Victor Vasarely - Fondation Vasarely

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the geometrical bases of constructionism and Wilhelm
Ostwald’s theory of the four basic colours. They were
working towards achieving the modern public art – the art
of the community – where the craftsman, the engineer, and
the artist’s activities are harmonised. Equipped with such
a practical and theoretical backdrop Vasarely travelled
to Paris in 1930, although the Bauhaus ideas remained
hidden in his art, for a long time. Similarly, he kept himself
distant from the artistic movements of Paris in the thirties,
e.g. from the Abstraction-Creation, even though the
movement had Hungarians in it. Vasarely made posters for
advertising agencies, pictograms and adverts for medical
firms, such activities made him a good earner. He created
a few paintings, compositions that were, in the beginning
surrealist-symbolic and decorative geometrical works.
In the forties there was a significant change in his artistic
attitude. Two works are to be found in our collection from
these days - these are not part of this exhibition – the
Mannequin (1946) and BI (1947) which display the abstracted
forms and compositional modes – far from traditional
painting. The tone-rich compositions, built on blues and
browns prove that the originally graphic aspects are
exchanged for the working methods of a painter. This lyrical
abstract period was very short in his creative life.
Vasarely called the above “the wrong way” and the turning
point came in 1947. The shapes had strict borders uniformly
painted, strict, homogenous planes supplant the effect of
the paintings which had been recorded by the various levels
of paint’s thickness. This period of his was motivated by the
desire to find a special creative language and character. He
had recorded his plans and observations in several sketches
which were only fully realised later, (this is why two dates
are to be found in some of his works). In his search he was
observing the shapes of nature – like the rounded, wave
broken stones of Belle Isle, as seen in Indore (1952, p34),
Brume – 2 (1952, p35), Yapourk-2 (1951-56, p29) – as much
as he was recording the constructive elements of builtup
environments - like the “crystal” contours” Paros-J
(1949-54, p26) – as well as the finely cut surface of the
Denfert metro station in Paris, Harpis (1950, p27). He was
studying the optical-psychological art of Josef Albers, and
he was greatly under the influence of the Gestalt-psychology
which, at the end of the 19th century, analysed the specific
relationships between sight and consciousness.
"The same opening - looking from the outside - seems an
inscrutable, bodiless black cube. The town of Southern
France, bathing in the cruel sun, revealed a contrasting
perspective for me. The eye cannot exactly distinguish
the shade from the wall: the planes, the empty spaces get
mixed up, form and background alternate. A triangle gets
dissolved into a lozenge on the left, into a trapezoid on the
right, a square jumps up, or slides down, depending on the
fact that one pairs it with a dark green patch or the light blue
sky. Concrete things become abstractions and start a new
life" - Vasarely wrote in 1948.
In the Formes et couleurs murales exhibition in 1951, in
the Denise René Galerie he showed those magnifications
and projections, called Photographismes (Naissance series
1951) which he had based on his pencil and pen drawings.
Vasarely was gripped by the strong contrasts of positivenegative
magnifications, and explored the chance for
treating black-white, yes-no as binary unities. He relived
his childhood surprise at the structure muslin or the finger
drawings on a befogged plane of glass, at the time when
he observed the dynamics of vibration appearing on one
of the small drawings shown on film sequences placed
on one another. A special effect is produced by his large
paintings Sophia-111 (1952, p33) or Biadan (1959, p47) with
their irritant contrasts of black grids painted on white bases.
These were decisive discoveries which gave the impulse to
Vasarely to make Op-art and Kinetic compositions.
Vasarely’s paintings became monochrome in the fifties
– partly paralleling formal analyses and partly caused by
the same. The greys and the blacks are full of dynamism
(Indore,1952) with their arched shapes seemingly covering
each other, just as much as the Aila (1953, p37) which
painting displays the teeth of the saw with lines dramatically
cut – the tautness of the relationship is caused by the
doubtful equilibrium between the two. We see four shapes
with lines cut in front of blue-mauve background, the peaks
of shapes are centred, like a fan, which are joined to a small