This recent exhibition in Budapest assembles a fascinating documentation of the life and work of Dr. Alice Madzsar-Jászi (Photo 1), who, from her first opening of a dance school in 1912 to her untimely death in 1935, wove an intricate path through the cultural, political, and artistic avant-gardes of modern Hungary. At the turn of the century, just ten years before Madzsar launched her school, Isadora Duncan had made her solo debut in Budapest, where her improvisation to Strauss's “Blue Danube Waltz” had affected the Hungarian audience like “an electric shock” (Duncan Reference Duncan1927: 74). Madzsar was one of the key figures to channel that early modernist shock into the collective body electric in an increasingly diversified set of dance-related body practices, including free dance, movement culture for women's health, avant-garde theater, worker's sport, recitation choruses, and collective spectacles (Photo 2).

Photo 1: Olga Máté: Portrait Photograph of Alice Madzsar. 1 Jan 1930, photo, courtesy of the family.

Photo 2: Anonymous: Polyp – Gymnastic exercises (Madzsar school). 1929, photo, Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute – Dance Archive.

Her dance and movement school, which was open from 1912–1937, introduced a synthetic mix of ideas and practices, from the therapeutic gymnastics propagated by Bess Mensendieck, to a characterology of movement oriented toward bodily beauty and health, to current European dance thought such as the methods of Rudolf Laban and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Notably, Madzsar's school was part of a broader flourishing of dance and body culture taught by Hungarian women, including the orchestric pedagogy of Valéria Dienes, whose school was active from 1912–1944, and Olga Szentpál, whose school spanned the years from 1917–1951. Moreover, Madzsar, like Dienes and Szentpál, disseminated her thought not only through her school, but also in writing aimed at a wider public. Most importantly, she published a major study in Hungarian in 1927 as A női testkultúra új útjai (New Directions of Women's Body Culture) and posthumously in French in 1936 as La culture physique de la femme moderne Madzsar Reference Madzsar1927 and Reference Madzsar1936.

Alice Madzsar is also a fascinating figure for her intimate proximity to two men at the center of early twentieth-century Hungarian political and intellectual life: her brother, the sociologist, historian, and founder of the Radical Party, Oszkár Jászi, and her husband, József Madzsar, a polymathic figure who was a remarkable physician and public health expert, director of the Budapest city library, a leader in the Radical Party, a syndicalist, and eventually a social-democrat and communist activist (he died in the USSR in 1940, a victim of Stalin's terror).

Oszkár Jászi, as founding editor of the influential sociological journal Huszadik Szazád (Twentieth Century), was a key figure in the modernist intellectual awakening in the period up to the end of World War I, which included other such luminaries as the philosopher and literary critic György Lukács, sociologist Karl (Karóly) Mannheim, economist Karl Polányi and his brother Michael Polányi, art critics Lajos Fulöp and Charles de Tolnay, poet and film theorist Béla Bálazs, composer and musical ethnographer Béla Bártok, and artist Anna Lésznai (who was Jászi's first wife). The groups and salons to which Madzsar thus had entry or to which she was linked by close contiguity include Lukács's famous Sunday Circle, the modernist painting group “Nyolcok” (“The Eight”), the sociologically oriented Galileo Circle, and the transformative modernist literary journal Nyugat (The West). Jászi himself advocated an anti-imperial republican politics and a Central European multinational alliance of “Danubian” countries; for his expertise on the vexed questions around national minorities and national self-determination posed by the collapse of the East and Central European empires, he served for a short time in the republican government of Mihály Karólyi as Minister of Nationalities. After the fall of the Karólyi government to the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919, Jászi went into exile, eventually coming to the United States in 1925.

His sister Alice, in contrast, remained with her husband József Madzsar in Hungary during the Soviet Republic, in which he served as a people's commissar of public health. After the regime fell and under pressure from the counter-revolutionary order that followed, József Madzsar eventually went into exile between 1921 and 1924. Consolidation and amnesty allowed some émigrés’ to return to Hungary under better political conditions; however, József became a left-wing Social Democrat, later joined the illegal Hungarian Communist Party, and eventually (in 1931) was appointed editor of the legal communist journal, Társadalmi Szemle (Social Review). By the mid-1920s, Alice had expanded her dance school's activity to include a teacher's training program, and at the same time, she forged multiple connections with the left-leaning theatrical and literary avant-garde, which represented a spectrum of cultural-political positions from expressionistic and constructivist tendencies to politicized documentary orientations to Proletcult and mass spectacle. Her political associations migrated in parallel with those of her husband, from independent left and social-democratic–oriented cultural tendencies such as the veteran avant-gardist Lajos Kassák's Documentum and Munka (Work) groups to alignment with the rival Communist Party cultural journal 100%, edited by Kassák's junior ex-protegé and bitter critic Aladár Tamás.

As its situation in the Kassák Museum might suggest, the Budapest exhibition's true center of gravity lies with this interwar historical, political, and cultural context, especially in the approximately ten years between the return of some of the émigré cultural left to Budapest and Alice's death in 1935. The exhibition title references the growing convergence of movement or body culture, as it was developed pedagogically and therapeutically by Alice and others prior to the war, with various interwar left-wing currents in the arts as well as political and popular culture. Alice's life-long mission of reforming the posture, shape, and movements of the body shifted over these years emphatically from the individual frame of therapeutic dance practice to a collective one, in which the struggle for a socialist culture was to be performatively enacted and instantiated by new mass dispositions and interactions of workers’ bodies.

As a Reference Gárdos1929 article in Munka by Magda Gárdos on “Women's Body Culture” argued:

Given the emphasis, however, in both the political vanguards of the time and among the expressionist-influenced leftwing artistic avant-gardes, on the formation of the “new man,” Alice Madzsar's specific focus on women's body culture suggests her special perspective on and contribution to this common politico-cultural aspiration of the period. For the socialist body-politic, the collective body of the “new man,” Madzsar implied in her expanding body-culture practice, was unimaginable without accounting for its distinctive feminine traits.

One can trace the gradual reinscription of Madzsar's female body-culture thought in different contexts by considering three photographs spanning a few years in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The first (Photo 3) shows one of Madzsar's most accomplished students, Ágnes Kövesházi, nude in a seaside pose related to the neo-Hellenistic aestheticism of Isadora Duncan. She is seen at a distance, as one among several figural elements of the photograph's highly stylized graphic design, and is literally incorporated, like a sculpture on a plinth, into the landscape view. The image emphasizes her limberness, the simplified abstraction of her highly artificial pose, and the wavelike litheness of her body, which is literally reflected in the still more abstract shadow cast on the rippling water. She exemplifies the principle of progressive body culture that Alice Madzsar would make explicit in an article, “Body Culture and Progress,” in Reference Duncan1927 (accompanied by another image from the same series of Kövesházi nudes; Photo 4):

Photo 3: József Madzsar: Ágnes Kövesházi. late 1920s, photo, Ferenc Kiss Collection.

Photo 4: József Madzsar: Ágnes Kövesházi. Late 1920s, photo. In Madzsar Józsefné Jászi Alice: “Testkultúra és haladás” (Body Culture and Progress). Új Föld, Feb Reference Madzsar1927, p. 18.

The second image suggests what this translation of harmonious movement into theatrical monumentality might look like. It shows the dancer Magda Róna in action in a theatrical performance in collaboration with the avant-garde theater director Ödön Palasovszky. Draped in a short silk dress and sidling up to the oversized, modernistically simplified bull (Photo 5), she plays Europa in The Abduction of Europa. The scene is playful, satirical, and populistic in its exaggerated, “device revealing” stylization (i.e., the transparent presence of two overly long sets of human legs and un-hooflike bare feet supporting the bull outfit)—befitting Palasovszky's projection of the new avant-garde theater as a sensational form reaching out to the masses and affecting them collectively, as ancient myth, ritual, and tragedy once did. Analogously, in a Reference Gró1927 article in Dokumentum, the Kassák circle film theorist Lajos Gró suggested the convergence of body culture with the mass art form of the cinema: “Between the body culture that has grown into a mass movement and the film that has developed into a mass art this mass characteristic is one of the most essential affinities. The second, one of the structural similarities of both, is movement” (33).

Photo 5: Anonymous: Abduction of Europa, Magda Róna as Europa. 1931, photo, Hungarian National Museum. Number: 76. 242.

The third image (Photo 6) accompanies an article on Ágnes Kövesházi from the Communist Party cultural journal 100%. It shows the dancer in loose-fitting workpants, a worker's undershirt, and a cap under which her hair is hidden. It emphasizes her tense muscularity and her aggressive posture, as well as her androgynously slender lack of definite female features; she appears like a stylized boy-apprentice in the factory or workshop. The article's author, Sándor Gergely, describes a scene from a dance that Kövesházi performed before the audiences of workers’ cultural associations. Of one dance entitled “Work,” he writes that Kövesházi

Here, the passage from the first image's static spectacle to the second's dynamic performance actor to a proto-agitational representational practice that hovers on the threshold of effective social action is nearly consummated, accompanied by a reimagination of the female body as an instrument of work. It is important to note, however, that these three “stages” of women's body culture—the individual-therapeutic, the theatrical-performative, and the active-effective—are only phases in the sense of a conceptual dialectic, not exclusive moments of Madzsar's oeuvre. In Madzsar's actual practice of the 1920s and early 1930s, they were intertwined as alternating and interrelated possibilities, and the exhibition indicates her consistent engagement with all three dimensions of body culture.

Photo 6: Ágnes Kövesházi, proletarian dance performance. Illustration to Sándor Gergely: Ágnes Köveshözi. 100%, Reference Gergely1928–29. p. 131.

It was, however, in two other forms of collective body culture that the Hungarian cultural left, including the Madzsar circle, ultimately invested its greatest hopes of making this full transition from art to action: the collective movement and recitation chorus, and workers’ sports, and it is to these I turn in conclusion. Both of these outgrowths of body cultures failed, in different senses, to fulfill the utopian wishes and aspirations the intellectuals of the politicized avant-gardes discerned in them.

The recitation-chorus, orchestrated with accompanying dance or dramatic movement, appeared to the artistic left of this generation to offer a way to overcome the individual, subjective nature of art, lending monumentality to the work's interpretation through the collective unity of voices and bodies on stage, and breaking down the distinctions between performers and audience by incorporating workers into the mass spectacles (Photo 7). In the communist cultural journal 100%, Aladár Tamás argued that the recitation-chorus was the spontaneous development of a new art form out of the spirit of the masses:

In another anonymous article in 100% dedicated to the subject, the author argued that although after the world war there were various theatrical experiments with choral performance, “What exclusively makes it possible for the choruses’ to become one of the first budding glimpses and subsequently realizations of a new, socialist art are the proletarian recitation-choruses” (Anonomous 1928–29: 26). Yet with the benefit of historical perspective, neither the avant-garde experiments nor the socialist adaptations of them really proved artistically generative. The most artistically sophisticated practitioners, such as Lajos Kassák and his wife Jólan Simon, attempted to grapple with the specific problems of the form, seeking neither to vulgarize it artistically to dry propaganda or agitational kitsch, nor to betray its performative connotations of socialistic collectivity. Nevertheless, it might be justly said that even they sought in choral culture too direct a path through the mediations of artistic form and reception to effective communication with the masses. The result was, in Theodor Adorno's term, a symptomatic “extorted reconciliation” (Adorno Reference Adorno and Nicholsen1991: 216ff)—a forced and ultimately fragile concord between the modern artist, his artistic idiom, and the mass reception of his work. In this instance, between the internal contradictions of the art form and the external blows dealt to the worker's movement by fascism and Stalinism, the imputed unity of choral art disintegrated and surprisingly swiftly disappeared from the cultural scene. Ironically, it was left to fascism to piece together the shards of this collectivist wish-dream in its own confected mass spectacles, though even here, it must be admitted, with only temporary political and cultural success.

Photo 7: Anonymous: Seized by the Machine, a scene from the movement drama Handcuffs. 1930, photo, Hungarian National Museum. Number: 81.45.

The other hoped-for overcoming of the individual performative work, in proletarian sport (Photo 8), proved equally disappointing, though for different reasons. The recitation- and movement-choruses failed to realize their promise as a mass art form because, in the end, it could not bridge the gap between modern art forms and proletarian audiences or sustain mass interest beyond a fairly narrow group of intellectuals and socialist activists. In contrast, the sports spectacles in which Hungarian left intellectuals, like their German counterparts Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow in their famous 1932 film Kuhle Wampe, put their revolutionary hopes, succeeded all too well in becoming mass culture. As László Sós wrote in an article on the National Celebration of the Worker's Physical Exercise Association: “But beware! … Worker's sports can only develop through the class struggle, only if they do not become ‘pure sports,’ but workers sports, only if the workers’ sportsmen and sportswomen are awakened, through the Marxist and dialectical materialist world-view, to class consciousness” (Sós Reference Sós1928–29: 385). Very true indeed, though in a quite different sense than Sós intended. The “proletarian” culture of sports devolved all too easily into a manipulated state culture or spectacular culture industry with only the occasional unanticipated spark of critical negativity left in their future. Hardly to be orchestrated by party intellectuals were singular instances such as Jesse Owens's Olympic gold medal long-jump victory in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—incongruously recorded by Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia—which posed its exemplary challenge to both the doctrinal racialism of his Nazi hosts and the everyday racism of his American sponsors.

Photo 8: MAFIRT (Hungarian Film Office): Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association (WGA) ceremony at the Millennium Arena, 1930s, fénykép, photo, Hungarian National Museum. Number: 65. 3806.