Artist Birthday: Victor Vasarely

The study of the optical effects possible in the manipulation of color and shape that began with the Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat (1895–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935) in the late 1800s, culminated in the mid-1900s in the Op Art movement. The intensive studies of visual perception carried out by Victor Vasarely can be credited with inspiring new generations of Op artists into the 21st century.

Artist Birthday for 9 April: Victor Vasarely (1908–1997, France, born Hungary)

Victor Vasarely was a pioneer in the development of Op Art painting.

Victor Vasarely, Cheyt-Stri, 1971/ Tempera on canvas, 64 x 73 cm. Photo courtesy of the Artist, Image Davis Art Images. © 2025 Estate of Victor Vasarely / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (8S-2260vsars)

By the early 1960s, Vasarely had developed a group of shapes and colors he called Planetary Folklore. They could be used over and over again in limitless combinations. His trompe-l’oeil (fool the eye) effects consisted of a central six-sided cube called a kepler. The series of keplers displaying three sides fill the picture plane of Cheyt-Stri having distorted curved lines and diagonals giving the illusion of depth and volume. In contrasting colors, Vasarely created a swell at the center of a sphere composed of the cubes that either appear to be emerging or pushed back from the picture plane (the two-dimensional painting surface).

Reaction against the domination of emphasis on individual expressive surface in Abstract Expressionism manifested itself in the emergence of color field abstraction in various forms starting in the mid- to late 1950s. Hard Edge and geometric abstraction reduced paintings to individual color shapes where there is no reference to foreground or background. Hard Edge painting seeks a featureless surface of two or three colors where the work as a whole is considered the picture.

One of the results of the Color Field painting was the movement Minimalism. Another related tendency in the 1960s Color Field painting was Op Art. Op Art is a painted optical illusion, which was not new in art history: there were illusionistic wall and ceiling paintings during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and trompe-l’oeil realism in Dutch Baroque and American 1800s still life painting. Op Art relies on the science of optically stimulating the retina to sense movement or volume due to placements of shapes and colors on the canvas.

Like Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and other Pointillist painters of Neo-Impressionism, Vasarely understood that complementary colors placed side by side in the same shape tend to produce a visual vibration. Vasarely took geometric abstraction to a new height of mathematical perfection. Using a grid, he laid down shapes of precisely calculated colors and slightly altered the shapes from one to the next to create the illusion of three-dimensional movement.

After studying academic painting, Vasarely studied at the Budapest version of the Bauhaus, where he learned graphic design and typography. Moving to Paris in the 1930s, he worked as a graphic designer where he combined patterns with organic forms. His early paintings of the 1930s were in the vein of Concrete Art, pure geometric abstraction. In the 1940s he devoted himself to studying optical art and theories of visual perception.

Vasarely’s 1955 manifesto Yellow Manifesto postulated that contemporary art should have a social context and not merely exist as an individual gesture. His work was the artist’s idea designed to perform multiple functions—projected, reproduced, or multiplied into numerous other forms. His compositions greatly influenced other Op artists, as well as the fields of fashion and interior design, advertising, and graphic design. His permutation of color and shape established a standard visual dictionary that could be universally applied to all disciplines, including in the 21st century, digital art.

Correlation to Davis programs: Experience Art, Unit 5 Place, 5.5 – Making Connections, STEAM, Math, Calculating Art