Krisztina Passuth:
Tranzit
Tanulmányok a kelet-közép-európai
avantgarde mûvészet témakörébõl
(Transit: Studies on East-Central European
avant-garde art),
Budapest: Új Mûvészet
Kiadó,
1996, 198 pp. + 68 plates
Krisztina Passuth describes her studies of the East-Central European avant-garde during the years 1920 to 1928 as a series of articles written for particular occasions, mosaic pieces which, hopefully, will fall into place to reveal "the intricate pattern of the points of convergence between Western and East-Central European avant-garde art. They share the same convictions and the same starting point; the individuals involved (artists and critics), the key figures, crop up time and again, as do certain issues that seem particularly important..." (p. 8).
This description certainly sums up the volume. After a closer look at these studies, however, I would elaborate on the picture. For it is not just the assorted writings that suggest pieces of a fragmented mosaic, but also the artistic movements discussed in them. A geographic image also comes to mind: like the scattered islands of some archipelago, the various avant-garde trends emerge on the distant horizon, in configurations at times more, and at times less coherent. Aptly enough for an archipelago, we find the far-off apparitions--individuals, works of art, groups of artists--surrounded by the cold and metallic sparkle of an ocean: the boundless ocean of incomprehension and indifference, or, if not that, an ocean of aversion and suspicion.
[...]
Returning to our metaphor of a spread-out archipelago, I should like, at this point, to call attention to the central stretch of this "formation," the more pronounced and more closely-knit avant-garde groups of the German-speaking parts of Europe. In terms of the avant-garde of the 1920s, German-speaking Europe started somewhere around Zurich (the Dadaists), continued through Düsseldorf and Cologne, past Weimar and Dessau (the Bauhaus) to Leipzig, whence it spread all the way down to Vienna (where the Kassák Circle worked). There was, however, also a northern stretch, one that began at Leipzig and continued up past Hanover (the Kestner Society) all the way east to Berlin, a vibrant metropolis in the '20s and home of the most prominent and most influential of the avant-garde magazines, such as Die Rote Fahne, Der Sturm, and the multilingual Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand. It was this central region that the avant-garde of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's successor states sought to establish contacts with, groups and magazines like Deveÿtsil, RED, Pásmo, Zenit, Contimporanul, Korunk, and so on. To the east, there was the small but important community of Polish moderns in Warsaw and L/ódz (it was here that Blok was published), and farther east yet, the Moscow avant-garde, which tended to exert its influence through schools and institutions (VkHUTEMAS, INkHUK, GINkHUK, UNOVIS) rather than through art magazines. The islands of Dutch Constructivism (De Stijl) neighbored the central stretch to the west.
The light that illuminated the skies above the entire region, however, came from two sources outside Central Europe. For despite all the spectacular fireworks of the Berlin of the '20s, tradition had made Paris the sun around which the art world revolved, and the presence there of Picasso and his followers only confirmed this impression. And even brighter, at times, than the sun itself was that new comet on the horizon, that harbinger of a new era, the rising star of the Russian avant-garde.
[...]