Page 28 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Vasarely comes from a wealthy family which in the to the effect that the painter Bortnyik, who had just re-
nineteenth century still owned a number of watering- turned from the Bauhaus, was to give a six-month course
places in southern Hungary. A reckless grandfather, how- in which he would pass on what he himself had learned
ever, managed single-handed to squander the immense at Dessau.
Vasarely fortune, so that when the painter was born in `I gave up my job. I was thought quite mad because
1908 it was into the ruins of an illustrious family. people were fighting for work. I registered for the course
It was also into the ruins of a ravaged country. Vasarely and swallowed the lot pell-mell—cubism, Léger, Male-
was 11 years old when the treaty of Versailles dismantled vich, Mondrian, Tatlin, Lissitzky, Chagall, Le Corbusier,
the Austro-Hungarian empire and turned the Hungarian Matisse.... At the same time I got a few commissions—a
Plain into a small and soon famished country. He lived small poster, a dust jacket. I was able to eat and even pay
through the Communist uprising under Bela Kun, the for my materials. But I was suffocating. The country
ensuing white terror, and the setting up of the fascist was falling apart. So I decided to leave.
dictatorship under Horthy. `First I thought of Germany but the Brown Shirts were
`I tried to go on with my medical studies but it was getting a bit too active there so I chose Paris. I arrived in
ridiculous in the circumstances. There were practically 1930, when I was 22, with 500 francs in my pocket. I
no classes. Without work and cut off from Austria and haven't budged for 35 years.'
thus the West, the intellectuals were shattered. There When the young Vasarely left Budapest, he was fleeing
were countless suicides, with doctors, engineers and not only a ruined family and country but above all a
lawyers falling from fourth floor windows like sacks of sense of deterioration, of deliquescence, of rottenness, the
potatoes. cruel effects of the passage of time on things and people.
`I looked for work and got a job as assistant book- He arrived in Paris unknown, but, as he says, 'I needed
keeper in a ball-bearing factory. How boring! Then one no more than a table, drawing paper and a pencil. I had
day the boss asked me to do some advertising posters for only to feel an inclination for work, and the infinite
him. I had been drawing for as long as I could remember universe opened up before me.'
and by fifteen had a very good trompe l'oeil technique. For Eventually he got a well-paid job at the Draeger print
my medical studies I drew skeletons, muscles.... I did his works in Montrouge. Then, in 1935, he was employed by
posters as well as one for a competition. I didn't win but a firm specializing in pharmaceutical advertising. 'From
the results were published in La Vie Publicitaire and it was then on I had a car, a house and a studio. I was rich.' He
in this magazine that I discovered modern art. It was showed me a few of the innumerable publicity drawings
fantastic. I was 21 at the time. There were masses of he had done at that time—and of which a few are still in
posters inspired by the Bauhaus as well as reproductions use—where the influence of both Bauhaus and such great
of Gropius, Kandinsky, Klee, Breuer, Albers, Moholy- poster painters as Casandre and Paul Colin is visible
Nagy and so on. What's more there was an advertisement along with Vasarely's own undeniable skill
`I had "arrived". Nevertheless I felt a veiled dissatis-
faction or discontent. Not long before, however, I had
Blue study 1930 bought a book on modern art. It contained reproduc-
Gouache
11 ¾ x 7 ¾ in. tions of Klee, Ernst and a heap of artists I'd studied in
Budapest and forgotten about. I remembered that at
Bortnyik's classes we graphic and commercial artists felt
far above the painters. Their work seemed useless to us.
Looking at this book I realized that all the best ideas in
publicity work in fact came from the painters. They were
the real innovators and inventors.'
1938, Munich, imminent war. Vasarely was 30, the age
of maturity. He needed a cause, a role to play, a raison
d'être. Painting? Of course, but why not first try to
utilize his knowledge of the graphic arts ? ... Perhaps open
a school, 'establish advanced courses in commercial art'.
He threw himself into a mad scheme, gathering to-
gether a kind of catalogue of all aspects of advertising
art. He worked with a magnifying glass to ensure per-
fection, collecting waste materials (bones, wood, glass,
iron, thread and so on), movement, colours, light and
shade, depth. 'It took me exactly ten years to accumulate
enough for one hundred display panels. I had intended.
to do twice as many but I stopped. It was rather limited
. . .' Nevertheless he exhibited this immense amount of
work in Paris in 1944. 'No one took the bait. I had some
good reviews but no one told me to go ahead with my
ideas and open a school. I would have liked to have gone
further and to have dealt with all the applied arts—the
theatre, interior decoration.... The necessary research