The Hungarian Avant-Garde in Late Socialism

Examines art and culture in Kadar- era Hungary.

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The Kadar era arguably offered Hungarians more freedom than their Eastern Bloc counterparts. At the same time the regime's socio-cultural policies remained rigid and their impact on Hungarian art was significant. In the first English-language study on the period's avant-garde art, Katalin Cseh-Varga deconstructs the binary distinction that existed between the official (first) and unofficial (second) public sphere. In doing so she discovers how performative and intermedia art formed an independent field of action which consisted of artists' studios, exhibitions, cellars, chapels and shop windows, which were all entwined with the official sphere, but simultaneously rejected it. She argues that the Central and Eastern European art worlds looked outwards, but were also dependent upon their domestic governments, and that it was within this unique overlapping space that innovative art emerged which added to the extraordinary dialogue between the first and second spheres of the late socialist era.