Biography
A central figure of the Hungarian avant-garde movement, Lajos Kassák was a writer, painter, designer, organiser. A significant figure of international modernism. Kassák’s art reflects his leftist political views. As a young worker and believer, he was constantély fighting for the rights of the workers both in his writings and his deeds. He organized several strikes which often caused him problems such as being fired from numerous positions. According to his memoirs, Egy ember élete (A Man's Life), he travelled by foot to Paris in 1909, where he stayed for one year.
In 1915, once again in Hungary, he published his first avant-garde magazine, Tett (The Deed), which was soon suppressed by the authorities due to its antimilitarism. Between 1916 and 1925, Kassák published Ma (Today), the most important review of modern art in Hungary. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March-August 1919, Kassák became a member of the Writers Directorate. After the regime’s fall, he emigrated to Vienna where he continued to publish Ma.
After returning to Hungary in 1925, he issued three new magazines: 365, Dokumentum (Document) and Munka (Work). In the new socialist regime established after World War II, Kassák began to edit Kortárs (Contemporary), a journal affiliated with the Social-Democratic Party.
As the politics of the new regime started to become stricter and forced the country’s political parties to melt into one communist party, Kassák found himself embroiled in political conflicts. Eventually, he was expelled from the communist party and his works were banned. While the situation began to ease after 1956, he was not allowed to leave the country, not even when his works got exhibited abroad.
Kassák played a central role in the Hungarian avant-garde movement as an artist and theoretician. His movement, “aktivizmus” (activism), was a typical avant-garde art group, defined by utopian leftist ideologies, mainly the wish for a new, democratic and egalitarian society. The “picture-architecture” art, the name given by Kassák first to the works of Sándor Bortnyik and later to his own paintings, symbolised a man-made perfect order that should mirror the ideal social order. From the twenties, he created a number of picture architecture works - paintings, watercolors, collages, and graphic works.
Kassák reported about most of the important foreign artistic trends in MA, relying on his wide international contacts (for example, his reporter from Berlin was László Moholy-Nagy). Kassák did not only play an important role in the graphic design of his age but also in literature, as he wrote novels and poems.