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In the latter stages of the First World War, Max Dvok began his revision of
the central tenets of the Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte [Vienna School
of Art History]. Instead of the evolutionary model of stylistic change that
had been developed by Alois Riegl in the 1890s, Dvok proposed a different
approach focusing on periods of crisis and rupture, which he saw as producing
radical new forms in the visual arts. Looking to artists like Tintoretto, El
Greco and Goya, Dvok identified new types of aesthetic expression that were
the product of deep and often sudden changes in cultural experience.1 These
artists, Dvok argued, revealed a break with conventional modes of depiction,
opening up entirely new lines of development and producing original types of
aesthetic experience that had not been possible under the previous conceptual
model. As was clear, not least to the author himself, Dvoks new approach
was partly inspired by the immediate experience of the war. The proximity of
death, destruction and catastrophic defeat allowed him to recognize certain
critical moments in the art of the past with greater clarity. Dvok was thinking
of the long span of art history, over several centuries, rather than contemporary
developments. But his theoretical model could be applied equally well to the
revolution in Hungarian culture that was enacted between 1916 and 1919. The
relatively stable development and conventional modes in Hungarian visual arts
in the period between the 1890s and the early war years point to the gradual
way that Hungary acquired an independent tradition of modern art. There were
plenty of thoughtful contemporary painters, sculptors and graphic designers
but they tended to work within well-established patterns and styles that were
duplicated in similar groups throughout Europe.2 However, the war years
1
The key texts are Max Dvok, Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen
Skulptur und Malerei, Historische Zeitschrift, 119 (1918), 162 and Max Dvok, ber
Greco und den Manierismus, Wiener Jahrbuch fr Kunstgeschichte, 1/xv (1921/22), 2242.
The latter was republished in Max Dvok, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. Studien
zur abendlndischen Kunstentwicklung, ed. by Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde
(Munich, 1924), pp. 26176. See Matthew Rampley, Max Dvok: art history and the crisis
of modernity, Art History, 26 (2003), 21437.
2
For example, at the Nagybnya art colony in northern Transylvania, established in 1896,
the dominant stylistic tendency was the French-inspired naturalism associated with many
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low, from the unique to the ubiquitous, this article aims to undertake a form
of visual culture analysis. Since its appearance in the 1990s, the sub-discipline
of Visual Culture has been highly theorized but it can not yet match the
philosophical underpinning that art history has developed over the last
hundred and fifty years.4 Nevertheless, a visual culture approach can open the
door to considerations of images from the highest and most elite forms of fine
art to the most mundane and ephemeral products of cheap printing houses,
and seek to interpret them as part of a continuum, rather than as products of
fundamentally different categories in taste and experience.
One of the first problems the student of visual culture must address is the
sheer volume of material that presents itself for consideration. By the turn
of the twentieth century every European city generated amounts of printed
images at all levels of society that would have been inconceivable even thirty
years previously. Due to the immense expansion in the market for cheap
goods and advertising, and the corresponding innovations in print technology,
papermaking and distribution throughout the nineteenth century, there was
an explosion in printed images. By the 1890s, there was no city in the western
world that was not festooned with pictorial posters and other forms of graphic
advertising. In many respects, Budapest is an especially interesting case because
its expansion in the later nineteenth century, like that of Chicago, is often
taken to be one of the demonstrations of spectacular growth, urbanization
and concentration of wealth.5 Budapest, therefore, becomes a particularly good
example of sudden and dramatic modernization, with a corresponding increase
in printed matter. Navigating through this amount of material is a formidable
task. In attempting an uncritical or horizontal (as opposed to a hierarchical)
approach, it becomes almost impossible to select which examples are somehow
significant or meaningful. Like a test survey that undertakes several bore-holes
into the terrain, this article will concentrate on a few case-studies drawn from
different groups and socio-economic circles, so as to indicate something of the
meanings and activities across a spectrum. The full range cannot be addressed
here but it is hoped that the samples will give some insight into the broader field
and provide a starting point for future studies.
The First World War had a huge impact on the culture and history of all the
combatant countries, as well as many of the non-combatants. But its effects
in, and on, the Kingdom of Hungary were both momentous and catastrophic.
The experience undoubtedly galvanized the Hungarian intelligentsia and
4
For an introduction to this field, see The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzoeff,
2nd edn (London, 2002) and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation (Chicago, 1994). For an approach that expands the range of art history,
see David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago, 1989).
5
At the first census in 1870, the population of greater Budapest (incorporating Pest, Buda
and Obuda, which were formally unified in 1873) was 302,085. In 1910, it was 1,110,453.
Statistics taken from Budapest statisztikai vknyve 19441946 (Budapest, 1947), p. 12.
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by war loans would help to defend the nation. There are at least nine separate
versions of this theme, the most famous being that by Mihly Bir with the text:
Fegyverrel s Pnzzel Vdjk a hazt. Jegyezznk Hadiklcsnt [Protect the
homeland with money and weapons. Subscribe to the War Loan, 1917].9
There were also many representations of soldiers in uniform bidding farewell
to their families and loved ones in village or rural settings as they set off for
their regiments. This was particularly popular in cheap postcards and magazine
illustrations, indicating the need to recruit and maintain morale across the
urbanrural divide in Hungary. Another aspect to this was the powerful
symbolic role of village life in Hungarian National Romanticism, the dominant
design movement in the period between the 1890s and the outbreak of war.10
Propaganda posters and popular advertisements gave prominence to familiar
motifs of Hungarian peasant culture, especially that of Transylvania, such as
the traditional wooden Szkely Gate and the embroidered shepherds coat or
szr, emphasizing the relevance of the Szkely region to what were considered
the core values of Hungarian national identity. An example of this can be
seen in the poster by Jen Haranghy, A Hadseregnek Pnz Kell [The Army
Needs Money, 1917], depicting an aged Transylvanian peasant wearing a szr;
alongside his grand-daughter, also in traditional costume, he is removing gold
coins from a chest painted in a vernacular tulip style. The secondary text states
Az Orszgos Kzponti Hitelszvetkezet kebelbe tartoz szvetkezeteknl
[Subscribe to the War Loan at co-operatives belonging to the National Central
Credit Co-operative].11
Medieval knights in armour, a popular theme in both German and Austrian
war propaganda, are relatively rare in Hungarian posters, which suggests that
they drew on a different set of familiar and potent symbols. There are, however,
several more specific representations of Matthias Corvinus (14431490), the
Hungarian Renaissance king who was already well established as a symbol of
9
Museum fr angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna, Inv. No. Pl 1667. Other examples by
Alfred Offner [Art.IWM PST 4823] Bla Moldovn [Art.IWM PST 10577] and two unknown
designers [Art.IWM PST 10656 and Art.IWM PST 6704] can be found in the Posters of
Conflict collection at the Imperial War Museum, London, available online at <http://www.
vads.ac.uk/collections/IWMPC.html>.
10
See the literature on the Gdll arts and crafts colony, and on architecture, design and
crafts more broadly in the prewar period. Katalin Gellr, A gdlli mvsztelep (19011920)
(Gdll, 2001) and Katalin Keser, The Workshops of Gdll: transformations of a
Morrisian Theme, Journal of Design History, 1 (1988), 123; Andrzej Szczerski, The Arts
and Crafts Movement in Central Europe, in Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and
Europe at the Fin de Sicle, ed. by Grace Brockington (London, 2009), pp. 10731. On the
role of village life and the folk arts in metropolitan culture, see David Crowley, The Uses of
Peasant Design in Austria-Hungary in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,
Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2/ii (Spring 1995), 228.
11
Imperial War Museum [Art.IWM PST 0226]. For a representation of a Szkely Gate in
this context, see the 1916 poster by G. Wagner, Az Erdlyi Menekltek Javra [Concert for
the Benefit of Transylvanian Refugees] Imperial War Museum [Art.IWM PST 5922].
187
Fig. 1. rpd Basch and Ern Barta, A Nemzeti ldozatkszsg Szobra [The Statue of
National Sacrifice, 1915]. Reproduced courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.
188
See Paul Stirton, Public Sculpture in Cluj/Kolozsvr, in Heritage, Ideology and Identity
in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Matthew Rampley (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 4166.
13
rpd Basch and Ern Barta, A Nemzeti ldozatkszsg Szobra, Imperial War Museum
[IWM PST 6726].
14
On the Wehrmann in Eisen, see Dietlinde Munzel-Everling, Kriegsnagelungen.
Wehrmann in Eisen, Nagel-Roland, Eisernes Kreuz (Wiesbaden, 2008).
15
A good example of this is Bla Moldovns poster Hadifnykp killts [Military
Photography Exhibition] for an exhibition of military photographs to be held at the Nemzeti
Szalon [National Salon] in October and November 1916. Orszgos Szchnyi Knyvtr
[National Szchnyi Library, Budapest], small prints and posters department, Inv. No.
PKG.1916/VH/16.
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reveal the actual experience of many soldiers suffering on various fronts, often
in terrible conditions, but to celebrate the bravery and successes of the troops.
In the same vein, Bla Moldovns 1917 poster celebrating the display of captured
enemy equipment in the Vrosliget [City Park] in Budapest features a soldier
photographer in the foreground. Photography was a popular pastime in which
Hungarians proved to be particularly gifted in the immediate pre- and postwar
period. Many Hungarians were involved in the launch of photographic news
magazines throughout Central Europe, as evidenced in the high standard of
documentary photographs of the war taken by both professional and amateur
photographers.16 This was also promoted by the authorities, which produced
folios of war photographs printed in high-quality photolithography and heliogravure to be sold or distributed to the public at large.
Turning aside from these narrative themes or iconographic types, the war
offers us the opportunity to study the early development of an individual
designer, Mihly Bir, whose work would have a major impact on graphic
design, particularly posters, throughout Central Europe in the postwar period.17
Trained in the Orszgos Magyar Kirlyi Iparmvszti Iskola [Royal Hungarian
School of Applied Arts] Bir had already made a name for himself as a designer
of both commercial and political posters. As early as 1912 he had produced for
the Hungarian Social Democratic Party a powerful anti-war poster, A Hbor
Borzalmai ellen [Against the Horrors of War], in which a uniformed figure
of death is shown shovelling a multitude of tiny people into the breach of a
large cannon. Also in 1912, Bir produced the first version of his Red Man for
the cover of Npszava [The Peoples Voice], a left-wing trade union newspaper.
This monumental male nude wielding a hammer was one of the earliest
departures from the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts tradition of left-wing
political symbolism exemplified in the work of Walter Crane.18 For much of
the war Bir produced propaganda posters in support of the governments
war effort, which allowed him to develop and refine his technique as a poster
artist and designer. By 1918, when the polarization of the political situation
in Budapest was descending into a class war, Bir returned to designing leftwing agitational propaganda and revived the Red Man, which became one of
the most widespread images of the Revolution of 1919, frequently printed over
broadsheet copies of Npszava (Figure 2). The Red Man would continue as a
symbol of Socialist power throughout the interwar period, by which time Bir
had become the leading commercial poster designer in Vienna.19
16
On The War Album see Mihly Simon, sszehasonlit magyar fottrtnet (Budapest,
2000), Chapter 3. Andr Kertsz was one of the early prizewinners in the war photography
competition. The most active of the Hungarian photo-journalists was Stefan Lorant, editor
of the Mnchner Illustrierte Presse and later the founding editor of Picture Post in London.
17
Emil Horn, Mihly Bir (Hannover, 1996) and Mihly Bir. Pathos in Rot, ed. by Peter
Noever, MAK Studies 19 (Vienna, 2010).
18
A major retrospective exhibition of Walter Cranes work was held at the Iparmvszeti
Mzeum in Budapest in 1900.
19
According to Noever, Bir created a new, style-forming genre in Europe before and
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the early twentieth century.22 Kassks first journal, A Tett [The Act], was closed
down in 1916 because of his critical stance towards the war but he immediately
launched another journal, Ma [Today], which became the main focus for the
younger generation of poets, writers and artists (Figure 3).23 Ma was conceived
in more ambitious terms than A Tett in that it promoted literary and musical
performances while also maintaining a gallery and a publishing arm that
produced editions of artists prints.24 Its first edition of original prints, a folio
of linocuts by the Transylvanian artist Jnos Mttis-Teutsch,25 marks a decisive
break with the earlier obsession with Cezanne that characterized the work of
the leading prewar modern art group A Nyolcak [The Eight] or Keresk [The
Seekers].26 Mttis-Teutschs linocuts reveal a distinct Expressionist sensibility, in
terms of both their stylization of natural forms and their emphasis on resonant,
almost sonic effects through the echoing lines emanating out from each
contour of the motif. It is also significant that Mttis-Teutsch should choose to
work in linocut, still a relatively new medium and one that had already been
exploited to great effect by the artists of Die Brcke and Der Blaue Reiter in
the decade before the war. Mttis-Teutsch would remain within this distinctive
aesthetic and continue to work in a somewhat isolated and individual manner.
By contrast, Kassk sought a larger collective ideal in which art and literature
would be the harbingers of a social and political revolution. His countercultural stance in 1916 encouraged a rejection of all earlier art forms, even the
progressive tendencies, in favour of a radical and spontaneous approach to
contemporary experience that had some affinity with Expressionism but was
actually becoming closer to the as yet unformed values of Dada.27
22
On Kassk, see Magam trvnye szerint. Tanulmnyok s dokumentumok Kassk Lajos
szletsnek szzadik vforduljra, ed. by Ferenc Csaplr (Budapest, 1987) and Central
European Avant-Gardes. Exchange and Transformation 19101930, ed. by Timothy Benson
(Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 14264. On the common ground between commercial graphics
and avant-garde art, see articles by Kassk entitled Propaganda and A plakt s az j
festszet [The Poster and the New Painting], Ma, 1/i (November 1916), both republished in
translation in Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 19101930,
ed. by Timothy O. Benson and va Forgcs (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 16266.
23
A Tett was inspired by the left-wing journal Die Aktion. Wochenschrift fr Politik,
Literatur und Kunst, produced in Berlin by Franz Pfemfert.
24
Breaking the Rules. The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 19001937, ed. by
Stephen Bury (London, 2007).
25
The Linoleum-Albuma of 1917 was a portfolio of 12 linocuts in an edition of 100. See
Konrad Oberhuber et al., Mattis Teutsch and Der Blaue Reiter (Budapest, 2001).
26
This group also had affinities with the Fauves in Paris. See Magyar vadak Prizstl
Nagybnyig 19041914, ed. by Krisztina Passuth and Gyrgy Szcs (Budapest, 2006).
Despite this, it was Czanne, above all, who captivated Hungarian artists and intellectuals
in the period leading up to and during the First World War.
27
The first Dada Manifesto was read out by Hugo Ball in Zurich in July 1916. News of the
groups activities and their publications only began to appear outside Switzerland in late
1916 and 1917, especially through the journal DADA founded by Tristan Tzara in July 1917.
See Dawn Ades, The Dada reader. A critical anthology (London, 2006).
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195
Lajos Kassk, A Ma demonstrativ killitshoz, Ma, 3/viiiix (15 September 1918), 90.
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197
On Tichy, see Magyar mvszet 18901919, ed. by Lajos Nmeth (Budapest, 1981), pp. 445
53, and Katalin Gellr, A szecesszis knyvillusztrci Magyarorszgon (18951925) (Miskolc,
1997), pp. 5456.
34
As Secretary of State for War, Kitcheners image had graced British recruitment posters;
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avant-garde and to the internationalist spirit that was emerging in all the arts.
If the war can be said to have acted as a stimulus to artists in Hungary, helping
to create a vibrant and creative environment for innovation across the full
spectrum from commercial graphics to the avant-garde, the postwar regime
was its opposite. At the very moment when Hungarian artists seemed ready
to participate on the European stage, these opportunities were closed down
at home. Most of the figures mentioned in this article sought refuge outside
Hungary, where they continued to develop within an international network
of galleries, journals, exhibitions and colleges. Bir went to Vienna, as did the
Ma circle before moving on individually to centres such as Berlin, Moscow,
Weimar, Dessau and eventually London. Postwar Hungarian art that sprang
from the experience of the war can be viewed as having split into two camps
those who returned to a somewhat provincial Hungary after an amnesty in
192526, and those like Moholy-Nagy who settled into the cosmopolitan centres
of Modernism throughout the continent.