For decades, the MNMKK–PIM–Kassák Museum and the Kassák Foundation have been committed to studying the relationship between avant-garde art and workers’ movements. From 2026, the Kassák Foundation will host a new international research program. The European Research Council (ERC) – the EU’s most competitive funding body for groundbreaking research – has awarded a five-year grant to our colleague, Gábor Dobó. The project, titled The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of the East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars (ProletGard), will involve several postdoctoral researchers and PhD students, focusing on the entire East-Central European region. It aims to explore the interactions between workers’ culture, labor movements, and the avant-garde in this part of Europe. How were avant-garde journals circulated in the region, and how did they shape the workers’ communities of the newly formed nation-states? Can we speak of an East-Central European “proletarian avant-garde,” and if so, how did it become integrated into global modernisms? What, where, and when did members of the working class read? What role did the avant-garde play in shaping the heterogeneous counterculture of workers’ movements? Expected outcomes of the project include a special journal issue, a monograph, and a series of exhibitions.
More news coming soon!
Photo: Our project manager colleague, Gábor Dobó, and the head of the Kassák Museum and the Kassák Foundation, Pál Merse Szeredi.