Page 38 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

or Chagall burbling their artistic nonsense away on vibrations and carried beyond the ravages of time. 'Born
television, if you see Estève, Soulages or Poliakoff painting aloft, I fly on, destined sometimes for the atom and some-
the same picture over and over again for fifteen years as times for the galaxies, traversing fields of attraction and
if they were digging coal out of a mine, you finish up by repulsion', he wrote in 1963 with the happy lyricism of a
realizing that all this art, this luxury of an over-indulged man who feels that he has correlated his art and his
élite, does no more than tickle the senses.... It is still- innermost feelings of fragmentation and radiation in
born because, in losing its universality, it has lost its space and time. One feels that in this almost naive and
style. juvenile lyricism, one has rediscovered the Hungarian
`One has to choose. The past does not interest me. I child with his love of converging furrows on fresh-turned
know very little about painting. I've been to the Louvre soil, of the undulation of telegraph wires, of railway lines
only twice in thirty years. Neither Rubens nor Rem- glistening in the distance, of electric power cables....
brandt mean a thing to me. Nearer our own times four Always a passionate seeker after the new, Vasarely made
impressionists, four cubists and, dare I say, a semi- an incursion into kinetic art in 1954-5. Whereas optical
surrealist, as well as a few very doubtful minor masters, art gives an illusion of movement, the eye quivering over
have been used as an excuse to unleash upon us a large a firm canvas under the influence of colours and forms,
number of imitators and academics, each one dedicated kinetic art is based upon actual movement, either of the
to his own personal ideas and his own unique genius. I work itself as with Schoeffer and Tinguely, or of the
am very pleased to say that my own contribution will spectator—so that the work changes according to his posi-
be to depersonalize works of art and put paid to the roman- tion—as with Agam and Soto. In both cases a fourth
ticism and delicate individuality of these "creators". dimension is added to art, that of time, as the changing
`I am known as a painter. My name appears in the work can only be seen fully over a certain period. Some
handbooks and I have been hung in various museums. ten years ago, Vasarely became one of the second group of
So it would seem that there is no difference between me artists, producing works notably for the University of Cara-
and any vulgar careerist. A difference exists, however. cas, which depended on the movement of the spectator.
His ideas date from the Renaissance; I fight for the de- He appears to be the only pioneer of kinetic art to have
bunking of the artist and an end to individual pictures.' abandoned it in favour of two dimensional works. And this
We have seen the social consequences of Vasarely's is where we come to the ultimate paradox of Vasarely.
ideas about the proliferation of works of art and need to This man, with his passion for movement, so keen on
spread his ideas on plasticity through people's minds. From progress and proliferation, yearns for the perfect cohesive
1950 onwards these ideas also had a great number of forms like those he painted back in Belle-tie, like those he
aesthetic consequences; to the degree that the painter of used to admire in the works of Mondrian and Malevich.
the great, balanced and impeccable Belle-lie series felt `There are two main aspects of abstraction' he wrote in
arising within himself the need for his forms to develop, 1953. 'First, the splintering, the fragmentation; second,
to proliferate, to respond to reproduction. He wanted to the condensation and construction of the new object.'
`job' them, to make them `move'. He attempted to trans- Thus he anticipated and summarized the keen contra-
late into plastic terms this desire for multiplication and diction which subtends all his works; he is torn between
movement, this yearning for vast spaces and vast numbers, being a painter of objects—linked to Mondrian's aesthetic
this denial of the unique which had already caused him to creed in which forms triumph in their perfect splendour,
reject easel pictures. Although his advocacy of the multi- seeming to arrest time by the discipline of their design—
ple reproduction of works of art and their use in and the opposite, a painter of the metamorphosis of
architecture had not previously affected the aesthetic perishable, dilating matter, its apparent solidity being
principles of a given picture, it was eventually to modify demonstrated in the cellular movement which gives rise
the composition itself. The artist was compelled to find to fleeting forms which dissolve and evaporate beneath
a language capable of expressing his drive towards frag- one's gaze so that the surface of the canvas is transformed
mentation and multiplication, the destruction of the into a sudden flash, a transient shock to the retina.
unique and the continuous mutation of reality. Fed on On the one hand matter is transcended by perfect form;
Bauhaus ideas, especially those of Albers, whose 1942 on the other form is engaged in the continuous process
sketches anticipated Vasarely's own researches, familiar- of the metamorphosis of matter, the eternal transformation
ized through his work in advertising with the effects of of things and beings, their cellular progress from life to
colours and forms upon the spectator, and being a death and death to life.
careful observer of Mondrian's early and late optical Vasarely is at the intersection of these two streams. He
compositions, Vasarely perfected his current technique of oscillates between the one and the other. His, work lively,
juxtaposing on canvas networks of forms and contrasting straight-forward, has retained many of the basic ideas
colours which the eye tries to absorb simultaneously and ofmodern art and focuses our interest on some of the major
which thus appear to be in constant vibration. This socio-aesthetic problems of our age. Transitory, stemming
illusion is carried still further as the surface of the image from the past, it yet indicates ways forward. q
appears to dissolve and lose its former density. The
picture evaporates before the fluttering gaze; it de-
materializes. Vasarely has found plastic expression for a
long-standing obsession—the negation of solid matter, the
metamorphosis of a static object which, dormant, has
been captured in a progression of immaterial wave