magyar

The ways of concrete poetry
From planar poems to dimensionism

“If the fog surrounding Lajos Kassák only really began to lift in the 1970s, it can be said that the neglect surrounding Károly Tamkó Sirató had an even longer lasting effect, as the reception of his progressive work only took place in the 1980s. In essence, both artists only received the professional attention they deserved after their deaths. Not that Tamkó's avant-garde activities can be ranked alongside Kassák's multifaceted activism and socio-political sensitivity in terms of volume, but there was a segment of his artistic ideology derived from poetry that could always be placed alongside the internationally significant output of Kassák's picture-poem production. The basis of this opus, which brings together several forms of poetics, was the dimensionalist view of art, which was a phenomenon of the time, and no one has expressed its character as authoritatively and with as much faith as Tamko, who was in the French capital.”