Biographie

1906–1997

Born in Hun­gary in 1906, Vic­tor Vasare­ly was des­tined to be a med­ical doc­tor. His inter­est in art led him to enter Muhë­ly, the Hun­gar­i­an Bauhaus in Budapest. In 1930, Vasare­ly set­tled in the Parisian sub­urb of Arcueil where he start­ed work as a graph­ic design­er for pub­lic­i­ty agencies.
Vasarely’s pre-War work bears tes­ti­mo­ny to a deep artis­tic research into the play of light and shad­ow exe­cut­ed in the Cubist or Sur­re­al­ist styles. Lat­er, Vasare­ly would dis­tance him­self from these ear­ly works nam­ing them ‘my wrong route’.

In 1947 Vasarely’s art under­went a rad­i­cal change: his ear­ly inter­est in Con­struc­tivism and Abstrac­tion final­ly man­i­fest­ed itself in sharp-edged geo­met­ri­cal forms, ren­dered in homo­ge­neous and monot­o­nous colours. Vasare­ly had dis­cov­ered his own cre­ative lan­guage, con­vinced that the observed real­i­ty could be expressed in ‘pure colour and pure form’. Vasare­ly also stud­ied the opti­cal-psy­cho­log­i­cal art by Josef Albers and 19th Cen­tu­ry psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­ses of the rela­tion between visu­al per­cep­tion and consciousness.
Thus, Vasare­ly trans­formed nat­ur­al shapes such as the peb­bles of Belle-Île in Brit­tany, and the nat­ur­al and con­struc­tive forms of the medieval town of Gordes in the Vau­cluse range, into geo­met­ri­cal Abstrac­tion. The cracked tiles from the Den­fert-Rochere­au metro sta­tion were the inspi­ra­tion for a series of draw­ings known as the ‘Den­fert peri­od’, 1951 – 1958.
The graph­ic stud­ies of the ‘Black and White’ peri­od 1954 – 1960 showed defor­ma­tion and undu­la­tions of the geo­met­ric forms, thus herald­ing Vasarely’s Kinet­ic peri­od. When gallery Denise René in Paris held its 1955 Kinet­ic Art exhi­bi­tion, Vasare­ly was hailed one of the major fig­ures of Euro­pean Abstrac­tion. This pio­neer­ing exhi­bi­tion also showed works by Mar­cel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexan­der Calder, Jean Tingue­ly and Yaa­cov Agam. At the occa­sion, Vasare­ly wrote his sem­i­nal ‘Man­i­feste Jaune’ in which he explained the notion of Kinet­ic Art as being pre­oc­cu­pied with move­ment which is not cre­at­ed by the com­po­si­tion or the sub­ject but by the eye of the beholder.
Dur­ing the ear­ly 1960s, vivid colour replaced black and white, notably in the series enti­tled ‘Œuvres per­mu­ta­tion­nelles’ and ‘Défor­ma­tions’.

In 1965, Vasare­ly was recog­nised as one of the ini­tia­tors of Op Art (Opti­cal Art) at the occa­sion of the ‘Respon­sive Eye’ exhi­bi­tion held at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York. Dur­ing 1965 – 1976, Vasare­ly pro­duced three-dimen­sion­al illu­sions, using two-coloured uni­ties which he linked with the basic shapes of the square, losagne or cir­cle. Known as ‘Folk­lore Plané­taire’, these works attempt­ed to com­mu­ni­cate the vibrat­ing ener­getic struc­ture of the Uni­verse open to all.

In 1976, Vasare­ly designed his own Foun­da­tion in Aix-en-Provence. As such he exe­cut­ed his con­cept of art in the city, acces­si­ble to all as a com­mon good, shared and used by the mass­es. World-famous dur­ing his life­time, Vasare­ly died in Paris in 1997.
In 2019, the Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou in Paris host­ed a large ret­ro­spec­tive enti­tled Vasare­ly. Le Partage des formes.