ritual overture towards it made by the publication
of 75HP in November 1924 was correctly perceived
as insufflaient, because it merged together Dada and
Constructivism in a pastiche-like fashion. Already in
Integral 1, in March 1925, 75HP (already attacked in
Contimporanul, as being merely a simulacrum of the
earlier avant-garde magazines), is presented as “the
effect of a formula, locally infallible because it was
verified elsewhere”, “unmasked as a pastiche and
sacrilege.”5 Fifty years later, Maxy kept unchanged
the same critical perspective and was quite plain on
this point: “75HP, with its picto-poetry by Voronca
and Brauner, threw some fireworks in the air...
I considered that the direction given to that magazine
was not the right one.”6 This is a very sensitive issue,
as nowadays most of the art-historical endeavours
take for granted the view that 75HP was the most
remarkable production of the historical Romanian
avant-garde, whereas the protagonists of the avant-
gardě of the time denied precisely (and correcdy) its
membership of the historical avant-garde, seeing it
as a Symptom and echo of prior models. The issue
of the historical Romanian avant-garde as actually
post-historical is further stressed by its erupting in
late 1924, precisely after the finish line drawn by
Lissitzky and Arp in their Kunstismen.
Lucid and intrepid as he was, Maxy seized the
momentům, and realized, precisely from the wrecked
example of 75HP, that a more radical avant-garde,
and not an ecumenical one, is the proper way to keep
modernization alive. This is how and why Integral
appeared. Both from the point of view of Maxy’s
own artistic development and the international
background, Integral could not hâve been other than
a Cubo-constructivist enterprise. Firstly, through
his Romanian éducation, Maxy was early on accus-
tomed to the post-Cezannism of losif Iser (of a
rather Expressionist facture) and Camil Ressu (with a
more structured, massive view on pictorial subjects).
Already after the war, his works of the early 1920s,
like “Portrait of a Peasant” from 1921 (Fig. 1) shows
how the (mis)understanding of Cubism by Maxy was
informing his artistic research. The critics of the time
pointed out this superficial attempt at cubization,


1. M. H. Maxy: Portrait of a Peasant, 1921 (TheBamianian National
Museum of Art, Bucharest)

stressing that he intently “exaggerated the planes, as
if in Cubist works, without identifying himself with
the Cubist doctrine.. ,”.7
Düring the time he spent in Berlin (1922 - 1923),
Maxy was under the spell of his mentor Arthur Segal,
whose “Optische Gleichwertigkeit” theory and art
practice, emulated by Maxy, was derived from French
Cubist expériences, especially from Delaunay’s “or-
phie cubism”, as it was named by Guillaume Apol-
linaire, largely known through Delaunay’s own label
of “Simultaneism”, which combined Cubism and
Futurism with a thrust on colour contrasts or “syn-
chromicity”. Delaunay’s works of the early 1910s,
such as “Simultaneous Window on the City” of
1912 (now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle), prefigured

5 IntegralIst March 1925, Notite (Notices), p. 25.
6 M. H. Maxy, in DRISCU 1971 (see in note 1), p. 53.

OPREA, P.: M. H. Maxy. Bucharest 1974, p. 11.

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