Imagining a movement: Ma in Budapest

The journal Ma and its circle appeared in Hungarian cultural life in the Budapest of the First World War and the Revolutions, between 1916 and 1919, as the real institutional embodiment of an imaginary movement. Lajos Kassák and his fellow-artists regarded themselves as the creators of a ‘new culture’ whose ideology they transmitted through more than just issuing manifestoes. They set out to create a new and multifaceted institution. Through a presentation of four themes, the exhibition explores the cultural and social ambitions of Kassák and his circle and the communication techniques by which they attempted to mark out their position in the Hungarian artistic scene in the early twentieth century.

The exhibition is part of a series by the Kassák Museum to present Lajos Kassák’s avant-garde journals. The first, entitled Signal to the World: War ? Avant-Garde ? Kassák. The present exhibition also draws on contemporary sources, mostly from the Kassák Museum’s own collection, to present the working of ‘Budapest Ma’ in the context of the First World War and the revolutions that followed. It has a different focus from the previous exhibition, however, just as Ma had a different profile from A Tett. For A Tett, we compared the magazine’s anti-militarist output with the documents of the mainstream ‘culture of war’, but for Ma, we explore an attempt at institutionalizing a partly imaginary and partly actual avant-garde artistic movement.