CHARLES SIRATO (1905-1980) Tamkó Sirató Károly. Planizmus / Le Planisme, 1936. With 7 plates and 4 illustrations in the text. Pest, Fajó János, 1981.

50 x 43 cm. [11] leaves. Loose sheets in an illustrated cardboard portfolio. Copy no. 27 of only 75 copies. Charles Sirato (1905-1980) was a Hungarian poet, art theorist and translator. Charles Tamkó Sirató arrived in Paris in 1930, and by 1936 he had gathered the signatures of many of the most important artists living in Paris, both French and expatriate, for his ‘Manifeste Dimensioniste’. The manifesto was remarkable for its ambition: nothing less than reconfiguring contemporary art in accordance with the new conceptions of space, time and dimension of Einstein and Minkowski. It was signed by many prominent modern artists worldwide. Yervand Kochar, Hans Arp, Francis Picabia, Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and Marcel Duchamp, among others, added their names in Paris; a short while later it was endorsed by artists abroad, including László Moholy-Nagy, Joan Miró, David Kakabadze, Alexander Calder and Ben Nicholson. This should have marked the beginning of a new movement, a synthesis and further development of both Surrealism and Abstraction-Création. Instead, the effort faded out as Sirató fell ill and had to return to Hungary for medical treatment.