The ERC-funded ProletGard project explores the relationship between workers’ movements and the global modern art scene. It analyses the circulation, reception and production of working-class and avant-garde publications in East Central Europe between the two World Wars. Furthermore, it investigates how these periodicals crossed administrative and linguistic boundaries of emerging nation-states, serving as platforms for cultural and political negotiation.

What is the problem being addressed?

We know who created avant-garde art and literature in the early twentieth century, but it is often unclear to whom it was addressed and who actually received it. Why, then, are audiences especially important when it comes to avant-garde art?

Avant-garde groups fundamentally transformed the relationship between art and everyday life. They questioned the role of bourgeois cultural institutions in artistic production and championed the fusion of art and life by integrating genres rooted in popular culture or even beyond what was conventionally considered art (political action, experiments with telecommunication, cuisine). Their aim was to bring art from elite circles to a much broader social base.

The history of the avant-garde has largely been shaped by Western European and North American narratives. This is understandable, since major museums and universities in the First World had the resources during the Cold War to develop and disseminate influential canons and theories that came to shape “universal” art history. However, this Western-centric framework distorted the history of the avant-garde by interpreting Eastern European and other non-Western movements as deviations from a supposedly universal model derived from Western Europe and North America.

Recent scholarship acknowledges multiple modernisms, including those of Eastern Europe, the Global South, ethnic minorities, and women. Yet the interaction between avant-garde initiatives and working-class movements in East Central Europe remains insufficiently explored. This matters because it shaped the turbulent and “entangled” successor states of the Austro–Hungarian Empire after 1918, where avant-garde and socialist periodicals operated in multilingual, politically unstable contexts. These groups and journals functioned as spaces of cultural and political negotiation, connecting communities across borders amid emerging nationalisms. Examining how avant-garde and socialist publications circulated across administrative, linguistic, and cultural borders; how they were read, performed, and debated in working-class milieus; and how their techniques were absorbed or contested within workers’ movements reveals the emergence of a distinct workers’ counterculture and a regionally specific proletarian avant-garde. Without this perspective, any comprehensive understanding of the global avant-garde remains incomplete.

What is the overall objective?

ProletGard seeks to rewrite the history of the interwar avant-garde from below, from the perspective of the everyday cultural praxis of working-class people – the main audience and often the producers of avant-garde art in East Central Europe. The project analyses East Central European modernisms on two interconnected scales: as embedded in local workers’ movements and as part of transnational avant-garde networks.

The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of six researchers and is structured around three closely connected components. It applies the theory of cultural transfer to analyze how ideas and techniques travelled between artistic and political spheres across regions and social groups.

The first component examines the transnational circulation of avant-garde and socialist periodicals across newly established nation-states. Periodicals are conceptualized as dynamic spaces in which material realities intersected with shared imaginaries. The project analyses how circulation networks shaped content and subjectivities, and how East Central European actors were embedded in global avant-garde exchanges.

The second component investigates reading and performative practices in working-class milieus. Avant-garde initiatives introduced or shaped collective forms such as speaking choirs, workers’ photography, political cabaret, and experimental theatre. The project explores how these practices transformed pre-existing reading cultures in trade union halls and party organizations, and how avant-garde techniques were reshaped through everyday use.

The third component analyses negotiations and conflicts within the press. Avant-garde and conventional working-class cultural forms influenced one another, often through debates in small-run, multilingual periodicals. Through research in major labor history and avant-garde archives and identifying dispersed and partly uncatalogued local materials, the project reconstructs how initially subversive artistic techniques became embedded in broader left-wing political cultures during the interwar period.

Through exhibitions, publications, and research projects, the Foundation actively contributes to international scholarship on modernism. It promotes scholarly work through conferences, edited volumes, and exhibitions that explore topics such as the transnational connections of the avant-garde, the role of artist journals and manifestos, and the relationship between art, literature, and social movements in the twentieth century. For a detailed overview of the Foundation’s programme and a selection of its publications, see its homepage: https://kassakmuzeum.hu/en/kassak-foundation