Kassák, Lajos (editor and graphic designer) and Ernö Kállai, Borbiró Virgil, among others (co-editors).

[KASSÁK'S DEPARTURE FROM CONSTRUCTIVISM] Alkotás: a magyar művészeti tanács folyóirata [Creation: a journal of the Hungarian Council of the Arts], vol. I, nos. 1–12 and vol. II, nos. 1–4 (in altogether eight issues; all published).

Budapest: Magyar Müvészeti Tanács, 1947–1948. Quartos (30 × 24 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 41 to 68 pp. per issue. Numerous full-page illustrations, including some in color. About very good; light traces of use, one issue with somewhat defective binding; wrappers slightly toned and dust-stained. Item #54932

Complete run of this significant Hungarian post-war journal of modern and avant-garde art and culture, edited by Lajos Kassák, who reappeared as a graphic designer after a decade and a half by designing the covers and typography of the issues. What is remarkable about Kassák's post-war project is its openness toward the architectural and artistic positions that he believed he had overcome with Constructivism in the interwar period. His group of editors included not only Ernö Kállai, the former editor-in-chief of the “bauhaus” magazine published in Dessau under Hannes Meyer, but also the architect and art historian Virgil Borbiró (also known as Bierbauer), who until 1928 mainly produced historicist architectural designs. After a trip to Holland, he turned his attention to modern industrial architecture as well as reformist housing construction and ran the magazine “Tür és Forma”. Among other things, he was now involved in major urban regulation plans in Budapest. His theoretical and practical engagement with urban planning was clearly influenced by his art history studies with Heinrich Wöfflin and his method of “comparative seeing”. Already in the first issue of “Alkotás”, Borbiró makes remarkable comparisons between various microscopic cell structures on the one hand and urban planning on the other in his essay “Új városépítés, természetes városépítés” (New urbanism, natural urbanism). He takes these comparisons so far that he ends up juxtaposing a carcinoma with a historical city map of Mechelen. In Kassák's circle, the machine alone was no longer the benchmark for the development of forms in art and architecture. Borbiró, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Bramante's first plans for St. Peter's in Rome, was not the only author in the journal who saw modernism in continuity with tradition (on Virgil Borbiró cf. AKL XII, 1996, p. 662). The architect, designer, and illustrator Lajos Kozma, whose designs are a far cry from Kassák's Constructivism, deals extensively with the development of the form of columns and pillars from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, for example, in No. 9–10.

Similarly to Kassák's pre-war journals, such as A Tett, MA, and Dokumentum, Alkotás explored both the international and the Hungarian contemporary arts scene, but with a focus on emerging trends in the immediate post-war period. In contrast to the earlier journals, it avoided political statements in an attempt to create wide-ranging international networks. The immediate post-war period also saw Kassák himself turn away from his Constructivist rules. He began to paint figuratively again. When he returned to abstraction in the mid-1950s, however, this did not mean a return to the old mechanical rigor. For Kassák, the publication of “Alkotás” was linked to his involvement in the Art Council, which came to an end with the collapse of the democratic phase. The magazine was also discontinued after the Communist takeover in Hungary in 1948, whereupon many of its contributors went into exile or suffered a harsh fate in political prisons. (Cf. AKL LXXIX, 2013, p. 391)

The issues include contributions by and about Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Moholy-Nagy, Robert Delaunay, Georges Rouault, Marcel Breuer, Lajos Kassák, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Béla Czobel, Ödön Márffy, Gyula Derkovits, Gyula Hincz, Lajos Tihanyi, József Csáky, Jenő Barcsay, Károly Kernstok and others. Equal attention is paid to literature, painting, graphic arts, sculpture, and architecture.

Csaplár, Cat. Budapest 1999, nr. 162.
As of Februrary 2025, KVK and OCLC show five complete runs in North America.

Price: €1,500.00

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