Vasarely, when art meets modernity
The Franciscans reveal the hidden treasures of its museum, an opportunity to discover one of its masterpieces of 20th century art! With a rich collection of objects from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the Franciscans preserve works by major artists, figures of the great artistic movements. Many of these works will be presented on the walls of the Franciscans as of summer 2020. Let's already discover Vasarely's work.
The museum keeps a geometric work of Victor Vasarely whose retrospective has just been completed at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Many exhibitions are planned to celebrate the master ofOp Art (Optical Art). Also, the acrylic on canvas entitled SEES will be exhibited at the Touquet-Paris-Plage museum, from October 26, 2019 to April 26, 2020, during a monographic exhibition, co-organized by the Vasarely Foundation chaired by Pierre Vasarely, grandson of the artist.
Victor Vasarely (Pécs 1906 - Paris 1997) was a Hungarian visual artist who became a French citizen in 1961. After two years of medical studies, he began his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Arts and at Mühely, a version of the Bauhaus in Budapest from 1928 to 1930. He moved to Paris in 1930 as a graphic designer for Havas while developing his personal research.
The scientific construction of works of art became the credo of this visual artist. Father of the optical art, he builds his works thanks to the movement created by the only relation of forms and colors, thus composing true optical illusions.
From the 1960s, in the tradition of the first abstract painters like Kandinsky, Victor Vasarely wanted painting to be addressed to the greatest number of people and to be understood by all. He wanted art to become a new universal language. Vasarely created a plastic alphabet made up of geometric shapes embedded in squares of pure colors. Defined as a visual Esperanto , this alphabet plays on the relationship between the shapes and colors used. As in the work SEES, preserved at the Franciscans, two ranges of colors are observed, whose combinations bring an emotional perception to the viewer.
Vasarely, a visionary visual artist, wrote that "creation is now programmable" and that it has a vocation " to go down to the street " to be integrated into the " polychrome city of happiness ".
