How Victor Vasarely became the ‘grandfather’ of Op Art

On 18 March 1997, three days after the death of the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely, The New York Times ran an obituary with the headline ‘Op Art Patriarch Dies at 90’.

‘Although ultimately eclipsed by the more restrained style of Minimalism, Op Art was an immensely popular form of Abstraction,’ wrote Roberta Smith, the paper’s art critic. ‘Mr Vasarely, who had experimented with optical patterns since the 1930s, was widely accepted as its “grandfather”.’

Vasarely had spent the best part of 20th century pushing the boundaries of geometric abstraction. Much more than just a mathematical pattern-maker, however, he was inspired by Malevich and Mondrian as much as by Einstein and Heisenberg, and left behind an oeuvre that rigorously investigated space, matter, energy, movement and time.

‘In his spacious studio in Annet-sur-Marne, organised like a laboratory, illustrious visitors jostled with each other at the door,’ the art historian Werner Spies recalled. ‘Cybernetics, computers, were household words there. Studio talk revolved around research and prototypes, and there were exciting discussions to which mathematicians, physicists, doctors, politicians and behavioural scientists contributed more than the exegetes of art.’

Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1906, Vasarely initially trained at a painting school in Budapest before enrolling at the Mühely academy, the city’s unofficial hub of Bauhaus studies.

In 1930, he moved to Paris, where a lucrative job in graphic design afforded him the freedom to develop his interests in quantum mechanics, astrophysics and optical theory. Applying his knowledge to his art, in 1935 he created L’Echiquier (The Chess Board) and in 1937/38 Zèbres (Zebras) — two hypnotic, Escher-like black-and-white images that are now considered the progenitors of Op Art.

During the following decade, Vasarely befriended the art dealer Denise René, and in 1955 the pair organised an exhibition at her gallery in Paris that would launch his vision. Called Le Mouvement, it presented works from Vasarely’s ‘Black and White’ series, which depicted complex networks of undulating and angular monochrome forms, together with pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Jesus Rafael Sotó and Jean Tinguely. One visiting reporter noted, ‘So many canvases are based on optical illusions that it seems more like a mathematician’s cabinet de curiosité.’

Despite this, the term ‘Op Art’ wouldn’t be coined until 1964, when Donald Judd first used it in a review of the exhibition Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Stanczak was initially critical of the show’s title, saying: ‘Optical, what does it mean? For other paintings you don’t use your eyes?!’ But Judd’s moniker stuck when Time magazine ran the story ‘Op Art: Pictures that Attack the Eye’ a few weeks later.

In February 1965, the movement became an international sensation when The Responsive Eye opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, before touring to St Louis, Seattle, Pasadena and Baltimore. Put together over three years by the curator William Seitz, it featured around 125 works by the likes of Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly — as well as six paintings by Vasarely.

The press release for the exhibition declared that the works on show were Op Art in its purest form: ‘Figuration, free form, gestural brushstrokes and thick impasto, which muffle and weaken the function of colours and shapes, are excluded.’ Seitz was quoted as saying that, ‘unlike most previous abstract painting, these works exist less as objects to be examined than as generators of perceptual responses’, not limited to ‘delight, anxiety and even vertigo’.

But by the time Op Art had become a phenomenon — its psychedelic patterns mirroring the era’s swinging mood and scientific advances — Vasarely had already been working on his biggest contribution to the movement for some five years.

He called it his ‘plastic alphabet’: a system of endlessly interchangeable ‘units’ made from basic shapes inside one another, rendered in a kaleidoscope of colours. Using algorithms, they were organised into dazzlingly complex grids to create his ‘Planetary Folklore’ series (1960 onwards) — the name alluding to the fact that Vasarely thought this new, universal language could transcend cultural borders and save the world from ‘visual pollution’.

This algebraic approach would became the basis for much of Vasarely’s subsequent work, as he continued to explore volumetric abstraction throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The series ‘Universal Expansive Regressive Structures’ (1968 onwards), for example, consisted of neon spherical distortions that resemble early computer graphics. ‘Tribute to the Hexagon’ (1964-76), meanwhile, explored the possibilities of six-sided shapes by means of acid colours and a pulsating, rhythmic energy.

Vasarely was also a great believer in democratising art through collaboration. In 1969, he issued ‘Create your own Vasarely’ kits, and one of his designs appeared on the cover for David Bowie’s album Space Oddity. Three years later, Vasarely unveiled his logo for the 1972 Olympics. And he was an early participant in Renault’s pioneering artist-in-residence programme, creating some 40 works in dialogue with the French car manufacturer — including, with the assistance of his son Jean-Pierre Vasarely (working under the name Yvaral), the brand’s iconic lozenge emblem.

Vasarely himself became a recognisable figure, thanks to his familiar swept-back hair and thick-rimmed glasses, framed by wisps of cigarette smoke.

As the artist’s fame grew, he opened a series of his own museums. The first was in 1970, in Gordes, a village in the south of France where he had gone on holiday every summer since the 1940s. This was soon followed by spaces in Pécs, Budapest and New York. Then there was the huge Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence.

Vasarely said he selected the location for the latter because of the area’s exceptional motorways, and its connections to Cezanne. He designed the building as a monumental sculpture in glass and aluminium, comprising 16 giant hexagons — or ‘cells’, as he called them — which housed an auditorium, a library, a warehouse and several galleries.

During the 1980s, however, Op Art’s popularity waned. Vasarely turned his attention to his empire of museums, but in 1996 the gallery in Gordes closed. By the time of his death in Paris the following year, Vasarely’s name had passed into relative obscurity.

The artist’s reputation was revived a decade later, when his foundation was rescued from collapse. In 2009, Vasarley’s grandson Pierre was made its president, and since then the building has been classified as a monument historique and undergone a full restoration. It now draws around 100,000 visitors annually.

In 2019, the artist received his first proper retrospective in France, which opened with fanfare at the Pompidou in Paris following its debut at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. On the eve of the opening, the show’s co-curator, Jana Baumann, called Vasarely ‘one of the best-known unknown artists of his generation’.

‘As a key figure of post-war art, Vasarely features in most major French collections, but there is also now increasing demand for his work among American and Asian collectors,’ notes Post-War and Contemporary Art specialist Josephine Wanecq, head of the Paris evening sale.

‘His historic monochrome pieces from the 1950s can command the highest prices [his auction recored was set at $882,920 by ALTAÏ III (1955) in 2007], but his colourful works from the 1960s and 1970s also embody the era, and are celebrated as his most iconic images.

‘These later works have a strong presence in institutions,’ she adds, ‘which also increases their desirability.’

Un plaidoyer pour la modernité — Collection Lise et Roland Funck-Brentano is on view at Christie’s in Paris, 2-8 April 2025, as part of the 20th and 21st Century Art spring auctions. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales in April

Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence, France