Galeria Extravagance

Victor Vasarely (born Győző Vásárhelyi)
Born in 1908 in Pécs (then Austria-Hungary), died in 1997 in Paris. French artist of Hungarian origin. A talented designer of advertising forms, an outstanding representative of geometric abstraction, a pioneer and leader of op art. Art theoretician.
Descendant of a noble family, once very wealthy. However, the artist's grandfather squandered the family fortune. Shortly afterwards, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, due to mistakes in its domestic and foreign policy, took part in the Great War (World War I), from which it emerged economically devastated and divided into many smaller states. The territory of Hungary was significantly reduced, as a result of which chaos and poverty reigned.
We were in utter poverty. My mother sold her jewellery. We were crammed into a filthy apartment. Without work, cut off from Austria and therefore from the West, the entire intelligentsia was plunged into despair: doctors, engineers, lawyers… At home, we went hungry.
Victor Vasarely
Vasarely started studying medicine. However, the classes hardly took place, and besides, he needed to support himself somehow. He gave up his studies.
 
I found a job as an accountant in a ball bearing company. Boring. One day the boss asked me to make posters advertising his product. I had always been drawing. At the age of fifteen I already had a very good technique of trompe-l'œil. […] Now I made the posters he asked me to make. Encouraged by the effect, I took part in a poster competition, the results of which were published in the La Vie Publicitaire magazine. It was there that I discovered modern art. Love at first sight! There were a lot of posters inspired by the Bauhaus, the great German school of applied art, where almost all the talented artists from Europe worked at that time: Gropius, Kandinsky, Klee, Breuer, Albers, Moholy-Nagy and others. And then an advertisement appeared in this magazine: the painter Bortnyik, who had just returned from the Bauhaus, was going to open a course where he would teach for six months what he had learned in Dessau. I quit my job, I enrolled in the school.
V.V.
While attending school, I began to receive small orders: a small poster, a book cover. I could eat and even afford art supplies. But I was suffocating: the country was decaying, cut off from everything… I decided to leave. At first, I ended up in Germany. However, the Nazis were already gaining strength there. I chose Paris. I arrived there in 1930. I was twenty-two years old and had 500 francs in my pocket. I didn’t speak French. However, all I needed was a table with tracing paper and a pencil: all I had to do was lean over and the universe opened up before me, infinite.
V.V.
 
At first, young Vasarely goes hungry. In time, he finds his first permanent job, then another. In the following years, he will make a career in advertising.
 
One day I bought a big book about contemporary art. It had Klee in it, Ernst, and many artists I had studied in Budapest and had forgotten about. A thought came to my mind: when I was young, at Bortnyik's school, us graphic artists, advertising designers, we had a sense of superiority over painters. Their work seemed to us futile. And then, standing in front of this book, I realized that all the powerful ideas we use in advertising come from painters. They were the real researchers, inventors.
V.V.
 
For the artist this was the beginning of a period of exploration. He tried to create a compendium of advertising studies, which went unnoticed. Then he painted in the spirit of symbolism, using plastic masses, experienced fascination with his great predecessors: Picasso and Matisse. All these works sold well. But Vasarely felt that he wanted to find his own way.
In 1947, on the shore of the Breton Island of Belle Île, in search of inspiration, he became fascinated by the shape of the shell and of the stone. He discovered that all individual forms, such as stones, whirlpools, clouds – can be reduced to one perfect form. Under the surface of the world he noticed an “internal geometry”.
I had an epiphany of abstraction then. I understood that pure form and pure colour could signify the world.
V.V.


This will all end badly. Many artists have worked honestly in their studios for years. Suddenly we “discover” their works, “introduce” them to the market, they are “fashionable”. The result: everyone starts creating op art – until the point of saturation. Let’s try to sell a tachist painting in America today. Nobody wants that anymore! Soon it will be our turn: the op art school will fall to its knees. I will endure as Mondrian has endured – while all his students and imitators have fallen into oblivion. Nevertheless, the vision of art as a “gadget”, seasonal excitement is unbearable for me. It is an expression of the decadence of a society that belittles everything it touches and that has failed to create a collective concept of art that meets its needs. V.V.
When I wanted to be abstract, I quickly realized that it is not easy to get rid of figurative forms rooted in our subconscious. I experienced epic struggles, I drew a line – this is the horizon; the background became air. How many times have I found in my paintings the gestures of the Virgin Mary, a landscape, a totem! […] At least when I have nothing but circles and squares, I am free: there are no possible memories… V.V.
The myth of uniqueness must disappear. Let us repeat our works endlessly with the machine. Let us not be afraid of the new tools that technology has given us. Literature and music spread through books and records, without losing any of their value. Why not do the same in painting? Ten, twenty thousand works of art that will be eloquently present in children's rooms, among young people: this is possible and will be done. It is about occupying both physical space (the city) and psychic space (collective consciousness). V.V.
Najpierw tekst mój
The emergence of combinatorics of this scale offers a tool of a global nature, while allowing, through the multiplicity of possible formulas, the manifestation of every ethical and aesthetic personality. I call for the creation of a global folklore in which everyone, within the same framework, could express their diversity. V.V.
 
In our times, we are dealing, on the one hand, with galloping population growth all over the world, and on the other hand, with growing technical potential that allows us to gradually respond, at least in terms of housing, to the needs of the masses. The artist must join this dialogue. His function is to humanize technology and beautify everyday life. […] Aesthetics is as necessary to man as oxygen. It is as close to him as music or rhythm. […] Since not everyone has the opportunity to study contemporary art in depth in order to understand it, I simply advocate its presence. Art should spread among the masses. V,V.
 
Survival does not consist in quietly passing on one's name to posterity, but in contributing a particle of novelty that will find its way, that will spread widely in the present and the future, that will mark the minds of people. V.V.