Vasarely’s Victory

Photo by Leon Chew

Vasarely at work in 1980 Annetsur-Marne, France

compass:
Aix-en-Provence

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Op-art inventor Victor Vasarely’s monumental eye-bending works are both familiar and forgotten—which is what enabled members of his family to steal and sell thousands of his paintings. But one relative is fighting back. At the late artist’s 1976 foundation near Aix-en-Provence, his only grandson is renovating not just the building’s neglected hexagons, but the legacy of a 20th-century master.

On the road in front of the Vasarely Foundation, on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, a jet of water from one of the museum’s broken sprinklers is slowing traffic. Drivers roll up their car windows and proceed—but not mine. Unwilling to sully his freshly waxed Renault, the cabbie drops me off at the bottom of the graveled driveway. Approaching by foot, the air of neglect is undeniable. Seen through the geyser across the scrubby landscape, the building, faced with huge alternating black-and-white squares framing white-and-black circles, resembles a shuttered World’s Fair relic fading in the Mediterranean sun.

Born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1906, Victor Vasarely’s fame reached its peak in Paris in the mid-1960s. By this time he was regarded as the godfather of Op-art, the popular form of abstraction based on optical-trickery and experimentation that encompassed such names as Yaacov Agam, Richard Anuskiewicz, Jesus-Rafael Soto, and Bridget Riley. Vasarely’s celebrity had already begun its decline by the time he opened his Aix foundation in 1976. It was his grasp at immortality. Not only did he lay down the plan—a honeycomb-like cluster of 16 hexagons by a shallow pool in the shape of a two-mouthed Pacman—he also fronted the money, naming it the Centre Architectonique d’Aix-en-Provence. His dream was to integrate his own art and architecture seamlessly into a democratic space, a nostalgic homage to the Bauhaus and Gestalt ideas that shaped him as a young art student in Budapest. He also embraced the optical illusion’s potential for populist appeal by making his art available and affordable through a shop selling prints, posters, and postcards. As he liked to say, “The art of the privileged must become the art of the community.”

Vasarely envisioned a community of artists, designers, psychologists, even weavers rising up around his creation in Aix like a town around a church, an artistic utopia winking across the horizon at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. And yet while his idea for such a community never materialized (unlike, say, the Marfa of Donald Judd), the foundation’s failure is almost as interesting a story. On this sunny morning, as I watch dogs from the surrounding apartment complexes romp in the overgrown grass, it looks as if the only utopia that came of Vasarely’s vision is a canine one. Dogs don’t mind the broken sprinkler.

At 10:00 a.m. the purple-tinted glass doors unlock and the artist’s only grandchild, Pierre Vasarely, greets me. In the past few years, Pierre has brought hope to this forgotten icon of a forgotten artist and to admirers of its sagging tapestries and chipped mosaics. The leaky roofs, composed of thousands of small glass circles, are finally fixed. Next on his to-do list is heating and air conditioning (a stable temperature is crucial to preserving artworks). But the most important project Pierre has undertaken on behalf of his grandfather is the restitution of the thousands of works that members of the family stole from the foundation in the mid-1990s. Though Vasarely intended the bulk of his archive to remain here at his foundation—or at the museum he’d opened in 1970 in nearby Gordes—most of it, from oils to prints, serigraphs, and architectural studies, has vanished. “He would have been very shocked to see that his family has broken his dreams,” admits Pierre. All that’s left is this building and the 42 large “integrations” hanging on the walls of seven connecting hexagonal rooms.

To walk through the rooms of the foundation is to disappear inside one of Vasarely’s more hypnotic paintings. The full range of his career—from his “kinetic” black-and-white works to his further investigations of colorful grids of shapes inside squares—is neatly summed up in these installations. Their language of color and shape inside the square is what Vasarely called (and tried to patent as) his “plastic alphabet.” He wrote: “We no longer create for centuries to come, but for daily plastic needs.” From certain angles, the enfilade appears as the curve of a fractal. As my eyes take in the shapes inside squares and bulging trompe l’oeil spheres, I’m suddenly engulfed in the vibrating rooms. The paintings and the architecture share such affinity, they function as a single work—one that leads the viewer through what Vasarely called the “inner geometry of nature,” a world of secret passages and color combinations imbued with spiritual power. After a tumble through these phenomena, the viewer is meant to emerge transformed.