ÚJ MAGYAR PIKTÚRA 1900 – 1925
Ernő Kállai
Ernő Kállai: ÚJ MAGYAR PIKTÚRA 1900 – 1925. Budapest: Amicus Kiadása, 1925. First edition. Text in Hungarian. Octavo. Blue cloth with embossed banding and gilt titling. Thick printed front wrapper printed in black and red bound in. 151 pp. 80 black and white plates. Front endpaper neatly split and laid in. Rear hinge starting, but a very good or better copy of this rare landmark study of modern Hungarian painting.
6.375 x 9 softcover edition with 151 text pages followed by 80 black and white plates. "Constructive art does not need any emergency exit. In it the unity of material and spirit is inherent, spontaneously and completely, as in a simple factory-made steel disc. For example, constructive art is not concerned with either the avoidance or the conquest of nature, in order to enable the imminent spirit of form to assert itself. As its name also explains, it produces constructions, in the strict technico-formal sense of handling raw materials." — Ernő Kállai, 1921
Includes work by Jósef Rippl-Rónai, János Vaszary, Robert Berény, Lajos Tihanyi, László Medgyes, Armand Schönberger, Gyula Derkovits, Ferenc Hatvany, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, Irme Szobotka, János Kmetty, Péter Benedek, Géza Bornemisza, Károly Kernstock, István Szönyi, Vilmos Aba-Novák, János Nagy Balogh, József Nemes Lampérth, Bertalan Pór, Ödön Márffy, József Egry, Béla Czóbel, F. György Simon, Pál Bohacsek, Húgó Scheiber, Anna Czillich, Lajos Gulácsy, Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, Valéria G. Dénes, Sándor Galimberti, Aurél Bernáth, Béla Kádár, Vilmos Huszár, László Moholy-Nagy, Alfréd Forbát, Lajos Kassák, László Péri, Sándor Bortnyik, and Mattis-Teutsch.
The line of development leading from Cézanne through Picasso, braque and Gleizes to Constructivism is also at the same time a process: the artistic self-realization of the scientifically-intellectually, technically-economically oriented man of our age. — Ernő Kállai, 1924
Ernő [Ernst] Kállai [1890 – 1954] was an aesthete and critic, member of the Bauhaus and a spokesman of Hungarian and International Avant-Garde art and literature. Kállai was among the leading protaganists of Constructivism in Germany along with Hungarian artists and theorists such as László Moholy-Nagy, László Peri, Lajos Kassák and Alfréd Kemény (1895–1945). Inspired by Utopian ideals, they had fostered contacts with Moscow after the short-lived Hungarian Revolution of 1919; Kemény, for instance, had participated in the Constructivists’ debates in Moscow in 1921. Exploring the potential of the new materials, Peri produced his first Constructivist coloured cement reliefs in 1921. In contrast, Moholy-Nagy’s abstract paintings, with their bold colours, interpenetrating geometric planes and interest in transparency, were close to Lissitzky’s Prouns. Moholy-Nagy also vividly demonstrated the new repudiation of subjectivity when in 1922 he dictated to a professional sign painter, by telephone, the colours and composition of two paintings, using a colour chart and a piece of squared paper . . . . [Christina Lodder]
Ernő Kállai’s, Alfréd Kemény’s, László Moholy-Nagy’s, and László Péri’s “Manifesto” (1923):
We are aware that Constructivism today is increasingly developing bourgeois traits. One of the manifestations of this is the Dutch Stijl group’s constructive (mechanized) aestheticism as well as the technical Naturalism achieved by the Russian Constructivists (the Obmokhu group) with their constructions representing technical devices.
Every form of art that sees itself as hovering above the current social forms in aesthetic or cosmic perspective exists on a bourgeois level even if its adherents call themselves Constructivists. The same holds true for all forms of contemporary naturalism, whether its subject be the machine or nature herself.
For this reason, we make a distinction between the aestheticism of bourgeois Constructivists and the kind of constructive art that springs from our communist ideology. This latter, in its analyses of form, matter and structure, is breaking the [444] ground for the collective architecture of the future, which will be the pivotal art form of communist society. As such it will not think of itself as either absolute or dogmatic, in that it dearly sees the partial role it fulfils in the integrated process of social transformation at the present time. It is raised above bourgeois Constructivism and against the bourgeois construction of life in today’s society by that constructive content which is indicative of constructive potentialities, which can be fully realized only within the framework of communist society. In contrast, the bourgeois Constructivists provide only the haute bourgeois forms of today’s capitalist society with the adequate and simplest artistic construction which can be realized in today’s society.
This kind of reappraised (from a bourgeois point of view, destructive) Constructivism (to which only a tiny portion of those contemporary movements in art that are known by the name of Constructivism belong) leads, on the one hand, in practical life to a new constructive architecture* that can be realized only in a communist society, and, on the other hand, to a nonfunctional but dynamic (kinetic) constructive system of forces which organizes space by moving in it, the further potential of which is again in practice dynamic architecture. The road to both goals leads through interim solutions.
In order to bring about a communist society; we artists must fight alongside the proletariat, and must subordinate our individual interests to those of the proletariat. We think that this is possible only within the communist party, by working in co-operation with the proletariat. For this reason, we think that a Proletkult organization should be established, an organization that would make such co-operation possible; that is why we join the Egység, since it was the one to begin work in this direction.
The new Proletkult organization must turn against bourgeois culture (destructive work) and must look for a road leading to a new communist culture (the constructive aspect of the work); furthermore, it must liberate the proletariat from the pressure of bourgeois culture, and substitute for their bourgeois intellectuals’ hunger for culture a wish for the most advanced organization of life. The artists of the Proletkult must pave the way for a high-standard (adequate) proletarian and collective art. Translated from the Hungarian by Krisztina Passuth.
Ernő Kállai’s “Constructivism” (1923):
Constructivism is art of the purest immanence. Its creative center does not lie outside the spatial formations meant to be sensed and objectivized but, as in the case of nonobjective Expressionism, is identical with them. Thus the space of both Constructivism and of non-objective Expressionism is not geocentrically but, rather, egocentrically defined. But whereas Expressionistic space is a passive riverbed of past psychic outpourings, constructive space, within its own laws, is a conscious and active structure of tensions and patterns of stress. The inner animation of the Expressionist experience is eruptive and staccato, it wanders off in every direction toward boundless and inarticulate regions. The oscillations of Constructivist vitality manifest as a system of balanced and articulated continuity.
This constraint creates a conceptual space that is perfectly even, in its center and peripheries alike, and is maximally, clearly, sharply demarcated from every metaphysical and physiological area of the unconscious.
It follows from this continuity and uniformity of illumination that the Constructivist consciousness experiences itself in space-time in terms of the absolute here and now. However, it does not lack dimensionality. It simply does not recognize the vanishing of the visual field that leads to zones that are perspectivally or prophetically placed in the distance: The constructive consciousness is ahistoricaL It possesses no forms suitable for an anthologizing or teleological viewpoint. There is no dualism of cause and effect confronting each other; they are both rooted in the fullest quintessential identity.
The constructive consciousness and work of art are therefore entities identical and sufficient unto themselves in the strictest sense of the word. For a Suprematist, it is not merely a matter of mastery to undertake the artistic task of a perfectly smooth, dense, and even painting of a single square. We see here the realization of the will to achieve ultimate unity and identity with oneself, one that, far from seeking some humble livelihood by accomplishing this outwardly modest task, strives for a focusing of extraordinary intensity. For this Suprematist unity already contains the possibility of an unfolding multiplicity. But this is not a multiplicity whose spread postulates a causal or deductive series, with a beginning and an end. The constructive awareness of multiplicity and of self-identical unity, respectively, relate to each other as does an articulated logical judgment to its own perfectly indivisible meaning.
This quality is incompatible with the notions of predestined fulfillment and the dialectics of tragedy. The mere notion of a constructive drama is an absurdity.
The systematic nature of constructive consciousness does not entail static immobility. On the contrary, Constructivism possesses the most powerful concept and most real possibilities of motion known to art. But the lines of oscillation of Constructivist motion do not scatter into anarchy, nor are they exhausted by a mere gesture, restricted to intimations of infinity. They stretch taut around the center of constructive consciousness [436] like a network of interdependent lines that obtain the basis and rationale of their existence from that center. Each and every peripheral function of constructive consciousness is set within an immanent gravitational system in which the centrifugal and centripetal forces are in perfect balance.
The central point of this gravitational field cannot be defined in psychological terms, but this center is indubitably the absolute factor in the Constructivist work of art. Otherwise we could not speak of unity in such a work, which nonetheless exists, without having to rely on the centralized composition scheme of classical art.
Constructivism cannot tolerate the hierarchic subdivision of emphases, only their uniformity. It does not entrench itself behind the frontality of representation. The consciousness responsible for its existence prevails in the unconditional readiness for action and momentum in every conceivable direction of spatial, logical and ethical expansion. Constructive consciousness is absolute expansiveness.
The will toward autonomous, total constructive development is diametrically opposed to any tendency toward a mystical consciousness. The mystical absorbs the world into itself. It soaks up multiplicity as sand soaks up water. As opposed to this, constructive consciousness quintessentially posits the idea of multiplicity as a goal to be realized. Constructivist multiplicity unfolds in such a manner that the unfolding takes place according to the laws of a system of immanent unity that is identical to itself.
The Constructivist unfolding of multiplicity avoids uncontrollably gliding transitions and fluid boundaries. A geometric precision characterizes its articulations, dividing lines and points of contact. It does not hide behind illusions. This is why Constructivists build with homogeneously colored, pure planes and use realistic material forms in physical space.
The will toward geometric necessity and purity establishes an organic interrelation between Constructivist art and the objective working methods and technological systems of our age. Constructivist art, even given the architectonic unity of the total vocabulary of its forms, affords opportunities for a pervasive division of labor. It is a collective art.
Its collective nature is not an image of chaotic society living for the present, but is a striving toward absolute equilibrium and extreme purity. It imposes laws that enter consciousness as the necessary, immanent principles of a transcendental vitality. The realization of the psychological and historical sediments of these principles does not play the least role in their formal and conceptual exposition. The totality of these principles is structured into a system by the ideal of the new human who is economically organized in both body and mind.
Originally published as “Konstruktivizmus,” in Ma (May 1923)] Translated from the German by John Bátki.