Victor Vasarely Hungarian, 1906-1997
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-French artist (born April 9, 1906, Pécs, Hungary—died March 15, 1997, Paris, France), who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op art movement. His work titled Zebra, created in 1937, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op art.
Vasarely was trained as an artist in Budapest in the Bauhaus tradition. In 1930 he left Hungary and settled in Paris, where he initially supported himself as a commercial artist but continued to do his own work. During the 1930s he was influenced by Constructivism, but by the 1940s his characteristic style of painting animated surfaces of geometric forms and interacting colours had emerged. His style reached maturity in the mid-1950s and 1960s, when he began using brighter, more vibrant colours to further enhance the suggestion of movement through optical illusion. Representative works include Sirius II (1954), Ondho (1956–60), and Arny-
C (1967–69).
