Page 66 - Studio International - May 1970

4
Theo van Doesburg
Arithmetic Composition 1930
Oil on canvas 101 x 101 cm.
5
Henryk Stazewski
Composition aux Factures Diverses c. 1930
Oil on canvas 70 x 86 cm.
6
Josef Albers Graphic 1933
7
Sonia Delaunay Drawing 1933

Chardin, riding comet-tails with Eisenberg, exponents, linked with the Galerie Denise `illusions of depth', are precursors of genius.
Vasarely falls over his own feet. There is, for Rene, were artist such as Dewasne, Deyrolle, The confusion here is between designers.
example, a contradiction between his refer- Poliakoff, Pillet, Jacobsen and Mortensen. expedients and artistic principles. In the
ences to vibration, motion, the ephemeral, On the other hand Concrete art was derived 1920s, Vasarely never publicized his re-
and his dogged search for 'certain constants from van Doesburg, Bill and Lohse, for whom searches as expressions of the idea of de-
running through all creation and all times. a surface is a programmed social organization materialization and optical disruption of the
... I have succeeded in progressively isolating which assigns no role to composition, to picture plane. He never attributed any
certain constants of artistic form founded on balance, to the irrational or to the arbitrary aesthetic significance to these designs (as was
plane geometry. Why should one not achieve selection of forms; each element in the whole done in 1930, for example, by the Polish
a codification of plastic means ?' structure is part of a system which applies to artist Stazewski, whose optical works were
As if the ideas of plane geometry, surfaces, all the details of the picture. It was not until shown last year at the Musée Galliera, and
plasticity, were not subject to mutation; as if 1962, under the influence of the Groupe de who explicitly attacks the idea of 'the funda-
colour itself were not subject to historical Recherche d'Art Visuel, that Vasarely passed mental indivisibility of the surface'.
conditioning ! As Meyerson said fifteen years unobtrusively from one of these tendencies to The truth is that Vasarely did his first paint-
ago, `[colour] seems to us to be a fact of the other; he went on to elaborate systematic ings in 1944-45 (The Metro, Seven rears' Bad
human life in which various societies, tech- programmes of his own. Luck and a self-portrait) ; that he held his
niques and arts have added in turn their That is not all. Vasarely maintains a confusion first exhibition, of representational-symbolist
contributions to the basic framework provided between the commercial art of his pre-war paintings, in 1946, with a catalogue preface
by human physiology.' In an age when the period—he worked mainly for pharmaceutical by Jacques Prevert ; and that he showed his
painting, the sculpture, the object in general firms—and his artistic output proper, which first abstract composition in 1947. In short,
are constantly called in question, by such came much later. Influenced, like many other he is in no sense, as he would have us believe,
ideas as spectator involvement and the total designers in the 1930s, by the Cassandre a contemporary of Albers, who has somehow
environment, it is hard to imagine a set of style and by the gestaltist tricks taught by strayed into our midst.
rules in whose name aesthetic effect can be the Bauhaus—he had studied in Budapest What exactly is the contribution of Vasarely
codified, as Vasarely proposes, in a two- under a former student of the Dessau Bauhaus to modern art ? The trouble with this extra-
dimensional alphabet consisting of a few —Vasarely did a certain number of designs, ordinary man is that with him nothing is
signs. all figurative, incorporating certain optical simple. Influences? He recognizes none. His
There also exists in Vasarely's words—and in devices, retinal stimuli which he presents most important intuitions come to him
his work— a manifest contradiction between today as premonitions of Op Art. If this is so, through the contemplation of nature, and not,
two very different tendencies within French the man who designed the Cinzano zebra is as with most artists, through studying those
post-war art. On the one hand formalist abstract the father of modern art, and the fifty budding who have gone before in order to try to go
art derived from the experimentation of Vasarelys who went to Josef Albers's prelimin- further. The mountain range of the Lubéron,
Magnelli, Domela and Arp, for whom the ary course at the Dessau Bauhaus in 1926, the village of Gordes seen from below, the
abstract was a distillation of nature; its and did practical exercises every morning in tiles of the Paris Metro station of Denfert-