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The Italian exhibition that features the work of Depero is accompanied by a show of a selection of nearly sixty works by Hungarian artists who, from the 1910s onward,were applying in their works the lessons of new trends in contemporary European art. Lajos Kassák, the poet-leader of Activists and founder of a series of journals, was atthe forefront of an innovative group of young artists bent on finding novel forms of artistic expression that might adequately reflect social realities in Hungary at thebeginning of the twentieth century. With innovative vigour, they enthusiastically welcomed every artistic initiative that seemed to promise fresh impetus and encouragingenergies. Going beyond the lessons of literary and artistic modernism based on French-oriented Postimpressionist/Symbolist traditions, they turned their eyes to thevarious manifestations of contemporary European trends.

Thus it was no coincidence that the travelling exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists, opened at the Budapest National Salon in January 1913 was a real eye-opener.A small circle of intellectuals knowledgeable about the European art scene might have come across the works of Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D. Carra, Luigi Russolo, and GinoSeverini; press reports about the scandalous behaviour and shocking declarations of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (the self-styled "Caffeine of Europe") had reachedHungary as well. There must have been people who had read Marinetti's eleven-point Manifesto (which was to become one of the most important formulations of theFuturist agenda) as soon as it was published in the Parisian "Le Figaro" in 1909. Since 1910, Hungarian literary and art journals had been providing more or less regularcoverage of (occasionally provocative) events and exhibitions relevant to avant-garde tendencies. In art historical retrospect it is abundantly clear that the Budapestexhibition featured masterpieces of Futurist painting. Boccioni's The Laugh (1911), Russolo's The Revolt (1911), Gino Severini's The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the"Monico" (1909-1911), or Carra's The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-1911) have radically rearranged the principles of thinking about the art of painting, and havegiven an enormous boost to all kinds of visual experimentation.

The innovative experiments in Hungarian art of the late 1910s derived inspiration from three major European trends: Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. None of theinternational styles (which at any rate reached Hungary belatedly) had become predominant in the country. Rather, tapping into the combined achievements of all modernmovements, the Activists' creative aspirations conjured up a new vision of the world, searching out new directions in the Hungarian art scene.The elements Hungarianpainters took over from the toolkit of Italian Futurists mainly included aspects indicating activity and revolutionary action: militant dynamism, the collision of opposingforces, the momentum of mass movements. Among the Activists in Lajos Kassák's circle, it was especially Sándor Bortnyik, Lajos Tihanyi, Béla Uitz and János Schadl whoproduced graphic works revealing formal influences of the Futurists' dynamic organisation of the pictorial space and of their broken lines of force.

In the Berlin of the 1920s Béla Kádár and Hugó Scheiber discovered for themselves the late, decorative style of the Futurist/Expressionist movements. They started to workwith stylized, simplified forms, segmented and arbitrarily reconstructed pictorial planes, vigorously flowing lines, distorted shapes. Scheiber's compositions mainly featuredthe new theme of Futurist painting: the representation of vibrant city life with its speed, movement, and rhythm. The painter was attracted by the glittering theatricality ofcircuses and variety shows, the demi-monde decadence of cabarets and night bars. Some of his works show a bird's eye view of the city from above, with the crowdthickening into a swirling mass. In his attractive village scenes, Béla Kádár used schematised Hungarian folk motifs to create an easily decodable visual system. Dynamisinghis flat surfaces, he followed the Cubist/Futurist practice of pictorial organisation; in order to represent space and time, he used tilted, stylized shapes broken down to theircomponents. In his stylised motifs of his figurative works, Béla Kádár dynamised flat surfaces to suggest space and time showing remarkable similarities to Depero'srelated efforts.