The Pécs collection provides the lion’s share of the exhibition-series which is the material organised jointly by the Regional Centre Letterkenny, the Glebe Gallery, Churchill, Donegal, and the Aix-en-Provence Vasarely Foundation. We are talking of 45 creations which includes the most exciting period of the creator’s life achievement. These are representative works of art underlined by international successes, large size paintings showing various formal and compositional solutions originating from the 60-s. We express our gratitude to the owners of private and public collections. Initially, I wish to sketch Vasarely’s art through the works donated to my native town.

The Vasarely museum opened in 1976 in Pécs. The 400 works were donated to the Janus Pannoneus Museum by Vasarely in 1969 and 1974.

The showing of the first 42 works resulted in phenomenal success. Many thousands came to see the material – which had been shown around in other Hungarian museums as well – which positively influenced current Hungarian art. The members of the studio called Pécs Mühely were especially open towards Vasarely’s creations which manifested itself in the application of meshwork painting, the projection magnifications, and the following of abstract creative aspects.

In order to survey the effects of the Vasarely collection we need to refer to Hungary’s historical and political position at that time. In the sixties and seventies Hungary belonged to the Soviet camp which prohibited the appearance of abstract and avant-garde art, the manifestations of “Western” culture. To accept Vasarely’s gift the Party’s permit was needed. It helped that Vasarely was an internationally recognised painter, his works had no political message, and his socialist sympathies were well known. Coincidentally the “new economic mechanism” a careful step towards market society was starting up at the time so the “acceptance” could be interpreted in this context as a positive gesture. The friendly acceptance induced Vasarely to establish a museum for his works in Pécs, similar to the one at Gordes. According to the wish of the creative artist the collection had to present the stylistic and genre variations of his life work. The Pécs collection contains very significant works of art: paintings, collages, gobelines, multiplicities and ink drawings as well as many examples of print. Knowing that Vasarely had found it important to show his works in his native town we may presume that his selection was based on his profound value judgement. In this sense the selection is Vasarely’s own confession, his own choice to represent his life work.

Those who observed and experienced Vasarely’s works concentrated, almost without exception, in pointing out their geometrical order, their inner structure, the solutions of the formulae of a permutation order. The inspiration, the discovery, the gazing aspect, the playfulness takes second place in mentioning. From an artistic point of view his life achievement’s most important pieces are the Op-art creations of the fifties. These are the works originating out of the creative gaze which are richly represented in the Pécs collection.

Vasarely’s artistic life story was first described in the academic studies of the Podolin Free School in 1927, to be followed by the studies in the Budapesti Mühely, directed by Sándor Bortnyik. This was no accident since Bortnyik was the best known figure of the Hungarian avant-garde. He had been a student of Bauhaus in Weimar, and the prophet of their spiritual heritage. The studies in his place were executed in a step by step rational order. The curriculum radiated the teachings of Gropius, Van Doesburg, László Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian and De Stilj. They were analysing the geometrical bases of constructionism and Wilhelm Ostwald’s theory of the four basic colours. They were working towards achieving the modern public art – the art of the community – where the craftsman, the engineer, and the artist’s activities are harmonised. Equipped with such a practical and theoretical backdrop Vasarely travelled to Paris in 1930, although the Bauhaus ideas remained hidden in his art, for a long time. Similarly, he kept himself distant from the artistic movements of Paris in the thirties, e.g. from the Abstraction-Creation, even though the movement had Hungarians in it. Vasarely made posters for advertising agencies, pictograms and adverts for medical firms, such activities made him a good earner. He created a few paintings, compositions that were, in the beginning surrealist-symbolic and decorative geometrical works.

In the forties there was a significant change in his artistic attitude. Two works are to be found in our collection from these days - these are not part of this exhibition – the Mannequin (1946) and BI (1947) which display the abstracted forms and compositional modes – far from traditional painting. The tone-rich compositions, built on blues and browns prove that the originally graphic aspects are exchanged for the working methods of a painter. This lyrical abstract period was very short in his creative life.

Vasarely called the above “the wrong way” and the turning point came in 1947. The shapes had strict borders uniformly painted, strict, homogenous planes supplant the effect of the paintings which had been recorded by the various levels of paint’s thickness. This period of his was motivated by the desire to find a special creative language and character. He had recorded his plans and observations in several sketches which were only fully realised later, (this is why two dates are to be found in some of his works). In his search he was observing the shapes of nature – like the rounded, wave broken stones of Belle Isle, as seen in Indore (1952), Brume – 2 (1952), Yapourk-2 (1951-56) – as much as he was recording the constructive elements of builtup environments - like the “crystal” contours” Paros-J (1949-54) – as well as the finely cut surface of the Denfert metro station in Paris, Harpis (1950). He was studying the optical-psychological art of Josef Albers, and he was greatly under the influence of the Gestalt-psychology which, at the end of the 19th century, analysed the specific relationships between sight and consciousness.

"The same opening - looking from the outside - seems an inscrutable, bodiless black cube. The town of Southern France, bathing in the cruel sun, revealed a contrasting perspective for me. The eye cannot exactly distinguish the shade from the wall : the planes, the empty spaces get mixed up, form and background alternate. A triangle gets dissolved into a lozenge on the left, into a trapezoid on the right, a square jumps up, or slides down, depending on the fact that one pairs it with a dark green patch or the light blue sky. Concrete things become abstractions and start a new life" - Vasarely wrote in 1948.

In the Formes et couleurs murales exhibition in 1951, in the Denise René Galerie he showed those magnifications and projections, called Photographismes (Naissance series 1951) which he had based on his pencil and pen drawings. Vasarely was gripped by the strong contrasts of positivenegative magnifications, and explored the chance for treating black-white, yes-no as binary unities. He relived his childhood surprise at the structure muslin or the finger drawings on a befogged plane of glass, at the time when he observed the dynamics of vibration appearing on one of the small drawings shown on film sequences placed on one another. A special effect is produced by his large paintings Sophia-111 (1952) or Biadan (1959) with their irritant contrasts of black grids painted on white bases. These were decisive discoveries which gave the impulse to Vasarely to make Op-art and Kinetic compositions.

Vasarely’s paintings became monochrome in the fifties – partly paralleling formal analyses and partly caused by the same. The greys and the blacks are full of dynamism (Indore,1952) with their arched shapes seemingly covering each other, just as much as the Aila (1953) which painting displays the teeth of the saw with lines dramatically cut – the tautness of the relationship is caused by the doubtful equilibrium between the two. We see four shapes with lines cut in front of blue-mauve background, the peaks of shapes are centred, like a fan, which are joined to a small square. This is an early example of Kinetic art. Something that gives sight to mobile energy. A similar artistic wish is manifested in Zebras where the dynamism is linked with the figure. In the previous example the dynamism was the abstract form itself.

Vasarely’s art reached its peak after 1954. A milestone of this was the Movement (le Mouvement) shared exhibition in 1955 April, in Galérie Denise René where to the two pioneers of the idea, Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder; Vasarely, Jesus Rafael Sotó, Nicholas Schöffer and Jan Tinguely also joined. Vasarely here declared his Yellow Manifesto. In it he set out his ideas regarding Kinetism and plastic wholeness, the language of the painting where geometric elements are set in a serial order. He confessed his faith, in the first time, in the serialisation and popularisation of artistic works.