VICTOR VASARELY (1906 - 1997)

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Lot n° 66
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60000 - 80000 EUR
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Result : 66 300EUR
VICTOR VASARELY (1906 - 1997)
Forgau, 1980 Acrylic on panel, signed lower left, countersigned, titled and dated on the back, bears the archive number 3.107 72 x 72 cm 28 11/32 x 28 11/32 in. We thank Mr. Pierre Vasarely for having kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work. Victor Vasarely Born in 1906 in Hungary, Victor Vasarely began briefly studying medicine and then entered the Muhëly in Budapest in 1929, a school based on the same model as the Bauhaus. There, the will to de-hierarchize artistic practices - fine arts and applied arts are put on the same level - and to work for a broad social diffusion is transmitted: art must be put at the service of society and its activities. To escape an authoritarian political power, Vasarely moved to Paris in 1930 where he became a graphic designer for the Havas advertising agency, thus putting Muhëly's teaching to good use. With advertising, he experienced the modernist pleasure of creation in contact with reality, but he also learned to assign an effect to a cause. After the Second World War, Vasarely abandoned graphic design to devote himself to painting and still advocated a revolution in artistic practice and its social functioning. His interest was in the multiple and he aimed for a democratic distribution of art. We find the mass diffusion encouraged by the modernists: the Bauhaus, De Stijl and the Union of Modern Artists (UAM). In 1955, he published the Yellow Manifesto, which defined kinetic art, of which he was a founder. Art is no longer defined by a subject, nor even by a composition or a technique, but by its apprehension by the eye. In 1965, the exhibition "The Responsive Eye", organized by the MoMA in New-York, allowed to measure the transgression that the works of op-art represented, especially those of Vasarely. This exhibition was welcomed as a consecration of optical art, the public reception was resounding but the critics remained mixed. An artistic quarrel was born, in which Vasarely was accused of being an illusionist and the initiator of an art based on laboratory experiments. This was without counting on the immense posterity of this movement, which still finds many echoes today, for example in digital art. The work we propose, entitled Forgau and created in 1980 by Vasarely, shows the viewer the repetition of colours and forms, themes dear to the artist. The viewer thus becomes aware of his own capacity to see and also of the biases and floats of his own vision. In Forgau, the round and the square stand side by side, and a depth is created in the centre of the canvas by the deformation of the squares. The circularity invokes a centrality but also a hypnotic movement of eternal repetition. The ubiquity of points of view, an idea at the heart of Vasarely's research, is thus perfectly synthesized in this work.
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