Victor Vasarely
Biography
The immediate heir to the ideas of the Bauhaus, Vasarely may be considered as one of the major representatives of kinetic art. Early on he reached two certainties from the teaching of his master Alexandre Bortnyik: first, that abstract art should perform a role in changing the urban environment, and secondly, that he should break with easel painting to accomplish total plastic creation.
In 1927 Vasarely stopped his medical studies at Budapest University to attend classes at the Podolini-Volkmann Academy. From 1928 to 1929 he was a pupil at the Muhely Academy (referred to as the Hungarian Bauhaus), run by Alexandre Bortnyik, who had returned from the Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin (where the demise of art was often discussed), still influenced by the teaching of Albers, Moholy-Nagy and his contacts with Klee and Kandinsky. The young Vasarely was profoundly influenced by the lectures Gropius gave in Budapest, in which the latter stigmatised the image of the ‘artist tramp’, advocating inspiration related to talent and an entirely new functionalist identity based on scientific foundations. These two years of study were decisive for Vasarely who acquired sound skills in drawing that enabled him, as he said himself, to execute “trompe-l’oeil just as well as new ways of drawing.”
“ Abstraction was only really revealed to me in 1947, when I was suddenly able to recognise that pure form and pure colour signify the world. ”
After a successful period as a graphic designer in the advertising business in Budapest, Vasarely emigrated to Paris, where for the next 15 years he designed posters, models and illustrations for leading companies and agencies such as Draeger, Havas and Devambez. He took French nationality. From 1935 he created a number of series on themes such as Echiquiers, Tigres, Zèbres, Arlequins and Martiens, which were the beginnings of his kinetic art, employing axonometric deformations. His early work is difficult to distinguish from his work for advertising, with drawings in black and white, marked by a particular interest in movement, which was to become central to his work.
Playing with optical phenomena, the model is suggested by the deformation in certain precise places of regular oblique lines that cover the painting’s entire two-dimensional space. We see this in Zèbre, where the forms are evoked by deforming the twisting lines that provide volume, prefiguring the later undulating works, and in l’Arlequin and l’Echiquier, with their arrangement of black-and-white squares, in which the series Algorithmesof the 1960s and Martiens had their roots, where the bodies are formed by the enlargement of squares, leading to Gonflages, and finally Têtes, placed on the six faces of a cube, with an axonometric perspective based on the superposing of an identical element (a square, or sometimes a hexagon), creating an illusion of volume and space that has not been deformed. Vasarely considered this research as “the basic repertory of the abstract kinetic period, begun in 1951 and fully developed from 1955”.
During the Occupation, Vasarely returned to painting still lives, landscapes and portraits. In his quest for his true path through his various experiences, questionings and ‘wrong directions’, he moved towards reducing the object to a diagram. He spent 1944 on his painting. He was the co-founder of the Galerie Denise René, which opened in November of that year at number 124 rue de la Boétie, with his first solo exhibition. He had regular exhibitions at the gallery from then on. He rapidly became the driving force of the form of abstraction referred to as ‘constructive’. He had a second exhibition in June 1946 with a text by Jacques Prévert. Among the still-figurative paintings, marked by a simplified symbolism, was Le metre and Sept ans de malheur.
Before going further, we should mention Vasarely’s solo exhibitions for the period under study. 1946, 1949 and 1950 in Denmark at the Arne Bruun Rasmussen Gallery in association with Denise René, the exhibition of 1952 there attracting several articles including one by Léon Degand in Art d’aujourd’hui series 3 no. 5, and in 1953 and in the same review by R. Van Gindertaël series 4 no. 2. In 1954 the gallery organised an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels as well as an exhibition in Cologne at the Der Spiegel Gallery with Graphiques. 1956 Blanche Gallery in Stockholm and the Artek Gallery in Helsinki, with Jacobsen. In 1958 there was a travelling exhibition that visited Buenos Aires, Montevideo and San Pablo.
In 1959 the Galerie Denise René showed his kinetic works: “Abstraction was only really revealed to me in 1947, when I was suddenly able to recognise that pure form and pure colour signify the world.” Vasarely’s visits at this period to Belle-Île and to Gordes made a decisive contribution to this recognition. His series titled Belle-Île (1947 to 1962) illustrates his rejection of figuration. “Looking at the forms which presented themselves to me and which all came down to ovoids and ellipses, I observed a very striking similarity between things that are apparently opposed.” The pebbles polished by the waves confirmed nature’s inner geometry to him, and in particular the symbol of ‘ocean feeling’ through the ellipse. This was followed in 1948 by the Gordes period. In the Lubéron Valley, where he spent his holidays, he confirmed his earlier fleeting impressions, discovering the architecture of the house made from overlapping cubes. The titles of his works, Kervilahuen, Sauzon and Locmaria, evoke the great rhythms of nature, with wide flat bands of contrasting colour.
Around 1950, the Cristal period shows geometrical forms which, according to Vasarely, can be considered as “purely abstract thanks to the systematic use of axonometric perspective begun earlier and the triumph of pure composition… picture plane or rigorous abstracts, few in number and expressed with a few colours (flat mat or shiny) have on the entire plastic surface: positive-negative”. Very significant are the different versions of l‘Hommage à Malevitch (1952 to 1958). Between 1948 and 1961, with a strong concentration in 1951, he developed the theme Denfert, from the name of the metro station with its finely cracked earthenware tiles which he carefully observed every day (at the time he was living at Arcueil), giving birth in him to obsessional landscapes reminiscent of those around the villages in the Lubéron.
This abstraction derived from Mondrian’s plasticism continued to attract Vasarely’s sensitivity. He also became interested in photographic techniques and made Photographismes, shown in 1952 at the Galerie Denise René: these were small ink drawings enlarged by a photographic process to 4 metres by 3 metres. The superposing of negatives and positives generated complex, unexpected forms. By fixing these on Perspex and separating them, he attained three dimensions. The origins of Œuvres profondes cinétiques are to be found here. The same year he participated in the first group of Charles Estienne’s exhibition La Nouvelle École de Paris at the Galerie de Babylone. His profound difference of opinion with the critic following his refusal of the Kandinsky Prize which he had just been awarded (cf. L’Observateur no. 91, 17 February, no. 92, 24 February 1952— letters mentioned in the catalogue Charles Estienne, CNAC, 1984), a prize which Vasarely considered to be “total fantasy”. In 1954 Vasarely worked on a project for the University City of Caracas, making a panel in aluminium leaf and graphics on Perspex, the composition of which alters as the spectator moves around it.
