Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely 1908-97, French artist, one of the originators of op art , b. Pécs, Hungary. Educated at art institutes in Budapest, Vasarely was profoundly impacted by Bauhaus thought. He settled (1930) in Paris, where he worked as a commercial artist and graphic designer and later (1959) became a French citizen. Influenced by such modernist movements as constructivism, cubism, and surrealism, by the 1930s he had begun working with the elements of geometric abstraction. In the post-World War II years Vasarely worked out a new pictorial and spatial language, at first in black and white and soon in color. Exploiting optical illusions, he juxtaposed colors so that they appeared to vibrate, meanwhile developing a technique that made parts of his geometric images seem to bulge forward from their surface ground. Vasarely's paintings and graphic art reached the peak of their popularity and influence in the 1960s and 70s.

Vasarely, Victor (1908–1997). Hungarian-born painter, sculptor, and designer who settled in Paris in 1930 and became a French citizen in 1959, the main originator and one of the leading practitioners of Op art. He studied in Budapest at the Poldini-Volkman Academy of Painting and the Mühely School (known as the Bauhaus of Budapest) before he moved to Paris in 1930. For the next decade he worked mainly as a commercial artist, particularly on the designing of posters, showing a keen interest in visual tricks and space illusions. From 1943 he turned to painting and he had his first one-man exhibition in 1944, at Denise René's gallery. About three years later he adopted the method of geometrical abstraction for which he is best known. Typically he created a hallucinatory impression of movement through visual ambiguity, using alternating positive–negative shapes in such a way as to suggest underlying secondary shapes. His fascination with the idea of movement led him to experiment with Kinetic art and he also collaborated with architects in such works as his relief in aluminium for Caracas University (1954), and the French Pavilion at ‘Expo '67’ in Montreal, hoping to create a kind of urban folk art. From the mid1950s he wrote a number of manifestos, which, together with his painting, were a major influence on younger artists working in the same fields.

From 1961 Vasarely lived mainly in the South of France, where he founded two museums devoted to his work in Provence—the Fondation Vasarely at Aix-en-Provence, which he designed himself, and the Château and Musée Vasarely at Gordes (both are now closed). He had a great talent for self-publicity and there are also two Vasarely museums in Hungary, in Budapest and his birthplace Pecs. According to his obituary in The Times, ‘To him the artist was simply an artisan who creates his artefacts at will and in volume, so that they can be accessible to the ordinary person'. His work was shown throughout the world and he won numerous honours, including first prize at the São Paulo Bienal in 1965 (jointly with Burri) and being made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1970. Vasarely's son, Jean-Pierre, who works under the name Yvaral, is also an Op and Kinetic artist.