Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely (; born Győző Vásárhelyi, ; – ), was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op art movement.
His work entitled "Zebra", created in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op art.
Life and work.
Vasarely was born in Pécs and grew up in Pöstyén (now Piešťany, Slovakia) and Budapest, where, in 1925, he took up medical studies at Eötvös Loránd University. In 1927, he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's private art school called "Műhely" (lit. "Workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as Budapest's centre of Bauhaus studies. Cash-strapped, the "műhely" could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design.
In 1929, he painted his "Blue Study" and "Green Study". In 1930, he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908–1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was also an artist and used the professional name 'Yvaral'. In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters. Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist during the 1930s combining patterns and organic images with each other.
Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930. He worked as a graphic artist and as a creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger, and Devambez (1930–1935). His interactions with other artists during this time were limited. He thought of opening an institution modelled after Sándor Bortnyik's "műhely" and developed some teaching material for it. Having lived mostly in cheap hotels, he settled in 1942/1944 in Saint-Céré in the Lot "département". After the Second World War, he opened an atelier in Arcueil, a suburb about 10 kilometres from the centre of Paris (in the Val-de-Marne "département" of the Île-de-France). In 1961, he finally settled in Annet-sur-Marne (in the Seine-et-Marne "département").
Vasarely eventually went on to produce art and sculpture using optical illusion. Over the next three decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art, working in various materials but using a minimal number of forms and colours:
In October 1967, designer Will Burtin invited Vasarely to make a presentation to Burtin's Vision '67 conference, held at New York University. On 5 June 1970, Vasarely opened his first dedicated museum with over 500 works in a renaissance palace in Gordes (closed in 1996). A second major undertaking was the "Foundation Vasarely" in Aix-en-Provence, a museum housed in a distinct structure specially designed by Vasarely. It was inaugurated in 1976 by French president Georges Pompidou, two years after his death. Sadly the museum is now in a state of disrepair, several of the pieces on display have been damaged by water leaking from the ceiling. Also, in 1976 his large kinematic object "Georges Pompidou" was installed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Vasarely Museum located at his birthplace in Pécs, Hungary, was established with a large donation of works by Vasarely. In the same decade, he took a stab at industrial design with a 500-piece run of the upscale "Suomi" tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Vasarely decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's "Studio Linie". In 1982, 154 specially created serigraphs were taken into space by the cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien on board the French-Soviet spacecraft Salyut 7 and later sold for the benefit of UNESCO. In 1987, the second Hungarian Vasarely museum was established in Zichy Palace in Budapest with more than 400 works.
He died age 90 in Paris on 15 March 1997.
Legacy.
A new Vasarely exhibit was mounted in Paris at Musée en Herbe in 2012.
In 2019, a temporary exhibition of Vasarely's work entitled "Le Partage des Formes" was displayed in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.