Both these books are authoritative statements on their subject, complete with the needed scholarly apparatus. Their target readership are students and others with a special interest. Exhibition catalogues and books in many parts of the world have discussed these themes, with some of the present authors as contributors—both books include a comprehensive list of the relevant publications. Works by Czech Cubists, Constructivists and Poetists have been shown (more than once) in Budapest, and there has also been an important exhibition devoted to the Zenit circle and to a group of Polish Constructivists. A small exhibition featuring Estonian Modernism and Avant-garde art was held in Pécs in 1991, though making a small impact, and the material selected left much to be desired. Since the 1960s, the Hungarian Avant-garde has been abundantly represented in Hungarian and foreign exhibitions alike, corresponding to the important role it played in the art and literature of the region. Judging by their past publications, both authors are well aware of this fact, in the books under review, however, only Krisztina Passuth stresses it in her insightful analysis.

In the An Anthology of Dadaism, edited by László Beke, we are treated to some fine translations of Kurt Schwitters’ and Tristan Tzara’s writings from the 1920s, along with the Hungarian rendering of some poems by that master translator, Dezső Tandori (for example, "The Dialogue of the Coach-Driver and the Lark," by Richard Hülsenbeck—Tristan Tzara or "The Hyperbole of the Crocodile Hairdresser and the Walking Stick", the latter he translated twice, in 1982 and 1986). Beke himself has provided his own translations of both prose and poetry. Thus, the texts take centre stage. The postscript, the notes and the black-and-white photographs on their part, serve as sign posts only as regards the artists, settings and works of a movement once regarded as scandalous.

At this stage we might well ask whether the year 1907, which also appears in Krisztina Passuth’s title, can be taken as the starting point of the Avant-garde as a movement. She identifies it with the beginnings of Cubism in Paris, László Beke on the other hand includes Symbolist and Expressionist verse as a manifestation of the Avant-garde. Both approaches are familiar from other scholars as well, not to mention dating that differs from both. Mario de Micheli goes back furthest to 1848. These days S. A. Mansbach and others also look on Art Nouveau and the Modernism of the 1890s as an Avant-garde movement. Partisans of a more rigorous definition—myself included—only speak of an Avant-garde after 1910. The Cubist approach to space and time and to new image structures only became fully-fledged then, completely changing the world, seen as an active social force, and precisely in Central and Eastern Europe. Just before the outbreak of the First World War (1913) and during it, it synthesized with German Expressionism which started around 1905, and with Futurism, created by Italian artists in Milan and Paris in and after 1909, which embarked on the conquest of the whole of the continent of Europe. Krisztina Passuth does not focus on particular schools and trends, but discusses in detail specific locations, events and artists.

The jacket cover of Krisztina Passuth’s Avant-garde Connections from Prague to Budapest features the poster for the 1924 exhibition of the Belgrade group, Zenit, which declared itself in a manifesto by the Serb poet and the movement’s chief organizer, Ljubomir Micic´, to be one of the "idea flyers", symbolizing friendship between the innovating artists of all countries. Ignoring historical problems, Krisztina Passuth does not discuss the historical context of the Europe of the 1910s and 1920s—barely mentioning the gestures of those avant-garde activists who tried to disregard the prevailing conditions. Her book offers a rich selection of the Cubo-Expressionist paintings and sculptures of the Prague and Brno museums, along with some works by individuals and groups within the Polish Avant-garde, and several portraits of Tristan Tzara (including one by the Hungarian painter Lajos Tihanyi and another by M. H. Maxy).

Tristan Tzara was first a Romanian Symbolist poet. In 1916, when Romania entered the war, he and his friend Marcel Iancu packed all their belongings into suitcases and took the train to Zurich in neutral Switzerland. There, they and other East and Central-European artists in exile, dressed in vividly coloured paper clothes and recited cabaret poems in French or German. Dadaism mostly figures as something Western; both books deserve credit for modifying this simplified picture. Krisztina Passuth places greater emphasis on the preliminaries, Beke on his part points to the universal in what to others appears as of merely local of Central or Eastern European significance.

Krisztina Passuth closely observes the emergence of new techniques, iconographic types and formal elements in the areas she considers as important. She concentrates her attention topographically on Czech, Polish, Romanian and South Slav manifestations as well as on the Hungarian Avant-garde in both Budapest and Vienna. Somewhat exaggerating, she declares in her opening pages: "Before 1914 avant-garde movements were present in two Central-European countries, in Bohemia and Hungary." Fortunately, a few paragraphs later she does underline the importance of what went on in Germany, and at several points in her book she also addresses the impact of Futurism. She tends to give more emphasis to Berlin in the twenties, saying less about Dresden and Munich. She has greater sympathy for education through art at Weimar and Dessau than for the anti-militarist and anarchist Berlin Die Aktion. She is unimpressed by Die Aktion’s graphic work—quite unfairly—describing it as secondary. She has less to say about Expressionism, and though she mentions Futurism in various connections, she largely overlooks the often dubious, but in their importance crucial, links between the Futurists and the other avant-garde movements. In any event, for her Paris Cubism takes pride of place.

She is able to establish what is Futurist about the early Hungarian Activists, yet she makes no mention of the fact that the first Futurist manifesto (drafted in Paris in 1909) was published in Budapest in April 1910 in the journal Nyugat in Mihály Babits’s translation (and this happened in other places in Central and Eastern Europe as well). The poets and critics of Nyugat (Babits, Kosztolányi, Dezső Szabó), along with a member of the first Modernist group, Nyolcak (The Eight), the painter Róbert Berény discussed and argued against, the Futurist approach. In 1962, Krisztina Passuth published a book on the painting of The Eight and in several exhibitions which she arranged these Expressionist and Naturalist painters were presented as the first avant-garde movement in Hungary. In the light of current research, The Eight, who were followers of Cézanne and other Post-Impressionists, seem more like an intermediate step towards the Avant-garde, with only a few of them (Berény, Tihanyi) becoming involved in the politically tainted avant-garde genres.

Krisztina Passuth’s Paris-centred notion of the Avant-garde before the mid-1920s is a by-product of a number of exhibitions and the research connected with them. Over several decades she has written on the Hungarian Cubists in Paris (Alfréd Réth, József Csáky, et al.), and she played a major part in the production of the catalogue of the Paris exhibition of FrantisŠek Kupka’s oeuvre, as well as in the famous Paris-Berlin exhibition emphasizing the primacy of Paris. Thus her championing of Paris is a logical outcome of a claim, in many respects well-founded, which goes back to the 19th century. She has found a painter-genius in the person of Kupka to give substance to this idea. His musically-structured Cubist and Orphic compositions and organic abstract paintings made him a true creator of new painterly values, one of the outstanding artists in Central Europe’s approaching closest to the ideal Avant-garde, an equal of Kandinsky. A similar intellectuality was present in the exhibitions of the Berlin Der Sturm, which after the 1910s paid respect to Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Orphism and to the artists of the Munich Blauer Reiter. A sad yet dignified relict of this age is Egon Schiele’s drawing on the cover of the 1914 Die Aktion, showing the features of Charles Peguy, the French poet who was killed in one of the opening battles of the war. A similar gesture was the publication, in Zsófia Dénes’ translation, of Apollinaire’s essay on Cubism by the Hungarian magazine MA. Its editor, Lajos Kassák, who in 1909 had walked on foot all the way to Paris, always spoke of the primacy of Cubism, and both Futurism and Expressionism were strongly criticized in his magazine; nevertheless, in the first wave of the Hungarian Avant-garde, that is amongst the artists grouped around the magazines MA and Tett, all three movements were equally present. Passuth notes these distinctions when discussing the oeuvres of individual artists such as Béla Uitz and Sándor Bortnyik, but prefers not to draw any general conclusions, perhaps to avoid simplifications.

The painter, sculptor and graphic artist Máttis Teutsch, most highly favoured by Krisztina Passuth, had no direct ties with Kupka. Like him, he was nevertheless a spiritual, orphic avant-garde artist. Krisztina Passuth started to discuss him back in the 1970s, drawing attention to his special qualities, manifest in colouring and form. His art took shape in the Paris– Berlin–Munich–Budapest–Rome context. The more’s the pity that, because of a number of Bucharest exhibitions, she discusses the second period of the Brasow-based artist as part of the Romanian Avant-garde.

Krisztina Passuth gives primacy to Máttis Teutsch but discusses all the principal members of the Hungarian Avant-garde. The presentation of the Hungarian Dada is a shade paler in László Beke’s selection and his own essay than the reality. Bearing in mind that, after the shared Futurist preludes, Kassák included a quasi-Dadaist poem in his first volume, Eposz Wagner maszkjában (An Epic Poem in Wagner’s Mask) as early as 1915, with a German translation also published in the anti-militarist Zurich newspaper Der Mistral, we are bound to feel it unjust to begin an anthology of Hungarian Dada with Tibor Déry’s forgotten writings, overlooking the earlier volumes of Kassák, the author of Világanyám (Universe Mother, 1921) and the Dadaist masterpiece "A ló meghal a madarak kirepülnek" (The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away, 1922).

Krisztina Passuth pays a great deal more attention to the Avant-garde events of the "main centres" of the 1920s (Berlin, Paris), than to the goings-on of the early 1910s. In this book she once again shows herself partial to the Bohemian, Polish, Romanian and Yugoslav Avant-garde. Sadly, neither the Slovakian nor the Hungarian Avant-garde of Pozsony (Bratislava) nor Kassa (Kosice) or Losonc (LucŠenec) are present in her account of the region. Noris there any mention of the Avant-garde literature and art of the Transylvanian cities of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and Arad, with their Hungarian magazines Kiáltás (Scream), Napkelet (East), Korunk (Our Age), and Periszkóp (Periscope), each abounding with ideas and closely tied to the mainstream of European modernism. The Serbian Zenit from the Voivodina is the only Újvidék (Novi Sad) entry, even though there was also a Hungarian Activist publication there, Az Út (The Road), edited by Zoltán Csuka, who captured the tragic and precarious historical position of Central Europe in a number of Expressionist poems. Csuka discovered the signs of disintegration in the Central Europe of the 1920s, while his Activist/Constructivists fellow artists were building the sand castles of the future, and the "idea Aeroplanes" (Micic´) were commuting between the centres and the peripheries.

At a time when many were already burying Expressionism in German, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian and

Estonian publications, the Expressionist/ Dadaist modes still seemed timely in this part of Europe. (The latter three are, again, sadly left out of Krisztina Passuth’s book.)

In the 1920s an absurd version of Expressionism, influenced by Dada, appeared in remote towns in Central Europe, (such as Osiek and Subotica in the Voivodina, as Krisztina Passuth herself mentions) on stage, in magazines and in books. Ödön Palasovszky and his friends in Budapest, who receive little attention in either book, produced Tristan Tzara’s Gas-Heart in Endre Gáspár’s translation. This production presented in an ironic vein the myth of the avant-garde artist’s supremacy and his power to change the world, as proclaimed by Kupka, Kassák and Marinetti:

"…man is dirty, he kills off the animals, the plants and his brothers and sisters, he is contentious, intelligent and talks too much... But the artist is able to produce creative forms which become organic." These were Tristan Tzara’s words, who looked back with an incredulous nostalgia on a dream born at the beginning of the century.

Beginning with the 1960s, the programmes and forms of European Constructivism revived all over the world; in conjunction with this, Dada and Oberdada were also resuscitated in both poetry, performance and mockery. I mention only one event, which took place in Budapest in the Spring of 1999. In the private gallery Studio 1900, a young artist, Tibor Bada Dada, showed his provocative paintings and collages, along with a video recording which captured him dressed in Dada costume, doing his physical jerks while repeating the battle cries of Total Spring as the heir of the immortal Dada. His paintings feature The Werewolf in the Deadly Spring and Moon Ring Triangle and the Cubo-Cosmic Conversion with the Sunrise. With both sleeves of his jacket cut off, the young man wore a colourful hat decorated with strange figures, and was visibly trembling with cold. His performance, poems and pictures would not have seemed out of place in the anthology compiled by Beke and, being a native of Újvidék (Novi Sad), his name could have been mentioned by Krisztina Passuth.