RADICAL WOMEN
Jolán Simon and Other Female Artists in Hungarian Avant-Garde Periodic
Zoom webinar & YouTube Live

East Central European Center hosts a webinar series on interwar art and culture. The East Central Vanguard: New Perspectives on the Avant-garde lecture series focuses on artists from East Central Europe whose art practices and contributions to various local and international avant-gardes have attracted less or no critical attention within Modernism Studies.

Gábor Dobó investigates how, just shortly after the global turmoil caused by the First World War, a dense transnational network was established by East-Central European radical artists, in which avant-garde journals played a central role. In this presentation, Dobó will focus on the role of Hungarian periodicals in this process, specifically, the role of Hungarian avant-garde women, who usually appear in supporting roles (if at all) in the history of Modernism, although they played an important part in this story, actively contributing to and shaping the field. Besides covering their multifaceted, yet until now largely under-researched activities, Dobó will also reflect on their structural invisibility within the avant-garde movements themselves. A particular focus will be on Jolán Simon, who is primarily known as the wife of artist and Ma editor Lajos Kassák. Based on recent archival findings, Dobó will explore her then-influential activity in such less-canonized fields as performative arts, journal editing, avant-garde networking, and education in the milieu of trade unions. How did Hungarian women enter the public sphere using the avant-garde journal as their platform that also allowed them to shape their own public image? How can we reconstruct their largely ephemeral activities, especially if, as in the case of Jolán Simon, they were mostly active in the workers’ movement, far from prestigious and established cultural institutions? And finally, instead of merely demanding the canonization of these figures, how can the basic framework of literary and art history be questioned through the research of East-Central European avant-garde women?

Gábor Dobó is a PhD literary historian. He studied at universities in Hungary, Italy, and France. He has been working at the Kassák Museum – Petőfi Literary Museum (Budapest) since 2015 as a member of the research project “Lajos Kassák’s Avant-garde Journals from an Interdisciplinary Perspective (1915–1928)." He has widely published essays, edited volumes, curated several exhibitions and organized conferences on the topic of avant-garde journals and movements.
He is a committee member of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit). He was awarded a Fulbright visiting scholarship to the Harriman Institute at Columbia University recently.


The presentation will be held on Tuesday, March 30th at 4PM ET.

Register here or tune in on YouTube Live.