Craftsman for Today, Dreamer for Tomorrow

VICTOR VASARELY'S first visit to the Provengal village of Gordes was decisive. "Southern towns and villages devoured by an implacable sun have revealed to me a contradictory perspective," he wrote. "Never can the eye identify to what a given shadow or strip of wall belongs: solids and voids merge into one another, forms and backgrounds alternate, a given square jumps up or slithers downward depending on whether I couple it with a dark green spot or a piece of pale sky. Thus, identifiable things are transmuted into abstractions and begin their own independent life." From that moment on, Vasarely's canvas was to become a visual theater expressing the permutations of light, space and movement--in short, what has come to be known as Op art.

That was 1948, and Vasarely has been returning to Gordes every summer since. Last week the whole village turned out to honor the sinewy Hungarian, who long ago was tacitly adopted as an honorary citizen. Down from Paris flew a host of artists, critics and dignitaries, led by Mme. Georges Pompidou, to attend the opening of the Vasarely Foundation in Gordes, a combination research center and public museum containing 1,500 ; of Vasarely's works. To house the foundation, the city rented " to the painter the massive 16th century Chateau de Gordes for a symbolic one franc a year.

Out of Folklore. Vasarely's debt to'Mondrian, Malevich and Seurat is apparent and acknowledged. But what Vasarely did was to build on the somewhat dry ideas of the Bauhaus and suffuse them with new life--the life of shifting perspectives, vibrant color harmonies and weighted geometric shapes. The deep, rich tonalities of such paintings as Chom and Axo-77, for which he often credits Hungarian folklore, are designed to give the viewer a sense of balance and wellbeing. In other works, like Ond-JG, the illusion of bulging forms acts as a magnetic force pulling the viewer into the painting.

An articulate theoretician who prefers to be called a craftsman rather than a painter, Vasarely z was born in Hungary in 1908. He DEG made a stab at medical studies. ; then signed up at the Budapest I Bauhaus, which had been established by the painter Bortnyik ' after a visit to Germany. In 1930, he went to Paris. There, he was able to make a living as a draftsman for several large publicity firms. He kept up his own experimenting on the side.

One of the most remarkable works of that period, Fille-Fleur, is at once colored with nostalgic memories of the bright costumes of his homeland and, in its ellipses and squares, prophetic of the direction that Vasarely would take. It was not until after the war that the artist, spurred on by the enterprising Paris dealer Denise Rene, was able to devote himself full time to his art. He read numerous scientific volumes and decided that Mondrian and Malevich had written fini to easel painting. "Pure physics suddenly revealed itself before my dazed eyes as the new poetic source," he recalls. By 1955, he had developed an alphabet --"planetary folklore," he calls it--composed of geometric forms and basic colors capable of infinite arrangements.

Today Vasarely, 62, lives in an 18th century villa on the outskirts of Paris, where he draws up coded "scores" with pencil and ruler for ten assistants to transfer onto canvas. The very idea of allowing assistants to do his paintings is considered heresy by some, but it is fundamental to Vasarely's belief that the unique work of art is a thing of the past. After all, he points out, "it is the original idea that is unique, not the object itself. There is such a great interdependence today that we do nothing alone. The artist may have the idea, but he depends on the chemist for his colors, and the engineer, architect and even the manufacturer help him realize it." Scornful of the practice of speculating in art, he deliberately seeks to subvert the system by selling only "enlargements" made by his assistants, never the original "score."

Double-Dealing. "I am like a Trojan horse," he says. "I allow my paintings to go to collectors in order to destroy this whole conception of the unique picture.

I admit this is a bit of double-dealing, but no one is willing to subsidize my work. I need collectors in order to live. Elementary dialectics tells us trail blazers to take what we need from the declining society in which we live while preparing its downfall."

Vasarely has long espoused something akin to esthetic socialism--the belief that art today must not be something "to tickle the senses" of the elite but a force in beautifying the environment for all. At his foundation, he hopes to accomplish just that by bringing together artists, sociologists and scientists to work on better urban design. Only through a marriage to architecture, he says, will art survive in the future. He dreams of a day when whole cities may be done in pastels or brilliant colors exploding like fireworks. Looking, presumably, more or less like Vasarelys.

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