Chrono-Anthology
Written by Arnauld Pierre

1906
9 April: Gyözö Csiszár is born in Pécs in Hungary, the third child out of wedlock of Anna Csiszár, born in Trnava in what is now Slovakia, and Gyözö Lajos Vásárhelyi from Timisoara in Romania, employed as a maître d’hôtel. Family legend presents him as the ruined heir of a noble family from Kézdivásárhely, today Targu Secuiesc in Romanian Transylvania.

1908
Anna Csiszár and Gyözö Vásárhelyi marry. On 20 May, the child is recognized by his father, whose name he takes. He grows up in Trencsén and then in the spa town of Pöstyén in northern Hungary. 

1919
The Vásárhelyis flee Pöstyén, which has become Piestany following its annexation by Czechoslovakia, and settle in Budapest, where one of Gyözö’s sisters, Vilma Vásárhelyi, a popular actress at the time, is already living.

We were totally destitute. My mother sold her jewelry. We were crammed into a shabby apartment in the depths of a working-class neighbourhood. I tried to do my medical studies. Absurd, in this débâcle. There were hardly any courses. Without work, cut off from Austria, and therefore from the West, the entire intelligentsia sank into despair.

1921-1925
Young Vásárhelyi studies at a vocational school where, in addition to general subjects, he takes courses in economics, management and business correspondence in French and German. 

From 1922 he is also enrolled in the Free Drawing and Painting Academy of Arthur Podolini-Volkmann, where he studies on plaster and live models.

When I was nine years old, an Austrian master named Krammer saw my oil paintings and predicted a bright future for me. At nineteen I was very good at the Academy, as another master from Budapest, Podolini-Volkman, testifies. I wanted to be a painter, but then Bortnyik convinced me of the primacy of modern arts like advertising, theatre and film set design. If the war had not broken out, I would today be the equal of Capiello, Colin, Cassandre… Who knows, perhaps I would have been a director at UFA.

1925-1928
Vásárhelyi works as a bookkeeper for the pharmaceutical and chemical company Labor, and then for Swedish ball bearings company SKF. In this context he produces his first advertising work:

At home, we were starving. I looked for work. Bookkeeper in a ball bearings company. Boredom. One day my boss asked me for posters for his merchandise. […] I made the posters that were asked of me. Then another one for a competition. I didn’t win. But the results were published in La Vie publicitaire. It’s there, in this journal, that I had the revelation of modern art. I was totally won over. I was then twenty-one years old. There were loads of posters inspired by the Bauhaus […]. And then, in this journal, there was an announcement: the painter Bortnyik, who had just returned from the Bauhaus, was going to open a course where in six months he was proposing to teach what he himself had learned in Dessau. I quit my employee position.

1929
Vásárhelyi enters Sandor Bortnyik’s Mühely, a school of applied arts where he receives a multidisciplinary education inspired by the Bauhaus philosophy. There he meets his future wife, artist Klára (Claire) Spinner.

Our preference was for purely abstract studies, for us the supreme art. Our task was to express in shape, colour and material the plastic equivalents of notions like sharp, dull, tense, soft, calm... In our discussions, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Malevich, Lissitzky and, curiously, Chagall, were analysed, praised, adored. When I left Hungary in 1930, I had already absorbed everything that abstract culture had created at that time.

1930
Vásárhelyi participates with his fellow Mühely students in the Exhibition of Books and Advertising Design held at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, and works on his first advertising commissions:

I was able to eat, even afford equipment... But I was suffocating: this decaying country, cut off from everything... I decided to leave. First to Germany. The Brownshirts were getting a little too agitated. I chose Paris.

That autumn, he leaves Hungary to settle in Paris, near the Place d’Italie, where Klára Spinner joins him a few weeks later. He begins working as a graphic designer for the Havas advertising agency, while Spinner is hired by publishing and advertising design house Tolmer.

1931
June: Marriage of Gyözö and Klára, who has just become pregnant with their first son, André. Jean-Pierre, the future artist Yvaral, is born in 1934.

1932
Vásárhelyi is hired as a “designer-creator” by the printer Draeger in Montrouge, on the strength in particular of his Study in Blue and Study in Green. He begins to Frenchify his name as Victor Vasarely, except for works published or exhibited in Hungary.

He meets sculptor Étienne Béothy and frequents artists’ circles in Montparnasse, which disappoint him:

There were Russians, Romanians, Poles, Germans there, and yet there was never any talk of Abstraction or Constructivism; as for the Bauhaus, its very name was as good as unknown. At the time, Malevich was totally ignored in Paris […]. Braque was spoken of with respect, while we were already gargling with the name of Picasso. I realize as a fact that what people call “painting” does not interest me.

1933
24 September-8 October: Vásárhelyi’s first solo exhibition is held at the Ernszt Muzeum in Budapest, featuring a selection of advertising works.

1935
In partnership with publisher Roger Bessard, who specializes in pharmaceutical and medical inserts, Vasarely increases his money-earning activity as an advertising designer and begins producing his “graphic studies”. These are intended to form the systematic basis of a renovated teaching of applied arts in the framework of a “College of Graphic Arts” which will never see the light of day:

I now have several regular collaborators who take care of the technical execution of my ideas, based on the precise pencil drawings I give them. This is a huge time savings, as achieving impeccable results is a long and tedious task. It’s this way of working that allows me to devote sufficient energy to my fundamental research.

1940-1944
At the start of the Occupation, with his family having taken refuge in the department of Lot and then in Hungary with his in-laws, Vasarely meets Denise Bleitbreu (Denise René) at the Café de Flore. He soon encourages her to transform the premises of her fashion studio, a three-room apartment at 124 rue La Boétie, into an art gallery, which is entered in the commercial register on 1 February 1944:

For my part, I felt that my place was in Paris; it was only there that I could, despite the events, continue to do the only thing that interested me and which was my reason for living: to research and create. Denise René and I had long conversations during which we considered all sorts of possible futures. Personally, I thought she had everything going for her to open, in the Rue La Boétie building, a gallery where we would exhibit contemporary painters, starting with my own production, in particular that of the period which now bears the name of ‘Graphic Studies’.

1944
November-December: “Drawings and Graphic Compositions” since 1935 are the subject of Vasarely’s first personal exhibition in France, at the Galerie Denise René. Planned initially for July (from the 13th to the 30th according to the invitation card printed at the time), it was postponed until autumn owing to the circumstances and the Liberation of Paris. The eighty studies exhibited constituted, in Vasarely’s eyes, not only the basis of his unfinished projects for teaching graphic arts, to be the subject of a vast album accompanied by didactic texts, but also the foundation of a new visual language, prefiguring the project of the plastic alphabet: 

If I compare advertising to a language, the line, the shapes and the colours will constitute its alphabet; the individual studies will form its vocabulary, with the help of which one will easily succeed in forming the most complicated sentences.

1946
June-July: thirty-six canvases of Surrealist and twilight inspiration, constituting the Imaginaires, as the series was named by Jacques Prévert in the eponymous poem inserted in the catalogue, are exhibited at the Galerie Denise René. To the anonymous author of the preface they reveal “a man prey to his fundamental Angst as much as to the decisive giving of concrete form to his most secret representations”:

The paintings of this period are very much marked by the war and the monstrous horrors of the concentration camps, the whole truth of which had just come to light; like everyone else, I had been horrified.

1947
July: takes part in the exhibition “Abstract Paintings” at the Galerie Denise René, with Dewasne, Magnelli, Hartung, Poliakoff and Schneider, among others. 

Stays in Belle-Île, where the biomorphic paintings of the Belle-Isle series are born, inspired by the oceanic feeling of the fundamental unity of living rhythms:

In the pebbles, in the pieces of glass from broken bottles, I recognize for certain the internal geometry of nature.

1948
Discovery, via Jean Deyrolle, of the Provençal village of Gordes where Vasarely buys a house a few years later. Beginning of a new cycle of works (Crystal-Gordes) inspired by the angular geometry of the site:

Towns and villages of Southern France devoured by a relentless sun revealed to me a contradictory perspective. The eye can never successfully identify to what a shadow or a section of wall belongs: full and empty spaces merge, shapes and backgrounds alternate. This triangle unites at times with the rhombus to the left, at times with the trapezoid to the right, this square jumps higher or vacillates downward, depending on whether I marry it with a dark green spot or a piece of pale sky.

Elsewhere, the cracks in the tiles of the Paris metro inspire the works in the Denfert series.

1950
29 April-12 May: the exhibition “Vasarely, Abstract Paintings”, consisting of forty works, is held at the Galerie Denise René before travelling to the Rasmussen gallery in Copenhagen: 

I meditate on the contribution of my first Abstract exhibition. The fact that I didn’t sell anything is almost comforting. I’m aware of the value of paintings like Yamada, Ho, Granada, Sénanque, Bhopal, Dallas, Aquila, Chillan, Imbituba, Baritoë or Celenderis. These or their developments will find their way into the large collections and museums. I know for certain: my exhibition is located at a crossroads; I choose the path of the future without hesitation. So I’m going to give my colleagues the slip, it’s written into my paintings. Too bad if they don’t notice anything. […] I will go alone to conquer the higher dimensions. In ten years the break will be total.

1951
According to Degand, “Vasarely presents, with Ménerbes, the most accomplished, the most striking, the most warmly vibrant painting of the entire Salon de Mai”. While for Pierre Guéguen, Yellow is the “masterpiece” of the abstract room at the Menton Biennale: 

With its firm shapes and audacious contrasts, Vasarely’s canvas constitutes a noble symphony in yellow minor.

15 June-12 July: The exhibition “Formes et couleurs murales” at the Galerie Denise René brings together, in a common aspiration to integrate art into architecture, Jacobsen, Dewasne and Vasarely, who has just joined the Espace Group founded by André Bloc. Vasarely exhibits there a large quadriptych composition, intended for transposition onto cement panels, along with his Photographismes, wall-scale photographic enlargements of distorted black and white linear patterns.

Vasarely designs the cover of the December issue of the journal Art d’Aujourd’hui, entirely devoted to the travelling exhibition “Klar Form”, then being held in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, at the instigation of the Galerie Denise René.

1952
Vasarely by Jean Dewasne is the first monograph devoted to the artist, by one of his peers. In it Vasarely explains his creative process, continuing to set great store by formal intuition: 

I see, I imagine, I feel rising in me a haunting, tenacious colour. This colour needs to present itself in a shape. I search, I grope within myself until I can define it clearly, more or less rounded here, pointed there, open on the left, balanced in a particular direction around an ideal centre of plastic gravity. This shape will, in essence, be very simple. It will be the future painting. I shall very occasionally put other small shapes inside. But I shall lace some around it to reinforce the expression by contrast or by struggle. 

16 May-10 June: Vasarely exhibits at the Galerie Denise René thirty-six works produced between autumn 1950 and spring 1952. On this occasion, Léon Degand publishes a significant study in Art d’Aujourd’hui:

Vasarely cultivates with predilection his very personal faculty of joining or separating shapes and colours according to their most tense relationships. His pictorial logic is one that one cannot fault. […] Here is a work which bears witness, with a rare intensity, to the psychological energy expended in the pictorial era in which we live.

1954
23 January-3 February: a retrospective of seventy works divided into five series (Arcueil, 1948; Belle Isle, 1947-53; Crystal, 1949-53; Denfert-Gordes, 1950-53 and Belle Isle Gordes, 1951-53) is held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels before moving on to Liège. As Roger van Gindertael reminds us, however complete it may be, this exhibition “can only reflect the ‘painting’ format, which Vasarely’s intentions had already moved beyond”:

How can I reconcile these terrible errors and contradictions at a time when I’m meditating on a fulgurating renewal by means of colour-light in the fourth dimension, drawing with me soon after in my wake the bravest, the best of the avant-garde. For the moment, I advance with the means at hand. With a helper, I could have completed the preparatory phase of my films a long time ago. A huge stock of material is already ready, another in progress. Filming will begin in early 1956.

Shortly afterwards Vasarely evokes for the first time in the columns of the journal Cimaise his idea of “plastic unit”:

From the immeasurable complexity of the earlier creative work, the abstract works have released the shape-colour duality which is their essence, and which I shall henceforth call “plastic unit”, or simply “unit”. It is the “thing” itself in its splendid simplicity, but it is also extremely diverse, just like the simple body in chemistry. The “unit” is beautiful in itself. It represents a first form of sensitivity. […] It is this, once discerned and defined, which has permitted the abandonment of elements foreign to painting, the move from the complicated to the essential, from the plane to space and from inertia to movement.

Then, in “L’artiste et l’éthique”, Vasarely proclaims his convictions about science and the dynamic future of visual plastic arts:

The atomic age is taking shape with the new polychrome and solar geometric city. Plastic art will be kinetic, multi-dimensional and communal. Abstract for sure and close to science. […] Let us denounce nostalgia for the past: let us love our era, which will one day be a “high era”. Let us have done with romantic “Nature”; our Nature is Biochemistry, Astrophysics and Wave Mechanics. Let us affirm that all human creation is formal and geometric like the secret structure of the Universe.

The construction of the University of Caracas, which architect Carlos Raul Villanueva wants to turn into a manifesto for modern art, offers Vasarely his first opportunity to put into practice his ideas on the integration of art into architecture. He designs a skylight in duralumin slats that changes appearance with the viewer’s movements, ceramic panels with linear motifs inspired by Naissances (Births), and a wall composition, Homage to Malevich. These achievements stand alongside a remarkable collection of works by Arp, Calder, Pevsner, Laurens, Léger, etc.

He also takes part in the exhibition “Architecture Formes Couleur”, organized in Biot by the Groupe Espace, with a Spatial plastic element moving by displacement of the visual field, a prelude to the “deep kinetic works” which play on the superposition of linear frameworks to create the illusion of movement

1955

30 April Vasarely presents two Kinetic Studies on transparent panels staggered in depth in the exhibition “Le Mouvement” at the Galerie Denise René, which he has helped organize. In his “Notes pour un manifeste” (Notes for a manifesto)”, published on this occasion, he announces the advent of “the new physically and spiritually moving plastic-kinetic beauty” which transforms the painting into a projection screen: 

The screen is a plane but, by allowing movement, it is also space. So it has not two, but four dimensions.

Vasarely also specifies his definition of “plastic unit”:

Shape and colour are one. Shape can exist only when signalled by a coloured quality. Colour is quality only when delimited in shape. […] Two necessarily contrasting shape-colours constitute the plastic unit, hence the unity of creation: eternal duality of all things, finally recognized as inseparable.

At the end of the year, a personal exhibition of fifty-six works from 1946 to 1955 is presented at the Galerie Denise René. This is the first appearance of a group of paintings that opens the abundant series of Blacks and Whites. The luxurious catalogue is prefaced by Michel Seuphor, who places Vasarely’s art beyond the Constructivist tradition:

The Constructivists are therefore his masters. They are the ones, he believes, who best embody the spirit of the times. It is important, therefore, to continue them, but also to amplify them, extend their conquests in all directions. He is not content just to follow in their footsteps. Malevich’s black square is an open window through which Vasarely jumps into the void. He enters into a war of movement, opens wide all doors to quarrels, the sweep of air through them is king. Even the square rotates, crumbling into optical errors. Eppur si muove! Vasarely exclaims, if it is not the object that moves it is the spectator, everything is movement, everything is space! 

For his part, critic Pierre Guéguen sees in this development the expression of “abstract painting, par excellence”, “total abstraction, sober and powerful, reduced to the minimum of material for the maximum of effect”:

Some paintings are white on a black background or vice versa. In the first, the white cutout in turn receives small black cutouts, triangular or square, which enter blackly into the white shape to make it blink. In the latter, infernally black shapes almost completely enclose the surface of a white shape, oppress it, squeeze it, cause it to cry out. These blinks and cries are movement for our retina, exerting on it maximum fascination by contrast, a fascination not dramatic but magical. The specific magic of black and white is to suggest to you in a striking way the duel within us and outside of us, of opposing physical and metaphysical forces, with a brutal simplicity that makes us touch the mystery.

Vasarely, for his part, publishes a decisive text in which, under the concept of “re-creation”, he theorizes a creative approach that contests the privilege of the unique, original work of art in order to promote an art based on the enlargement of prototypes with a view to their application to various media as well as the dissemination of what he would later call, in a deliberately paradoxical formula, “multiple originals”:

This enlargement, or “making operational”, is in every case a second creation (re-creation), signed by the creator, or by the re-creator. New types of artists will emerge: the “visual artist-film director”, the “visual artist-conductor”. […] The unique item, as embodied in easel painting, is not outdated in the positive sense of the word, but we are witnessing the shift from the egocentric to the collective. It is important to be able to connect the very rare transmitting beings with the multitude of receiving beings. Thus the original, which is to the work what grain is to bread, is in reality only a thing as potential. What was beforehand the end of a process is now a departure, the departure of a re-creation with a view to a new function.

1956
A group of works by Vasarely is presented at the Galerie Blanche in Stockholm in September. In the accompanying catalogue, Ulf Linde comments on the black and white paintings with reference to the ying-yang of Eastern thought.

Artist Gyula Kosice from the Madí group, who arrives in Paris to meet Vasarely, attributes to him “the indisputable paternity of kinetic plastic art”. His text marks Vasarely’s significant recognition in South America, where he exhibits the following year at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, then at the Museum of Modern Art in Montevideo, and in 1959 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas.

1957
Vasarely participates in the exhibition “Architecture contemporaine, intégration des arts” (Contemporary Architecture, Integration of the Arts), organized at the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts by the journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui and architect Claude Parent. 

1958
The beginning of a fruitful collaboration with architect Jean Ginsberg, for whom Vasarely creates aluminium panels framing the entrance to a building on Boulevard Lannes in Paris and, at the entrance to a building on Rue Camou, a mural mosaic “the projecting position of which forces the passer-by to register a certain number of optical sensations through which the artist seeks precisely to touch his sensitivity.” 

The Rose Fried Gallery in New York offers Vasarely his first solo exhibition in the United States.

1959
2 March 1959: Vasarely files with the French copyright protection and collection society Spadem a patent for the “Plastic Unit”, formed by the association of a simple geometric shape (circle, triangle, square, rectangle or ellipse) and the pure-coloured square background in which it is set. Their formal and chromatic combinations (six shapes and six colours) constitute the fundamental elements of what the artist calls, after that of Auguste Herbin, the “plastic alphabet”. 

While Vasarely is invited to the Documenta 2 in Kassel, the Der Spiegel gallery in Cologne presents a group of twenty-four works. The luxurious catalogue published on this occasion includes Stockhausen’s scores for the XIth of his Klavierstücke, “Gesang der Jünglinge”. 

In November-December, a new exhibition of “Kinetic Paintings” is held at the Galerie Denise René. In his review, Claude Rivière places the work, and in particular the black and white paintings, under the heading of “simultaneity” and perceptive speed:

While the viewer believes he has grasped a pure shape, the eye has already arrived at another shape, in what becomes like a flickering, frantic race that exhausts and defeats the eye.

In an ambitious essay, which asserts the existence of a specific language of art and a pictorial form of thought, Hungarian-born artist and theorist François Molnar considers Vasarely’s contribution through the prism of information theory and cybernetics. The works of his compatriot, the constituent units of which lend themselves to exhaustive quantification, appear to him to herald the possibility of founding a “science of art” and an “experimental aesthetic”:

Could we not consider certain shapes in Vasarely as the “routines” and “subroutines” of calculating machines? Could we not consider some of his shapes as pre-corrections of the field of information theory? More generally, could we not examine the distribution of shapes in a painting on a statistical-probabilistic basis and in this way place aesthetics in the domain of information theory? […] The problem was insoluble until today. But, starting from some recent paintings by Vasarely, this enumeration becomes possible (paradoxically, very old works by Vasarely already lend themselves, if not to a micro-aesthetic calculation, at least to a calculation of the computer-based value of the work; it seems that one can even express it in bits).

1960
30 January-14 February: an ensemble of sixty-seven works, representative of the production of the past decade, is exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. 

October: publication in the Belgian journal Fine Arts of an important essay by Vasarely announcing the coming advent of a “planetary civilization-culture” calling for its own universal visual language, based on a “new science of plasticity” and fed by a computerizable “plastic bank”:

The idea of the Plastic Bank consists in the collection of these simple elements - obviously geometric -, like atoms that agglutinate into molecules and are traversed by life, organize themselves, perfect themselves, and end up giving us plastic multi-shapes, integrating into all sectors of human life. […] It is from this ‘Plastic Bank’ that ‘planetary folklore’ will spring forth, ensuring the concomitance of civilization and culture.

1961
Vasarely participates with four works, including Tlinko (1956) and Vega (1957), at the exhibition “Bewogen Beweging”, organized by Pontus Hulten at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the first museum survey of kinetic art. 
Vasarely produces the fourth issue of the journal Gorgona, published in Zagreb by the eponymous group. Running across several pages is a linear framework from the Naissances series, preceded by a long preface in which he expresses his conviction that the creative capacities of “thinking humanity” are the prolongation of natural physical forces :

Man rises forth at the summit of the biochemical complex, art rises forth at the summit of the human complex. The analytical dissection of a work of art inevitably leads us to its elementary components, just as the brain itself is just some chemical compound. […] I cannot help but feel a disturbing analogy between my “kinetic plasticity” and the entire micro and macrocosmos. It’s all there: space, duration, corpuscles and waves, relationships and fields. My art therefore transposes Nature once again, this time the nature of pure physics, in such a way as to feel and understand this world psychically.

Vasarely designs the cover of the Christmas issue of the journal Art International (vol. 5, no 10).

1962
12-31 March: The Pace Gallery in Boston offers Vasarely a solo exhibition, prefaced by Sam Hunter, who returns to the ambiguous links between Vasarely’s work and the European Constructivist tradition:

The artist’s debt to the structural aesthetics and schematic reductions of Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy and the classical constructivists is clear, and acknowledged; his use of ambiguity as an expressive device, however, places him solidly in our own time. The optical dipsy-doodle of his reliefs, in particular, subverts the closed geometric order of the old purist generation, and sets free a certain flexibility of spirit more in keeping with contemporary attitudes. One might describe these works as an effort to define the limitations of an art of intellectural control: at the least movement of the spectator’s head the neatly regimented forms break ranks and scatter to unpredictable positions. […] A complex illusionism and visual play, suggesting multiple formal solutions, have replaced the innocent faith in the monolithic pictorial order of the great constructivist pioneers. In Europe today, Vasarely bears a major share of the responsibility for reviving geometric abstraction and placing it in the service of contemporary moods..

Vasarely also presents three paintings, including Supernovae, at the  “Konstruktivisten” exhibition, organized by Udo Kultermann at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen, while the Argos gallery in Nantes exhibits his works together with those of François Morellet, from 17 November to 14 December.

Vasarely produces the cover of the journal L’Œil. Opposite a colour reproduction of Orion, he explains, on the subject of the handling of the “plastic unit” to which the work bears witness:

Even though my example-paintings are created empirically like any work of plastic art of the past, with due respect for intuitive aesthetics, they lend themselves to the investigation of several scientific disciplines, in particular genetics, physics (kinetics, optics), informatics, statistics, economics and social sciences. These example-paintings (or initial prototypes) contain innumerable morphological virtualities translatable into black and white (positive-negative), black and colours, white and colours, colours and colours (in contrast or in harmony), thanks to the law of reversibility of the “plastic unit” (1=2, 2=1) that I previously stated. […] This is an already codified plastic language, allowing the transition from a single work to a multiple work, without loss of qualitative information. […] May this idea appeal to the youngest so that a ‘planetary folklore’ may be developed, a cultural movement in full accord with the material promotion of the world.

1963
March-April Vasarely exhibits at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris a collection of works expressing the principle of the “plastic unit” in multiple two- and three-dimensional forms. These works are understood as the starting point of an art that is applicable on the larger scale of the “polychrome city”, where the multipliable forms of a true “planetary folklore” will flourish.

Vasarely offers the Polychrome City an ordered, well thought-through work, integrated into the architecture, in which inventions for social purposes necessarily increase - in types of themes: fresco, tapestry, stained glass, mosaic - in quantity of editions: silkscreens, album and film. […] Vasarely’s architectural compositions, clothing the wall, infinitely extend and exceed the limits of easel painting with the addition of elements whose position and quantity are determined in advance, changing according to the canvas, film, wall or album. Contrary to the notion of a unique piece, they are multipliable originals, derived from a prototype conceived to give not one but a hundred of them, their rarity stemming not from their number but from the unique quality they signify.

In the same spirit, Vasarely presents at the 43rd Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, at the Grand Palais in Paris, a long wall panel in black and pale gold anodized aluminium. Titled Hondo, it deploys a horizontal linear motif, the curves of which generate globe-shaped protuberances.

At the end of the year, the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover dedicates to Vasarely a retrospective of around a hundred works from 1935 to 1963. This travels the following year to the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf and, under the aegis of Harald Szeemann, to the Kunsthalle in Bern.

At the same time, the Der Spiegel gallery in Cologne organizes an exhibition devoted exclusively to the Naissances cycle, while the Galerie Denise René displays, from 29 November, an ensemble of recent “Kinetic Paintings”. In Arts Magazine, Edouard Roditi makes Vasarely the preeminent figure of a “hard-edge” trend  within the Paris School:

The rare intelligence revealed by Vasarely in so much of his recent work, the obvious seriousness of purpose of his almost scientific experiments in suggesting optical illusion, the supreme technical perfection of his execution, all these now made me wonder whether he may not be one of the few truly great artists of his generation.

1964
Documenta 3 in Kassel allocates to Vasarely an entire room where he alternates between spatial and two-dimensional compositions on the theme of the plastic unit. He also exhibits at the Galleria del Naviglio (Milan, 3-18 December, with an introduction by Umbro Apollonio) and at the Pace Gallery in New York (31 March-18 April). The catalogue here is prefaced by Allan T. Schoer, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati: 

Victor Vasarely’s position as the international leader of geometric abstraction was confirmed last year by the exhibition of his work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris, an honour accorded few living artists. He has maintained a pivotal position in the continuing development of the abstract-geometric tradition by serving as a great source of inspiration for the accomplishments of a younger generation of artists to whom he has

This important critical breakthrough in the Anglo-Saxon world is confirmed by Annette Michelson’s appreciation for International Art:

Since Herbin’s death, Vasarely has been, of all the geometric painters working there, by far the best and most brilliant. […] In Vasarely’s work, however, what is most striking and immediately convincing is the joyous extravagance to which a rationalism of this militant quality can lead. His concentrated exploitation of optical tactics takes him to extremes of simplicity and complexity, establishing a dialectic between the immediate and the subtle, driven by a will that stops, in the way it addresses the spectator, at the threshold of sadism. The spectator, alternately passive and active, is so totally engaged in the visual immediacy and complexity of perception that he experiences a rupture, if not a paralysis, of his critical faculty. In any case that’s what happens with me.  I succumb to the tonic effect of these visual gymnastics.

For his part, Guy Brett maintains, opposing him to Mondrian, that “Vasarely has greatly extended the range of geometric art and saved it from a blinkered pursuit of the absolute and changeless, by showing that vital energy and movement as well as balance and proportion can be conveyed by static geometric forms”.
These opinions contrast with those of Donald Judd and Frank Stella who, in a famous interview conducted by Bruce Glaser, denigrate European abstraction, identified with the central figure of Vasarely, who has just been awarded the Guggenheim Award of Merit: 
Judd: When Vasarely has optical effects within the squares, they’re never enough, and he has to have at least three or four squares, slanted, tilted inside each other, and all arranged. That is about five times more composition and juggling than he needs. […] Vasarely’s composition has the effect of order and quality that traditional European painting had, which I find pretty objectionable…. The objection is not that Vasarely’s busy, but that in this multiplicity there’s a certain structure that has qualities I don’t like.”

Compounding this complexity, Vasarely’s plastic alphabet is enriched with twelve secondary colours and six metallic colours. These can be gradated according to a scale of numbered hues, from 1 for the lightest to 15 for the darkest, allowing the manual programming of the thousands of combinations of tones and gradations made possible in this way.

1965
25 and 27 February: simultaneous opening of the exhibitions “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art, where Vasarely is the best represented artist with Josef Albers, and “Kinetic and Optic” in Buffalo as part of the Art Today festival, two events which contribute to affirming Vasarely’s stature as “father of op art”: 

Vasarely had, 10 years ago, in lucid manifestos, reconsidered the work of art as object; the artist’s act as depersonalized; his product as available to all; the spectator as an organism to be energized; movement and time in stationary works. […] He was co-founder of the Galerie Denise René in Paris which has loyally supported Constructivist art since 1945, and which put on Europe’s first movement exhibition in 1955, where the “peinture cinétique” of Vasarely revealed an optical dimension in painting as radical as time and movement in sculpture. It is this optical dimension which has become the theme of “The Responsive Eye” and joins with the kinetic component in Buffalo.

Vasarely shares with Alberto Burri the Grand Prix of the 8th Sao Paulo Biennale. He also participates in the Venice Biennale, giving rise to an important essay by Hubert Damisch on the recent appearance of a “new genre of illusionism”, situated in a history longer than that of modern painting alone:

If modern art is often defined as the rejection of ‘trompe-l’oeil’ and all forms of illusionism, Vasarely’s research seems curiously linked to that of a Paolo Ucello and to the other mechanicians of vision who claim to obtain, by the sole partition of the surface and the superposition on the plane of geometric elements in chiaroscuro, effects of volume and depth from which the eye cannot escape.

Publication of the first volume of the editorial masterpiece by Marcel Joray and Éditions du Griffon in Neuchâtel: a work designed and laid out by Vasarely, using several types of paper, transparent film and printing techniques. Three further volumes, equally carefully produced and inventive, appear in 1970, 1974 and 1979 respectively.

1966
Vasarely inaugurates his collaboration with the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York with an exhibition of fifty-four recent paintings, accompanied by a luxurious catalogue.

25 March: Vasarely is included in the “Pop Op” exhibition at the Galerie am Dom in Frankfurt, a vast bringing together of multiples conceived by artists from the pop and op movements, which the spirit of the times is increasingly assimilating as the shapes of optical and kinetic art disseminate into everyday culture:

With Vasarely, op art has taken fashion, decoration, construction, advertising, cartoons, and shop windows by storm. We sell miles of ‘Vasarely’: fabrics, tea towels, scarves, sheets, towels, wrapping paper. —I’m not in favour of private ownership of creations, said Vasarely, I don’t care if my work is reproduced on miles of rag! We must create a multipliable art.

June-July: the preface to the new “Vasarely” exhibition at the Galerie Denise René is entrusted to Abraham Moles, who highlights the “structuralist” and “algorithmic” dimension of Vasarely’s “permutational art”:

Vasarely prefigures machine art. Although his work is entirely manual, and his workshop does not contain a single slide rule, his art is already an image of the computer’s product. […] Vasarely is aware of this, he knows better than anyone that all that is needed is technical progress for his works to be infinitely varied by machines for manipulating data elements. It is in this way that, beyond op art, his work is part of a deeper evolution, that of the alignment of art with the latent characteristics of society.

In the most comprehensive study published till then, Henri Van Lier strikes a very similar tone, placing Vasarely’s approach at the heart of the same civilizational issues:

If Vasarely puts us in mind of the contemporary technician or scientist, it is because his art implies the same categories of action and thought, the same definition of the relationships between man and nature, between man and man. And it is this convergence, secret but essential, which is vital to the emergence of a new humanism.

1967
In Arts et Loisirs, Jean-Jacques Lévêque announces:

We lived in 1966, we shall live in 1967 in an ‘op art’ décor. In this way each era is defined by a type of climate. […] In 1925, these were the dry, cubic, austere lines of Mondrian, and today, they are the geometric, abundant, dynamic and joyful lines of Vasarely, the father of op art, the greatest poet of the ‘dynamics’ of our day. […] The one who invents beauty in the age of highways, cybernetics, supersonic planes, the twist and of dresses capable of perpetuating the youthfulness of the body. Because Vasarely is all of this at once: the street given over to the pleasure of rhythm, walls invaded by the profusion of colours that sing and multiply, and the new face of women who dress ‘op’, who buy ‘op’, who live ‘op’, sometimes perhaps without knowing it.

Confirming the rise of this art of the multiple and the derivative product, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presents a collection of nearly one hundred and thirty silkscreen prints by Vasarely. In Zurich, the Pyra-William Wise publishing house begins marketing a wide selection of modular elements in polystyrene and polyester resin for wall integrations, taking up certain formal themes derived from “planetary folklore”. 

Committed to this cultural democratization, the new Galerie Denise René rive gauche opens in November the exhibition “Vasarely: multiples”.

1968
January-February: new exhibition of more than sixty recent works at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Vasarely is also represented by five works at the exhibition “Plus By Minus: Today’s Half-Century” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

On the occasion of the Winter Olympic Games organized by the city of Grenoble, Vasarely designs a 300m² Kinetic wall for the grandstand of the Anneau de vitesse (speed ice skating venue) made of aluminium blade panels forming vibrant black and white targets. As Vasarely wrote, “the wall was already intended, by its structure, to suggest the speed of the skaters”.

On the evening of 27 December, Vasarely is interviewed by pop singer Michel Polnareff on the sets designed by him for the variety show “Quatre Temps” on French TV Channel 1.

1969
October-November: new exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery and first Vasarely retrospective in his native country, at the Mücsarnok in Budapest. On this occasion, Vasarely establishes initial contacts with representatives of the city of Pécs for the creation of a Vasarely Museum.

All my life I have searched for a universal language that would bring people together instead of setting them apart. It is a wonderful achievement for me to be able to make this language heard even in the East.

On the occasion of the Year of Human Rights and under the aegis of UNESCO, Vasarely, “the undisputed master of art for the masses”, designed the graphic symbol, accompanied with a long declaration:

Global machine civilization is first and foremost a programme of education, followed by economic expansion and the establishment of social justice. From this point on, the constantly improving understanding of the causes of friction and the search for factors of rapprochement between nations and races will lead us towards the golden age, not of a privileged ethnic grouping, but of the entire earth. The great pole of attraction allowing the convergence of populations towards this goal are indisputably the sciences and the arts which are now merging.

The following year, for the International Year of Education, he creates a new graphic symbol in the form of a frontal face, constructed from the circular black and white circular shapes emanating from his forehead.

Vasarely participates in the exhibition “Formas computables” at the Computing Centre of the University of Madrid, ending a seminar dedicated to artificial imagination and the “generation of plastic forms”.

November: David Bowie’s album ‘Space Oddity’ is released in the UK. Its cover is a photomontage by Vernon Dewhurst using Vasarely’s work CTA 25 Neg. In 1977, Bowie visits Vasarely at his studio in Annet-sur-Marne, with the meeting immortalized in a series of photographs by Christian Simonpietri.

1970
March-April: under the title “Multidimensional Polychromies”, the Galerie Denise René unveils a set of works based on the illusionistic plays of axonometric perspective, the first examples of which date from the previous year.

May: the “Musée didactique” (Didactic Museum) is inaugurated in the Renaissance castle of the town of Gordes, restored and fitted out at the artist’s expense. The museum houses nearly one thousand five hundred works spanning Vasarely’s entire career, including all original starting prototypes. This “painting library” can be consulted using mobile displays which place the works one after another at regular intervals in front of the visitor’s eyes. Additionally, by offering numerous insights into the integration of the arts in the modern city, the Musée didactique de Gordes prefigures the project of the future Centre architectonique in Aix-en-Provence.

1971
On a framework derived from the plastic alphabet, Vasarely creates two facing frescoes for the concourse of the new Montparnasse station building in Paris.

1973
16 December: laying of the first stone of the Centre architectonique of Aix-en-Provence, at Jas de Bouffan. Vasarely deposits in the foundations a text bearing the resolution: “We shall be worthy of Cézanne”. Intended to house Vasarely’s monumental proposals for the integration of his visual vocabulary into architecture, the artist’s project is executed by two architects of the French Monuments Historiques.

1974
Vasarely participates in the vast architectural integration programme of the Renault headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt by installing thirty-one anodized aluminium panels partitioning the space of the executive dining room.

1975
The Aix-en-Provence Centre architectonique rises out of the ground. The outside walls of this vast building offer a succession of black and white facets reproducing the fundamental plastic unit. The building is composed of sixteen eight-metres-high hexagonal cells, opening onto each other, housing forty-two examples of integrations into architecture representing all aspects of the Vasarelian language, in all available materials: “Less a monument than a demonstration, less a museum than a machine for convincing people, a sort of giant kaleidoscope where we shall, if possible, discover future beauty,” writes Pierre Joly.

1976
14 February: Two special airplanes, chartered by the artist, bring in the crowd of personalities and journalists eager to take part in the inauguration of the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence. The ceremony takes place in the presence of Claude Pompidou, wife of the late French President Georges Pompidou, and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, whose speech places the Vasarelian project in a historical and international perspective:

We who feel so fully European, we who know what living forces our continent contains within it, never tired of inventing words and things, how could we not be sensitive to what is represented, here, under this Provençal sky, by the accomplishment of the project conceived long ago in Weimar by the creator of the Bauhaus?

Dozens of articles published in France and around the world, of which Vasarely kept faithful records, amplify the echo of the event.

Opening of the Vasarely Museum in Pécs in a former presbytery opposite the artist’s birthplace, around a collection of original works, tapestries and silkscreen prints donated by the artist. This collection is enriched by the presence of works by Dewasne, Yvaral, Morellet, Soto, Seuphor and others from the artist’s personal collection, as well as an ensemble by Claire Vasarely.

1977
In Paris Match, Vasarely defends the opening of the Centre Georges-Pompidou, “a kind of aesthetic magnet”. His grid-portrait of the former President of the Republic, co-realized with Yvaral, welcomes visitors into the hall:

My links with President Pompidou have been greatly exaggerated. I have been a few times to the Elysée or Brégançon. The President appeared to me then as a man interested in art, but in a very eclectic way, without the spirit of any one school. A person steeped in culture, but who respected the opinions of others. He loved everything. […] Finally, he was aware of his responsibilities; he believed in France’s role in art. The inspiration for the Centre Beaubourg is not to be sought elsewhere.

Concrete poet Eugen Gomringer devotes a long study to the Centre architectonique of Aix-en-Provence and to the utopia of the Polychrome City:

Vasarely’s Polychrome City must be considered the greatest work of art humanly achievable, combining the plastic value of a physical space with a real psychic dimension. It is Shape-Colour-Space. […] The Polychrome City has an exemplary character. It is a perfect model and, as such, its function is to highlight the difference between what exists and what should exist.

Vasarely is made a doctor honoris causa of Cleveland University, with the city’s mayor declaring 9 November “Vasarely Day.” Vasarely is also appointed honorary advisor to the UNESCO International Association of Plastic Arts.

1978
Inauguration on 18 May of the Vasarely Center on New York’s Madison Avenue, “created to promote his ideas, philosophy of art, architectonic and urban researches”. The day before, the artist had been awarded a Certificate of Distinction by New York University.

1979
Vasarely designs the cover of the special issue of UNESCO Courier, dedicated to Albert Einstein.

A tribute from art to science, this painting by Victor Vasarely, Einstein (1976), where the lines of space-time incurve, shines like an emblem of the genius of the great physicist born a hundred years before.

1980
In Opus International, for which he designs the cover, Vasarely announces that “we are at the dawn of a new style” and presents a series of projects, commissioned by French electricity company EDF the previous year for the coloured cladding of its nuclear power stations. He launches into a “praise of energy”: 

If France wins its own nuclear energy battle, it will be victorious throughout the world, as it was in the Middle Ages, when it created the cathedrals.

1982
Vasarely’s last published book, Gea, drifts poetically between art, science and science fiction, on the place of man and creation in a universe transformed by the discoveries of contemporary physics.

1983
Vasarely is made an honorary citizen of New York City.

1987
8 May: After seven years of arduous negotiations, the Vasarely Museum in Budapest opens its doors in the presence of the artist, who has donated more than four hundred works. 

1990
Claire Vasarely dies at the family home in Annet-sur-Marne.

1997
15 March: Victor Vasarely dies in Paris. Tributes pour in from the art world, as well as the political world. He was, according to the newspaper Le Monde, the “painter of faith in technical progress”, a faith “which makes Vasarely’s art the style of the Pompidou years, in the same way as the Citroën DS or the armchairs designed by Pierre Paulin.” Vasarely’s painting has risen to the status of one of the great mythologies of the 20th century.