Page 30 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Inguiniel 1947-55
52 x 78 in.
Oil

A painting of the creative
Bel le-Île
in the summer of 1947....In
the pebbles, in the pieces of
glass from broken bottles,
polished by the rhythmic rise
and fall of the waves, I am
sure I recognize the inner
geometry of nature. My first
sketches made on the spot
and the paintings...that I
derived from them...still
suffer from traces of gestural
elements, but the ellipsoid
form is already present.'

was inconceivable without painting. Why not start? which, when he was almost forty, he celebrated his real
`This is where I started to follow a lot of false scents. debut in painting and abstract art. 'The abstract was only
There was the gestatory period in 1946: pictures made revealed to me in 1947 when I was able to recognize that
entirely of paste, of which I sold dozens. I could have pure form and pure colour could represent the world.'
become an Estève or a Bazaine. The same year I went But how could abstract art express reality better than
through a symbolist period full of angels, prisoners, the figurative art ?
devil, rather like Prévert. I could have gone on, but what `In the past, the artist claimed that his work evoked a
I had learned from the Bauhaus made me rebel.' whole range of emotions from pleasure in the anecdote,
He was 38 when he took stock. Looking at his over- serving as an historic document, to giving aesthetic satis-
brilliant and facile canvases he had the feeling that there faction and fulfilling a decorative purpose. But with
was a vanity in art akin to vanity in life. When he chose successive limitations, art has become increasingly
to become a painter, it was not, he said, in order to specialized. Just as human activities have been split up
`succeed', to become one of the fashionable artists. What into a growing number of sub-divisions— there are twenty-
he was groping towards was something to neutralize his five branches of biology, for example—so today art leaves
sufferings, a work which, by its discipline and the per- story-telling to the coloured feature film and concentrates
fection of its forms, by the aristocratic elegance of its on that basic sphere where art is irreplaceable, pure
design, would offset decrepitude, deterioration, the pas- plasticism. What was a yellow apple in a composition in
sage of time; a work which would serve as an imperishable the past if not above all a yellow circle? But if I just paint
symbol in a world where everything changes, ages, dies. a yellow circle and not an apple, it could just as well be
He became satiated with this drive for purity—in Belle- the sun....I accomplish and encompass more. At a period
He in 1947. Holidaying on the beach he was over- when mankind has extended his knowledge to cover both
whelmed with a pantheistic sense of oneness with nature. macro- and micro-cosmos, how can an artist get excited
Like pre-Socratic philosophers who wrote cosmogonies by about the same things that made up the day-to-day
the sea seeking a First Principle—air, fire or water—out world of the painter of the past, restricted as it was to
of which the universe was created, Vasarely discovered what came within his immediate sense range— his house,
that all the forms surrounding him—the waves, pebbles, the people he knew, his garden, the landscape, his town ?
shells, polished glass, eddies, beaches, clouds and so on— Henceforth only abstract art will adequately express this
could be reduced to a single fundamental shape—the cosmic age of atoms and stars. The modern artist will no
ellipse—which unites within itself all the various aspects longer paint a green leaf hanging from a tree. He will be
of nature. Vasarely was to reproduce this 'inner geo- wondering where chlorophyll comes from. And suddenly
metry', which he considered basic to the real world, in a he is flying among the complexities of space-time.
remarkable series of canvases called From Belle-lie with `But although after Belle-Ile I wanted to paint abstrac-