Page 34 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Left, Eper 1965, indelible tempera, 19 x 19 in. (courtesy Hanover Gallery,
London); lower left, Oeuvre Profonde et Cinétique, a biform of 1954, painted on
glass, 31½ x 24½ x 6 in.; and, below, a 'deep kinetic work' of 1954.

tolerated in the West and banned in the East, I am originals here on the second floor. What I sell are en-
trying somehow to make contacts. I happen to know that largements of my original layouts for exhibitions or
the U.S.S.R. has just bought a licence from France for collections, for a tapestry, a wall and so on. I am like a
the prefabrication of sky-scrapers. It needs only an Trojan horse. I allow my paintings to go to collectors in
effort at this level to ensure that hundreds of thousands order to destroy this whole conception of the unique
of buildings in the U.S.S.R., China and Japan will one picture, of collecting and speculation.'
day show what can be done with the new plastics and get It is difficult to see, if such ideas became widespread,
rid of their grim greyness. Unfortunately architects are how the market for modern pictures could continue. It is
absolutely uninterested.... The only ultimate solution is usually the fact that a work is an original that induces the
a society which considers architecture a service and not a buyer to make the investment. But Vasarely keeps his
speculative business. originals for himself. What he sells for forty or fifty
`You see the paradox. I am only accepted and can only thousand new francs are faithful enlargements of his
express my ideas provided I paint in the traditional original layout which frequently, thanks to his assistants,
manner according to rules and in a milieu which I reject. he has not even touched. But as Vasarely himself explains,
I loathe exhibitions and salons with their cyclical crazes — these reproductions would soon lose all commercial
neo-impressionist, neo-expressionist, neo-cubist. I abhor value had not his gallery put pressure upon him to limit
the pseudo-élite world of collectors who don't know himself to one 'unique reproduction' of each work. What
where to turn for their kicks and who fabricate such Vasarely sells, he says, are `bi-products of my archi-
purely pathological movements as the neo-dadaist. They tectural ideas. I admit this is a bit of double-dealing, but
are attracted by boxes of excrement, mazes of dirty as no one is willing to subsidize my work, I need col-
clothes, by clammy and repugnant objects. They attri- lectors in order to live. I have to pay my assistants and
bute an importance which I question to the unique and the photographer. I can't live in a slum.
the exceptional. Nowadays I have only to sign one of the 'Bourgeois society, with its pretensions to immortality,
little sketches I used to do to sell it immediately for a constructs massive houses which it stuffs full of Gauguins
sum upon which, at the time I did it, I could have lived and Cézannes encased in guilt frames. This state of
for a whole month. Now the value of my work does not affairs will not last and elementary dialectics tells us
depend upon uniqueness. In any case I keep all my trail-blazers to take what we need from the declining