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"If yesterday art strived
for feeling and doing, today it could strive for conceiving
and doing the doing."
Thus,
a simple "artist-painter" becomes a "plastician" and
a "conceptualizer".
Persuaded by man's profound
aesthetic and plastic aspiration, Vasarely would never
cease to promote a social art readily available to everyone.
His determination for defending a generous conception of
art, one that would not be anymore reserved for, or limited
to, a hyper-cultured elite, translates itself into his
persevering efforts to ingrate plastic beauty in architecture, "La
cité polychrome", "The polychrome city",
and to diffuse numerous editions of multiples. The units
of his plastic alphabet are constants, and therefore apt
to be reproduced by industrial means in any material.
Conscious of his role as
a "plastician" in the modern city, he opts for
a strict life in his atelier, disconnected from the world
of money, politics, and everyday business, dedicated to
his self imposed mission of "giving to see", "donner à voir".
"The
crowds, the masses, a multitude of beings, this is the
new dimension. See the unlimited space, the truth of structures.
Art is the plastic aspect of the community. Art must be
a common treasure or not be art at all."
After his bachelor's degree,
Vasarely enrolls in the University of Budapest's School
of Medicine, which he is forced to abandon a couple of
years later in the context of the deep economic and social
crisis afflicting Hungary at the time. From these two years
and a half in contact with the world of science, he will
forever keep a strong will for objectivity and the scientific
method, developing even further his taste for exactitude
and systematic series.
He devours popular scientific
books on astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics, cybernetics,
etc... cultivating his passion for the theories of Neils
Böhr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Dirac, De Broglie, Wiener..."Pure
physics is revealed as the new poetic source".
He realizes that scientific
knowledge, having arrived at the limits of the explainable,
can not be assimilated by everyone, and that art, as a
real educational medium, could offer plastic equivalents
that, short of making the scientific models comprehensible,
could render them approachable through feeling and intuition.
"The
two creative expressions of man, art and science, meet
again to form an imaginary construct that is in accord
with our sensibility and contemporary knowledge."
In 1928, Alexandre Bortnyik,
former student of the Weimer Bauhaus School, opens in Budapest
the Mühely, a school dedicated to the dissemination of
the teachings of Walter Gropius, Johaness Itten, Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy Nagy and Josef Albers.
Soon enough, Vasarely enrolls at the Mühely and as an apprentice
of the different new graphic techniques, he discovers abstract
art, Malevitch and the Russian Avant-garde, and initiates
himself in the tendencies of constructivism and adheres
to the theories of a social art available to everyone,
adapted to the evolution of the new industrial world.
Later
on he discovers Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Sophie Tauber-Arp,
Auguste Herbin and Alberto Magnelli.
The
pictorial evolution of Vasarely is the result of a slow
and steady accumulation of experiences. He begins to paint
quite late, at the age of 37. Influenced by the pictorial
movements at the time in Paris, he quickly adopts a symbolist
and surrealist painting style, later venturing into expressionism,
and then into semi-figuration and complete abstraction,
displaying in all styles a subtlety and sophistication
that equals or even surpasses the achievements of the foremost
artists of the moment.
He
will later baptize his first endeavors as his "false
routes". The exhibit of his surrealist works at the
Denise René Gallery, prefaced by Jacques Prévert in the
form of "imaginary" poems, grabs the attention
of André Breton. Just by relying on his prodigious drawing
abilities, Vasarely could well had been an excellent figurative
or surrealist painter, yet this was not sufficient to satisfy
his ambitious aesthetic aspirations. Through a process
of true artistic self-mutilation, he abandons figuration,
rejects all shortcuts offered by his technical mastery,
and distances himself from the establishment.
The
landscapes he discovers while on vacation in Bretagne,
at Belle-Ile-en-Mer, and later in Provence,
at Gordes, paradoxically induce him into the path of geometric
abstraction, renovating the genre by giving it new forms
and directions.
By way of his research in
black-and-white format, he defines an original conception
of movement, discarding any form of motor and luminous
animation, relying above all on the elaboration of a flat
composition, leaving the effect of movement solely within
the perception of the spectator.
Through
unrelenting experimentations, he leads geometric abstraction
into becoming a true abstract art, free of any contingency
other than plastic expression.
In
his "l'Unité Plastique" exhibit, at the Pavillon
de Marsan at the Louvre, Vasarely unfurls, in a tour de
force demonstration of the possibilities of the integration
of color in architecture, a vast inventory of new plastic
mediums and materials available, in a grand display of
flamboyantly, dynamically, convincingly and strictly organized
colors.
Vasarely
is hailed as the inventor and father of optical art. His
work is the recipient of the top prizes and honors of the
great international competitions he takes part in. Documented
studies of his oeuvre multiply around the world. Many young
artists from all over Europe and South America come to Paris to meet the Master at his atelier. His "Folklore
Planetaire", "Planetary Folklore", acquires
a large audience amongst numerous youngsters who adopt
this or that aspect of his permutational art form.
In
his desire to transcend the stage of the "painting-object" through
the means of the integration of color in architecture,
Vasarely speculates on the conquest of greater dimensions
that will generate different projection technologies: a
new plastic-kinetic adventure would unfold with the incorporation
of color and light, where beams of intense and contrasting
hues cross each other merging in a colored space, the future
of technological hardware would allow the creation of true
plastic symphonies.
Vasarely
deduced from his oeuvre open-ended methods and modular
hardware for deploying permutational art in a context of
inexhaustible virtual possibilities.
As soon as he had developed
his Alphabet Plastique and his Folklore Planetaire, he
forced upon himself not to strictly apply the principles
he had just deduced, allowing instead his creative imagination
to flow freely and unencumbered, always exploring new structures.
Vasarely's
method was not to permit himself to be held hostage by
the fixed structure of any given method, theory does not
precede creation, one must always give oneself into continuous
experimentation without any a priori notion.
Discovery
rests itself upon reason, but it always rewards the sensible
eye that decides if reason is right.
Vasarely
achieved a superb synthesis of a numerical and permutational
art, while deducing the possibilities for domesticating
the computer for art's sake. In a time where the science
of numbers and binary languages engulf our lives, his work
is more relevant than ever.
Vasarely
has left a vast legacy of not only an important diversified
and polymorphous body of work, but also that of a deepening
of the principles developed by the Bauhaus School and the
abstract artists of the first half of the century.
His
creative prowess has opened a limitless field of possibilities
for exploration and discovery.
Michèle Vasarely
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Med enorm glädje minns jag mitt besök
hemma hos
Victor Vasarely.
Mirja och jag är mycket glada över
att, i vár privata samling, äga flera orginal-málningar
och en stor mängd grafiska vackra blad av denna helt
fantastiska konstnär.
Dessutom, en mycket vänlig och älskvärd
människa.
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