Hungarian Studies Review Spring-Fall, 2004 [antikvár]

Preface The present volume is the third in a series I have been editing since 1988 on Hungárián fine arts.1 While the studies gathered here have no unifying theme, they all deal with an aspect of Hungárián modernist and avant-garde visual arts, and they cover the last century from its early years to its very conclusion. Part of his upcoming detailed biography of László Moholy-Nagy, Lloyd Engelbrecht's article looks in detail at Moholy-Nagy's high school (,gimnázium) schooling, in order to better understand the later wide-ranging work of this 20lh century "Renaissance Man." In her article, Mariann Mazzone examines the ways in which the képversek [picture poems] of Lajos Kassák draw from both the discourses of Dada and Constructivism. In the critique of abstract artistic practices she uses to frame this discussion, she "posit[s] ... that what is now always seen as 'purity' may instead be at times mute geometry, work that has failed in its goal of communication, lost its voice, so to speak." Ruth E. Iskin looks at Moholy-Nagy as a theorist and practitioner of an art of pure light. Following his writings and invoking the theoretical work of the Germán art histórián Erwin Panowsky she has produced an originál reading of Moholy-Nagy's use of light in his work as a way of overcoming Renaissance perspective as a spatial paradigm in contemporary art. She goes on to compare Moholy-Nagy's approach with that of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and concludes with a look at how somé of Moholy-Nagy's ideas have been realized in the field of contemporary art, but in ways that Moholy-Nagy did not foresee. Drawn from his recent dissertation, James Wechsler's article on the Hungárián-American artist Hugó Gellert, sheds light for the first time on this Leftist artist's connections with his homeland and with the Hungárián community in the United States.