not only because of its geographic position, but also because Berlin became the hub of a great number of Eastern and Central European artists, the “Wahlberliner” in Peter Gay’s term, who chose to live in Berlin. The fledgling German democracy, run by Social Democrats, was not becoming communist, and the possible leaders of such a development were murdered under murky circumstances in January 1919; the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic as well as the Hungarian Commune in the same year were crashed, and by the mid‐1920s it was clear that no communist world revolution would happen in Berlin, or elsewhere. The temporary or longtime relocations of artists must be examined in this postwar framework. In Hungary, similarly to other newly minted countries a new national cultural narrative was being constructed composed of local folk art and memories or invented bits of national mythology. While rightwing, conservative agents of the mainstream culture were busy re‐writing the past and reinventing a national myth, progressives anticipated a future of cultural and scientific development. Being in minority and in opposition in their own state under political pressure drove many to migrate into one or another cosmopolitan metropolis, first of all Berlin or Paris. Not always correctly, they saw the international spirit in these cities as sign of an imminent new age of a collective, international society.3 From among the great number of Hungarian artists and intellectuals who emigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s4 and throughout the interwar period I would like to highlight a little‐ known and short lived group because of their unique position in the right wing proto‐fascist country Hungary had turned into after August 1919: that they were rejected both by the officialdom and the avant‐garde. After the defeat of the short‐lived communist republic the country’s new leader Admiral Horthy sent out troops to find 3 For a detailed discussion of the internationalist avant‐garde’s failure to understand the actual reality, see Éva Forgács, “Internationalists Spread Thin. The Hungarian Aspect 1920‐1922," in Hubert van den Berg, Lydia Gluchowska eds., Internationality and Internationalism in the European Avant‐Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Leeuven: Peeters, 2013), 145‐164, especially p. 147: “George Grosz recalls in his Autobiography, that ‘Foreigners who visited us at that time were easily fooled by the apparent light‐hearted, whirring fun on the surface (...), the so‐called freedom and the flowering of the arts. (...) But that was really nothing more than froth. Right under that short‐lived, lively surface of the shimmering swamp was fratricide and general discord, and regiments were formed for the final reckoning.” 4 On the greatest migration of modern Hungarian history, see Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish‐Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919‐1945 (Pieterlen, Switzerland: Peter Lang Verlag, 2009). Forgács – Unwanted by Both the Political Left and Right 55 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (Summer 2017) Migrations, Transfers, and Resemantization “revolutionaries” in hiding: everyone who could be even vaguely suspected of having cooperated with the Commune had good reason to flee for his life. The fledgling avant‐gardes most of whom were socialist or communist emigrated as soon as they could and split into various factions, each vigilant to save their intellectual integrity. The 1926 general amnesty made some of the exiles return and take up activities in Hungary, even in the midst of political censorship. This was the case of the leading figure of the Hungarian avant‐garde, poet, writer, painter, editor and publisher Lajos Kassák (1887‐ 1967), who carved a special niche for himself in the Hungarian cultural scene, and his person as well as the community he organized had become an institution of progressive art and writing upon his return to Budapest. According to his autobiography as well as the memoirs of his friends and collaborators, Kassák was a leader of strong convictions and firm principles. Educated in the socialist workers’ movement in Hungary before and during the Great War, he was not only a passionate poet calling out those who caused the terrible suffering, but also got to understand the strategy of a political‐artistic movement where unity is of the highest importance. He had seen his group split in Vienna and learned that dissent and differing views had to be suppressed—the more so in a hostile environment where censors and political opponents could easily take advantage of the inner rifts of a group. Seeing the rise of a new generation of left‐wing artists, Kassák was both welcoming and guarded towards them. The Young Progressive Painters The young forward‐looking artists emerged in Hungary in late 1920s, when Horthy’s regime was consolidating and Kassák attempted to resume his avant‐garde activities in Budapest. They were around twenty years of age, radically innovative in art, and socialist‐leaning idealists with no political experience. They saw various iterations of artistic modernism as a strong argument for a better future both in culture and the society. Most of them attended the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest between 1927‐1930, and were joined by a few others from outside the Academy. The painters who founded a common platform were Dezső Korniss (1908‐1984), György Kepes (1906‐2001), Sándor Trauner, (1906‐1993), Lajos Vajda (1908‐1941), Ernő Schubert (1903‐1960), Béla Hegedűs (1910‐1940), and Béla Veszelszky (1905‐1977). They were soon labeled the “Young Progressives,” as they distinguished themselves advocating cubism, Russian constructivism, French surrealism, and early cinema (Fig. 1). As students they studied to paint in post‐ impressionist style, which they found stuffy and unexciting. They were interested in creating a new blend of the latest modernist directions that they labeled “constructive surrealism,” which materialized in painting as well as photomontages, where constructivist compositions could be paired with surrealist imagery. While the geometric order of the constructivist framework visualized their universal utopias, the photographic details of surrealist works referred to the social realities they experienced: suffering, violence, poverty and inequality—all of which appeared absurd in the light of their ideas of a better future. Figure 1. The “Progressive Artists” group, Budapest, 1929: Unknown photographer. Seated: Béla Veszelszky, György Kepes, Eva Balla, Sándor Trauner; stands: Dezső Korniss. The woman on the left is not identified. Forgács – Unwanted by Both the Political Left and Right 56 Migrations, Transfers, and Resemantization ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (Summer 2017) Since very few documents are available from the existence of the group, the program of “constructive surrealism,” developed during their student years, is also projected back to this era from their later statements. Vajda wrote in a letter to his wife in 1936: “I am experimenting with positioning various objects from different environments in one single picture plane (constructive surrealist schematic).”5 In the mid‐ 1930s he cooperated with Korniss in this spirit. At the same time a new chapter started in the Hungarian avant‐garde with Kassák’s arrival back from his Vienna exile in 1926. He almost immediately launched a new avant‐garde periodical Dokumentum (Document), only to realize that he could not continue where he had left it in 1919: interest in the avant‐garde was gone, and there were hardly any artists or audiences that wanted to get involved in oppositional art. Trying to adapt with the least possible compromise, Kassák re‐styled his mode of communication and launched his new journal Munka (work) in 1928. Getting more acquainted with the new realities in Hungary he understood that a new voice and a new demographic were needed for a progressive movement. As the name ‘Work’ indicates, Kassák replaced his previous radically modernist program by one that aimed at everyday life and focused, instead of oppositional liberals and literati, on young, socialist skilled workers. This was a tradition he had brought from the pre‐war Social Democratic Party, which, again, proved to be his resource. Reaching out to young workers entailed many changes in his former avant‐garde agenda: clear language, cleaned of expressionist and modernist style, and generally understandable topics of interest to his target audience. This entailed providing space, both in print and actual activities to such popular items as sport and leisure. This was a re‐interpretation of the avant‐garde, turning it into the political and cultural workshop and 5 Lajos Vajda, Letter to his wife Júlia, Szentendre, September 3, 1936, published in Iván, Dévényi ed., Vajda Lajos Emlékkönyv (Lajos Vajda memorial book) (Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1972), 12. Author’s translation.
 forum of the young workers, who were, other than this, not represented on the cultural forums of Hungary. In a section for correspondence readers could share ideas and express massive social discontent and criticism, however not generally, but concerning concrete experiences. One of the most important innovative features of Munka was publication of a new kind of photography that Kassák labeled “socio‐photo.” This became a movement, and Munka turned into a new platform for excellent photographers of strong social consciousness documenting poverty and oppression in Hungary. In spite of the new, politically more rigorous and more populist voice of the journal, which adapted a near‐classicist style, such authors as critic Ernő Kállai and artist László Moholy‐Nagy, committed to modernism, also published in Munka, along with other previous, avant‐garde collaborators of Kassák. The Munka Circle held regular meetings and organized a recital choir. The choir recited poetry, to a strong vocal and political effect, tangibly, as well as symbolically, demonstrating the power of collective action. The Young Progressives started to attend the meetings of the Munka Circle and cooperated with it in several ways. Vajda, for example, was member of the recital choir, while the others participated in various events and activities of the Circle. Most of them published drawings in various issues of the journal. The Hungarian officialdom kept a vigilant eye not only on Kassák and his group, but also on the Academy of Fine Arts’ spirit and teaching, in particular the young art students and their friends. Their initial public appearance happened in March 1928, when Trauner and Schubert had a small exhibition in the back room of the Budapest bookshop called “Mentor.” This location was Kassák’s headquarters, known to the authorities as the hotbed of socialist ideas. This small show was followed by a more comprehensive group exhibition of the fine arts students in the Budapest Műcsarnok (Hall of Arts) in May 1928. This event was a critical success, except for the Young Progressives, whose paintings raised the eyebrows Forgács – Unwanted by Both the Political Left and Right 57 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (Summer 2017) Migrations, Transfers, and Resemantization of State Secretary Gyula Kornis (no relation to the painter), who found the modernist abstract works scandalously inacceptable for the mainstream, government‐sponsored Christian‐conservative neo‐classicist direction. He sent out a State Control Committee to the Academy of Fine Arts to take a thorough look at the students’ works.6 The investigations of this Committee culminated in yet another scandal, as they found many more abstract and surrealist works and photo collages on the studio walls than what had already upset them at the exhibition. Moreover, the students painted cubistic, geometric, pre‐tachist works, that the Committee found not only aesthetically but, more importantly, politically subversive. The photomontages shocked them, and called the young artists an “anarchist, bolshevik gang.”7 That rebellious spirit had to be exorcised from the Academy, therefore not only were the progressive students dismissed, but also their teachers: established painters holding the honorable title ’Professor’ István Csók and János Vaszary were, in an unprecedented way, fired for not having disciplined their students. With that act the political regime indicated that no bias from the officially supported figurative right‐wing art was tolerated, and choosing a different style was seen as political dissent. The scandal of their dismissal from the Academy brought the Young Progressives to the attention of the artists and critics who continued to advocate the marginally still existing avant‐garde art. Critic and curator Miklós Rózsa (1873‐1945) invited most of them to participate at the group exhibition of KÚT (Képzőművészek Új Társasága, or New Association of Artists) at the Nemzeti Szalon (National Salon) in 1929.8 KÚT was a platform of modernism, if not of the avant‐garde. Its members were progressive, but not radical. Rózsa was a great—perhaps, at the time, the greatest— authority in matters of art in interwar Hungary. He 6 Quoted from Dezső Kornis’s unpublished Autobiography, in Lóránd Hegyi, Dezső Kornis (Budapest: Corvina, 1982), 16. 7For more details, see L. Hegyi, “Korniss Dezső első alkotói korszaka 1923‐1933” (Dezső Korniss’s First Creative Period 1923‐ 1933), Ars Hungarica (1976/1): 101‐ 102. 8 István Vas, Nehéz szerelem (Hard love) (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1972), 602; quoted by Hegyi, Dezső Kornis, 172, N.30. had played an important role in creating the art scene of Budapest at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ha had been a journalist, banker, and, most of all, art critic and organizer of exhibitions,9 respected enough to be able to call the attention of the art world to the young painters by exhibiting them. Following their appearance at the KÚT show Kassák also invited them to attend the meetings of his newly organized Munka Circle. The invitation was preceded by a highly positive review of the KÚT exhibition by Kassák himself, in which he wrote: The young artists of KUT, Sándor Trauner, Ernő Schubert, György Kepes, Dezső Korniss, Béla Hegedüs and Lajos Vajda are young only in the number of their years, but they are they past adolescence in their work, too. Their restrained colors and simplified forms communicate profound human lyricism to those who understand the formal language of painting. (...) We in the Munka Circle register the emergence of the six new artists with pleasure.10 It was inevitable that the Young Progressives and the new iteration of the Hungarian avant‐garde find each other and make an attempt to cooperate. There was hardly any other intellectual home for the emerging artists than Kassák’s group around