Lecture Series in the course of the exhibition “Vienna 1924. Hotspot of the Avant-Garde”

Merse Pál Szeredi, art historian and curator at the Kassák Museum in Budapest is going to give a lecture on “Cooperation and/or Isolation: Lajos Kassák’s Magazine „Ma“ and the Viennese Avant-Garde Art Scene during the early 1920s”
(in English)

The presentation focuses on the contacts between the Viennese Avant-Garde circles and artists and the emigrant Hungarian group of “Activists”, led by Lajos Kassák, during the first half of the 1920s. After the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in Budapest, Kassák and his fellow artists fled to Vienna where they continued to publish the art magazine “Ma” (Today) and organized several exhibitions and performances between 1920 and 1925. Through Kassák’s intensive networking, his magazine “Ma” became an internationally renowned forum for Dada and Constructivism, however, it was less acknowledged by the local art scene. The presentation traces the ambivalent relationship between the Hungarian and Viennese Avant-Garde artists – including Friedrich Kiesler, Jacob Levy Moreno, and Adolf Loos – and aims to contextualize Kassák’s presence in Vienna through new research results.
The presentation is connected to the research project of the Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum entitled “Lajos Kassák’s Avant-Garde Journals from an Interdisciplinary Perspective (1915–1928)”, supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Project No. K-120779.