Victor Vasarely

The History of His Paintings

Vasarely was born in 1908 in Hungary.He died in 1997 in Paris.

• He left his country in 1930 and went to Paris.

• He wanted art to be accessible for everybody, not only for a few .

• He thought that art should express personality and it should be present in people’s everyday life.

In Paris he first worked as a graphic designer in advertising.Simplicity and rationality determined his art.He called this period his "white period" .In these paintings he preferred using stripes, chessboard pattern or axonometric squares.

In these paintings he preferred using lines, chessboard pattern or axonometric squares.

Between 1932 and 1942 he made a lot of black-and-white graphic experiments.Many of them are based on optical illusion.Playing with lines, positive and negative shapes characterize the opposite set of zebras.

He called his next period the Denfert-period.He often used the underground in Paris, where his eyes recorded and completed the cracks of tiles covering the walls of stops.In these he discovered the pictures of strange landscapes and cities.This is how his first paintings of lines became abstract images.

Pictures from Belle Isle times

The inspiration for these pictures came from stones and shells that he saw in the summer of 1874 on a beach.

Caracas University

In 1951 Caracas University asked Vasarely to help to build the university campus.

Circle in circle

VEGA-WA-3 1869

His life

Vasarely is the main figure of op-art.In op-art simple mathematical and geometrical rules make us feel motion and vibration through the optical effects of using lines, circles, triangles and squares.