Activating visual energy: The MA circle and the art of Sándor Bortnyik
Abstract The article examines how energetically and biomechanically-based aesthetics, reception theories, and political ideas could inform, or inspire, leftist visual and poetic representation and choice of style in Hungarian modernism during the 1918–19 political upheavals, as a response to modern technology's effects. In connection to these views, the article also reconsiders the political ambiguities of Bortnyik's art in relation to Hungarian anarchism.