User:Luni/Lajos
By working across different branches of art and creating works of equal significance as a writer and as a visual artist, he provided an eminent example for the breaking down of barriers between art forms which was, as we shall see, central to his avant-gardist credo. This article discusses a work that combines literature and visual art: a ‘picture-poem’. Concrete poetry, where the typographical arrangement ‘spells out’ an image, was popular with the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde. The best-known examples are Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880–1918) ‘calligrams,’ particularly The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain (1913–1916). While the typography of the latter poem visualises the motifs in its title, Kassák’s picture-poems – as he called them – are nonfigurative; similar to the Constructivist compositions he was producing at the time. But how far did the abstraction go? As one of Kassák’s longest and most complex picture-poems, Numbered Poem No 18 provides an intriguing case study for examining the relationship between Kassák’s professed avant-garde principles and his somewhat contradictory tendency to subjective introspection. In order to do so, text and image have to be discussed as an integral whole.