Victor Vasarely

Biography

In 1925 Győző Vásárhelyi enrolled in the medical faculty of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Two years later he left: he did not want to study medicine, and he joined the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy, where traditional painting was taught.

He was born on 9 April 1906 in Pécs and spent his childhood in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest. In 1928–1929 he entered Sándor Bortnyik’s private school, the Műhely (“Workshop”), regarded as the centre of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. The school had little money, and instead of everything the real Bauhaus offered, it taught applied graphic art and typography. In 1929 he painted “Blue Study” and “Green Study”. In 1930 he married a fellow student, Claire (Klára) Spinner, and in the same year moved to Paris. In the following years he worked as a graphic artist and creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger and Devambez. His circle of acquaintances was narrow. He thought of opening a school modelled on Bortnyik’s workshop and even prepared teaching materials for it, but the school never materialised. He lived mostly in cheap hotels, and in 1942–1944 settled in Saint-Céré (Lot département). After the war he opened a studio in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris, and from 1961 he lived in Annet-sur-Marne.

In 1937 came “Zebra”, which some regard as one of the earliest examples of Op art. He took up painting of his own from 1941–1944. He later called those years “the wrong track”: he tried Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism and did not find a language of his own. In 1944 the Galerie Denise René opened in Paris, and its first exhibition was devoted to his drawings and graphic compositions. In 1946–1947 he showed work at Denise René and at the René Breteau gallery; in the introduction to the catalogue Jacques Prévert placed him among the Surrealists.

His own language emerged toward the end of the 1940s. On holiday in 1947 on Belle-Île, in Brittany, he saw ellipsoid pebbles and shells, and the “Belle-Île” works followed. The white tiles of the Denfert-Rochereau metro station gave their name to the “Denfert” cycle. From 1948 he spent his summers in Gordes in Provence: the cubic houses of the village led to the “Gordes/Cristal” cycle, in which he worked on the relation of empty and filled space on a flat surface and on the stereoscopic effect.

From the Gordes works grew his kinetic pictures: superimposed panes of acrylic glass create an impression of movement depending on the viewpoint. In the black-and-white period he transposed photographs into two colours and combined the layers into a single plane. In 1954, with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, he worked on the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas; the ceramic wall “Tribute to Malevich”, of 100 square metres, is among the most noticeable works of those years. In 1955 the exhibition “Le Mouvement” at the Galerie Denise René showed Vasarely, Calder, Duchamp, Man Ray, Soto and Tinguely; in the catalogue, printed on a single yellow sheet, he published the “Yellow Manifesto”. Building on the Constructivists and the Bauhaus, he held that the kinetic spectacle depends on the perception of the viewer. On 2 March 1959 Vasarely patented his method of “plastic units”: geometric forms are cut out of a coloured square and rearranged. The palette and the set of forms were strictly defined (three reds, three greens, three blues, two violets, two yellows, black, white, grey; circles, squares, rhombuses, rectangles, a triangle, ellipses), later enlarged and numbered. From this “plastic alphabet” he made serial art, whose endless permutations were carried out by assistants. In 1963 he presented the palette to the public under the name “Folklore planétaire”. In 1965 his work was shown in the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; in the series “Tribute to the Hexagon” and “Vega” he sought an illusion of relief and volume. His awards include the Guggenheim Prize (1964), the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1965) and the rank of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1965).

On 5 June 1970 his first museum, with more than 500 works, opened in a Renaissance palace in Gordes (closed in 1996). In 1976 the Fondation Vasarely was built to his design in Aix-en-Provence, and in Pécs, his birthplace, a museum bearing his name opened with a large donation from the artist himself. In the same year his large kinetic object “Georges Pompidou” was installed in the Centre Pompidou. In 1972, with his son Jean-Pierre, who worked under the name Yvaral, he updated the Renault logo. In 1982 154 specially created serigraphs went into space aboard the Franco-Soviet space station Salyut 7 with the cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, and were later sold for the benefit of UNESCO. In 1987 a second Hungarian Vasarely museum, with more than 400 works, opened in the Zichy Palace in Budapest.

He died on 15 March 1997 in Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, a few weeks short of his ninety-first birthday.