Károly Tamkó Sirató and His Rediscovery by the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde

Fenyő, Dániel (2025) Károly Tamkó Sirató and His Rediscovery by the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde. THEATRON: SZÍNHÁZTUDOMÁNYI PERIODIKA, 19 (4). pp. 41-52. ISSN 1418-9941

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Abstract

The continuity between the Hungarian historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde in terms of poetical and habitual similarities is also a conscious labour on tradition. At the time of the emergence of the neo-avant-garde, artists of the historical avant-garde—despite of the adverse circumstances during Hungarian state socialism, but due to their international recognition—possessed a symbolic authority and historical relevance that could not be ignored by those who proclaimed themselves as an artist of the neo-avant-garde. However, the transformation of the historical avant-garde into a tradition by the neo-avant-garde involves processes of sorting: neo-avant-garde artists selected and chose particular elements of the historical avant-garde that seemed relevant to them, based on their own interests and the surrounding context. Nevertheless, the historical avant-garde artists were still alive at the time of the emergence of the neo-avant-garde, thus they experienced their oeuvre becoming tradition. Consequently, they had the opportunity to intervene in this process through their statements and reflections. This paper discusses the example of Károly Tamkó Sirató, whose Dimensionist Manifesto was elaborated in the 1930s and became a point of reference for certain circles of the neo-avant-garde in the 1970s. The peculiarity of this case is that while his earlier work became more valuable, Károly Tamkó Sirató did not consider dimensionism to be directly continuable during this period; instead, he proposed a different method to revive the tradition of the historical avant-garde.

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