Vasarely’s Periods
by Arnauld Pierre

During his lifetime, Vasarely classified his work into several large aesthetic families – he called them “periods” –, based on both formal and chronological criteria, his intention being to bring order to the abundant creativity that characterized his career and to strengthen the legibility of his life’s work.

Nevertheless, he frequently varied the naming and definitions of these periods, as well as their limits in time. Indeed, the very idea of a “period” is misleading, potentially leading the reader to believe that a succession of styles follow one another in a linear chronology. In fact, most of his formal inventions overlap and continue in parallel, sometimes long after the initial impulse.

For this reason the classification adopted here, while applying the broad outlines and terminology of Vasarely’s own nomenclature, chooses to clarify certain concepts and to highlight others. Each “period” described below is accompanied by explanations which place the artist’s orientations into perspective, with a contemporary and updated reading of his work.

Graphic Studies
Trained in the spirit of the Bauhaus in the “functional character of plasticity”, to use his own words, Vasarely engaged throughout the 1930s in a systematic analysis of the means of visual creation: line, shape, colour, material, perspective, optical and kinetic effects. Initially, he applied the studies deriving from this didactic approach to his creative work in advertising and visual communication. They were It was also intended to form the systematic basis for teaching applied arts in the framework of a “College of Graphic Arts” which never saw the light of day. They constitute a stock of visual structures impressive in its scale and inventiveness, ranging from the Harlequins and the Martians to the first deformations of the grid, and on to the famous Zebras, which inaugurate the reversible structures in black and white.  Once freed from their still figurative substrate, Vasarely would draw on these formal ideas throughout his career.

“Wrong Paths”
Under this self-deprecating heading, Vasarely grouped works which for him bore witness to his “wanderings” and “gropings” in and around Symbolism and Surrealism, post-Cubism and gestural painting. Produced mostly in the first half of the 1940s, in the heart of the darkness of History, their pathetic subjects and their dark tone seemed to reveal “a man in the grip of his fundamental Angst″, according to the anonymous author of the preface to the exhibition at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, which revealed them to the public in 1946. Certain of these paintings, however, begin to mark a departure from reality, heralding Vasarely’s interest in pure, non-figurative plastic art, albeit in a still non-geometric language. 

Geometries of Reality
The abstraction to which Vasarely converted from 1947 onwards always takes as its starting point the observation of reality. But for him it is all about moving beyond outer appearances and revealing fundamental structures, what he calls the “internal geometry” of nature. Revelatory of the author’s taxonomic hesitations, the ensembles resulting from this activity are not always clearly delimited. In 1954, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels distinguishes five of them: Arcueil, Belle-Isle, Cristal, Denfert-Gordes and Belle-Isle-Gordes. In the 1970s, Vasarely spoke of them as “composite periods”, testifying to the continuing difficulty in assigning certain works to one group rather than another. The classification below keeps to the three categories that finally imposed themselves: Belle-Isle, Denfert and Gordes, with certain composite works distributed in a sometimes arbitrary manner. 

Belle-Isle
The works in this ensemble were created following the artist’s stay in Belle-Île, off the Brittany coast, during summer 1947. Observation of pebbles and shells, surf glass and eddies of water provided the inspiration for abstract shapes based on curves and ovoids with rounded corners. Stylistically these belong to biomorphism, an abstract movement to which Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder had given its credentials since the 1930s. Introduced to new concepts of physics and biology by his scientific readings, Vasarely gave new impetus to this organic abstraction, becoming one of its main representatives in the post-war years.

Denfert
The works in this group are inspired by the fine curved cracks in the ceramic tiles lining the Denfert-Rochereau metro station in Paris, which the artist regularly frequented in the pre-war years. His first observations date back to this period. They form the subject, first of drawings from memory from 1948 onwards, then of transpositions into paintings from 1951. Evocative of abstract landscapes, these works are an occasion for reflections on the relationships between microcosm and macrocosm, with Vasarely comparing the molecular rupture responsible for these cracks to the geological cataclysms giving birth to the great synclines. They are exemplary of a metamorphic imagination that questions the centrality of the human frame of reference and plunges the gaze into a continuum of undecidable scales.

Cristal-Gordes
Vasarely discovered in 1948 the village of Gordes, where he purchased a house a few years later. The mineral geometry of the site, crushed by the Provençal light which accentuates the harshness of contrasts of shadow and light, inspires a set of works with angular lines and crystalline shapes, nested within each other according to what the artist identifies as “contradictory perspectives”: “full and empty merge, shapes and backgrounds alternate”. Far from the architectural solidity that serves as his starting point, Vasarely discovers through this family of works the uncertainties of a wavering geometry and the resulting ambiguities of perception. All these reach their summit in the optical effects orchestrated by the works in black and white, the beginnings of which are exactly contemporary with Cristal-Gordes. Vasarely placed here transitional works, such as those from the Akka series and the Homage to Malevich. 

Black and White
The reduction to black and white appears in Vasarely’s work as early as 1951 with the series of Photographisms, that is wall-sized photographic enlargements of linear patterns, the deformations of which generate virtual volumes. Extended in the Naissances [Births] series, these patterns are assimilated to waves, while the small round or square modular forms juxtaposed in other works like the Betelgeuses or Tlinkos, are presented as particles, prefiguring the “plastic units” of the following period. These binary structures, mostly in grid formats, alternate again with freer compositions. In each case, the surfaces of these works vibrate under the powerful effect of contrast, being further animated by the rotation of the plastic units, the circles sometimes stretching into ellipses and the squares into diamonds. The observer is suddenly confronted not only with shapes but with forces, as simple planes begin to take on movement. Through this vast family of works, with its numerous sub-series, Vasarely invented optical and kinetic art, one of the most significant developments in geometric abstraction since its appearance.

Planetary Folklore
At the dawn of the 1960s, Vasarely developed a “plastic alphabet” consisting of a lexicon of six simple geometric shapes embedded in squares of pure colour, the “plastic units”, the juxtaposition of which creates multi-coloured and as it were pixelated grids. Affirming “the convergence of all creative forms towards a civilization-culture on the scale of the entire earth”, the artist in this way offered a now globalized planet a visual language, the combinatorial properties of which would make it freely adaptable into the source of a true “planetary folklore”. In Vasarely’s mind, this visual language sought to be universal while permitting the expression of personality and cultural particularities. This language is propagated not only on the surface of paintings but also on reliefs mounting up to attack the walls and onto volumes which take possession of the surrounding space. Through their codification, the plastic units also lend themselves to industrial manufacturing in many available materials and to their enlargement in the form of architectural integrations, making it potentially possible to give its face to the “polychrome city” that the artist wished to see built.

Permutations & Algorithms 
From 1965 onwards, each of the six pure colours of the plastic alphabet was resolved into twelve to fifteen intermediate chromatic values. This new colour chart introduces refined effects of gradation, cameos or chiaroscuros into the contrasting mosaic of works from the initial alphabet, leading to ever more subtle spatial suggestions. To master the growing combinatorial possibilities of this alphabet, Vasarely included its components in a systematic and computerizable game of permutations and progressions. “Complexity becomes in this way simplicity. Creation is now programmable,” he writes. This pre-digital abstraction reveals his deep connivance with cybernetic thought and the beginnings of computer art. Vasarely’s “programmings”, however, dispense with machines, being presented in the form of studies on graph paper, with the distribution of shapes and colours responding to a coding (letters and numbers) permitting the precise execution of the work by the artist’s studio.

CTA 
This series is generally not distinguished from that of the Permutations and Algorithms, with which it is contemporary and with which it shares certain effects of light and colour gradations. It differs, however, in its extreme simplification: the plastic unit is abandoned in favour of the repetition of a single shape (the circle) and a single metallic shade (gold, silver, bronze) the modulation of which generates at the centre of the work a single source of radiation that Vasarely assimilated to that of quasars and pulsars, the most energetic celestial bodies in the universe, designated in astronomical nomenclature under the name of CTAs. The same inspiration and luminous energy emerge from related series, such as the aptly named Quasar, where the inclined diamond replaces the circle.

Vonal
This group of works abandons the individual cells of the plastic unit, instead treating the plane homogeneously by an interlocking of shapes which digs an illusory space into the heart of the canvas, where the gaze is as if sucked in. The Vonals themselves, but also other works entitled Reytey, Zsinor, etc., use the square, at times inclined, destabilizing the observer’s points of reference. The Oervengs, Szems, etc., for their part, favour the embedding of eccentric circles, generating stereo-kinetic illusions (of space and movement) frequently exploited in the context of Op art. Other compositions based on successions of chevron or broken lines reiterate the volumetric effects of the Naissances. These are classified in this same family, whose name “vonal” means “line” or “stroke” in Hungarian.

Multidimensional Polychromies
It is under this title that Vasarely exhibited in 1970, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, a group of works - the first examples of which date from the end of the previous decade - based on the handling of cubes seen in so-called “parallel” perspective: the axonometric cube, formed by the union of a square and two rhombuses, and the Kepler cube, formed by three isometric rhombuses. This new component of Vasarely’s art can be read, in three-dimensional space, as a cube with protruding or re-entrant edges and, in two-dimensional space, as a regular or irregular hexagon. Hence the name “Homage to the Hexagon” that Vasarely often used to designate this family of works, which nevertheless includes other clearly identified groups, such as the Gestalt, Tri-dims or the Torony series. In all these variations, the gradated hues filling the surfaces contribute to the predominance of an ambiguous volumetric vision, where the sense of orientation is lost, and where all visual information, carried by reversible spatial coordinates, is liable to be called into question.

VEGA - Universal Structures 
Compositions based on the deformation of their modular patterns are present in certain Graphic Studies (the Martians) and advertisements from the 1930s (for the Mitin pharmaceutical company) as well as in the Black and White period (Vega). From the end of the 1960s, they constitute an autonomous and systematic path of research - the royal road to the development of Vasarely’s art - immediately establishing themselves as the artist’s signature. In expansive deformations, an enormous bubble forms on the surface, stretching the structure and causing light to stream over its rounded contours. Regressive deformations, on the contrary, suck the shapes into unfathomable depths. “Breathing surfaces”, as Vasarely called them, they give the image of a cosmos endowed with exuberant life, like a living organism. Unlike the statism of the grids of classical modernist abstraction, “they reveal”, in the artist’s words, “a fanciful baroque dimension”. Specific to all the Metamorphoses, they can also be composed with the hexagonal cells of the Multidimensional Polychromies. In fact they incorporate most of Vasarely’s formal research, of which they offer the ultimate synthesis.