A victim of the vagaries of vogue

TWO Old Masters of late Modernism gone inside a week: Willem deKooning and Victor Vasarely. It is true Vasarely's hour seemed to have passed, but that is only in terms of vogue, not artistic value. From being ultra-fashionable in the 1960s - and not only intellectually fashionable, but a figure with the snob-media appeal of Chanel clothes - he suddenly appeared to have lost the gloss of his modernity and relevance. Even the Vasarely Foundation he founded at Aix is reported to be in virtual liquidation, though another at Gordes survives (times are tough economically in France).

Vasarely was, of course, a very old man and his grip on his multitudinal activities was loosening, if it had not relaxed altogether. From an apparently left- wing and "progressive" stance, in which he was widely hailed as the creator of a new kind of urban folk art, he became virtual head of a commercial enterprise, overseeing a whole staff of assistants. Yet while some people spoke scornfully of "Vasarely Enterprises Ltd", there is no proof he had ever let his standards slip through mass-production. He had, inevitably, many imitators, but their frequent banalities should not be blamed on him.

Vasarely believed his kind of art was particularly suited to social and urban projects, and to this end he collaborated widely with architects and interior designers. He produced not only pictures and prints, he created three-dimensional metal pillars, pyramid shaped metal reliefs, and for the University of Caracas he constructed ceramic murals and aluminium reliefs. Other public works were the Jerusalem Museum and the French Pavilion at the 1967 Expo in Montreal as well as many projects in his adopted city, Paris.

Victor Vasarely (originally Gyoezoe Vasarhelyi) was born at Pecs, Hungary in 1908 (there is now a museum to him in his birthplace). It is often written that he studied at the Bauhaus in Budapest, but strictly speaking there is no Bauhaus in Hungary and the art school in question was the Muhely Academy. He did absorb the ideas of the original Germany Bauhaus from progressive teachers, before moving to Paris in 1930; here he married Claire Spinner (died 1991) with whom he had two sons. Earning his living as a graphic artist and designer, he had little time to paint, but in 1944 decided to start again.

His very early pictures appear to have been quasi-Expressionist and figurative, but from about 1947 he moved via the Zebra paintings with their interlocking stripes into the particular geometric area which he made his own. Often working in small square units, in metal or plastic, he assembled these in an infinite variety of combinations. There are obvious parallels with Albers's famous squares, but Vasarely's much more intricate forms set off an optical shimmer, effects of advance and recession, visual ripples and undulations, and a strong sense of spatial ambiguity. Though his methods were based considerably on geometric formulae, as in so much Constructivist art, he produced works not only of great beauty and refinement, but also of surprisingly "romantic" glow. Above all, he was a superb colourist and these brilliant, life-enhancing pictures and prints influenced an entire generation.

Op Art owed him a considerable debt, while the much-publicised Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel in Paris sprang directly from his influence and personality. One of its leading figures, in fact, was his son Yves ("Yvaral"). He himself wrote: "I believe I am able to point to the existence in my works of an architectonic, abstract art form, a sort of universal folklore, whose language is readily adaptable to the highly developed techniques of urban construction. The parallels with certain types of contemporary music are also plain.

VASARELY won many honours, including the Guggenheim Prize in New York (1965), the Grand Prize of the Sao Paulo Biennale in the same year and the Foreign Ministers' Prize at the Tokyo Biennale in 1967. In Paris, he was associated largely with the Galerie Denise Rene, which has virtually specialised in abstract and kinetic act. Late in life he moved on to simpler, broader geometrical effects, showing his lasting concern with "the democratisation of art". There are some fine examples of his work (and of other Op and Kinetic artists) in IMMA, thanks to the generosity of Gordon Lambert, an ardent admirer of Vasarely and his followers.