Victor VASARELY (1906-1997) Lot n° 111

Pereg, 1983 Acrylic on panel, signed lower part, countersigned, dated and titled on reverse, bearing the archive number N°3.184 78.5 x 75 cm 30 45/64 x 29 17/32 in. Victor Vasarely Pereg, 1983 Born in 1906 in Hungary, Victor Vasarely began briefly studying medicine and then in 1929 entered the Muhëly in Budapest, a school comparable to the Bauhaus. The will to de-hierarchize artistic practices and to put art at the service of society and its activities is transmitted there. Vasarely moved to Paris in 1930 where he became a graphic designer for the Havas advertising agency, thus putting Muhëly's teaching to good use. With advertising, he experienced the pleasure of creation in contact with reality, but he also learned to assign an effect to a cause. After the Second World War, Vasarely abandoned graphic design to devote himself to painting, always advocating a revolution in artistic practice and its social functioning. His interest is in the multiple, aiming at a democratic diffusion of art. We find the mass diffusion encouraged by the modernists: the Bauhaus, De Stijl and the Union of Modern Artists (UAM). In 1955, he published the Yellow Manifesto, which defines the kinetic art of which he is one of the founders: the art is not defined any more by a subject, nor even a composition or a technique, but well by its apprehension by the eye. In 1965, the exhibition "The Responsive Eye", organized by the MoMA in New York, allowed to measure the transgression that represented the works of op-art and notably those of Vasarely. This exhibition was welcomed as a consecration of optical art, the good reception of the public was resounding but the critics remained mixed. An artistic quarrel was born, where Vasarely was accused of being an illusionist and the initiator of an art based on laboratory experiments. This was without counting on the immense posterity of this movement, which still finds many echoes today, for example in digital art. The work we propose, entitled Pereg and realized in 1983 by Vasarely, shows the spectator the repetition of colors and forms, themes dear to the artist. The viewer becomes aware of his own ability to see and also of the biases and floats of his own vision. In Pereg, the motifs, neither completely round nor completely square, respond to a palette that is neither completely gray nor completely blue. The eye and the mind drift with the shapes and a drift of the forms from left to right, whose beginning and end are outside the canvas, thus drawing the spectator into a hypnotic movement.