Op's Top

"The whole of my life and work has been and is consecrated to the modern city," says Victor Vasarely, 59, France's great academician of op art. "For me, there is nothing more beautiful than New York, especially at night." Inevitably it follows that Vasarely lives in immaculate seclusion behind iron gates on a wooded estate at Annet-sur-Marne, 20 miles from Paris--and refused to journey to Manhattan even for the opening of his current show at the Sidney Janis Gallery.

Paradox is at the core of Vasarely's throbbing vistas of geometry; it creates the tension that gives them vibrancy and verve. Although the 50 paintings on view appear to be little more than decorative flat arrangements of squares, lozenges and ovals, in fact the shapes are knitted together in complex honeycombs to create rippling illusions of perspective and depth. Glowing with savage chartreuses, electric blues, racing-silk greens and murky purple shadows, his panels, priced at up to $14,500, have made Vasarely the darling of multimillionaire collectors, including the Rothschilds and the Aga Khan.

Olympic Shield. Despite such wealthy patronage, Vasarely has maintained in many a pamphlet and manifesto that art should be vastly more democratic. "In our modern society of consumption," he says, "everything is multiplied, from cars and refrigerators to country homes. One unique piece of art is an anachronism." An assembly line of ten assistants executes the paintings that he first drafts, then pastes up in prototype collages. Other aides turn out his serigraphs, tapestries, wood and Plexiglas constructions. Yet the multiples, priced at only $70 to $1,000, lack illusionistic finesse compared with the blazing oils and temperas that he supervises and touches up himself. In reality, his art is about as suitable to mass production as a Rolls-Royce.

"I have often experimented with my assistants," says the savant in some puzzlement. "Using exactly the same elements, none of them has been able to create an original work." Nonetheless, in the U.S. and Europe, he has spawned a host of op disciples. He has also played spiritual begetter to a younger generation of kinetic "visual researchers," led by his son Yvaral, who apply his democratic principles to mechanized art. Moreover, at Grenoble his work is at last being integrated into a "consecrated modern city" in the form of a giant aluminum shield for a skating rink at the Winter Olympics. What Vasarely would really like is to extend his designs to entire cityscapes. Toward that end he plans to open a study center in 1969 where urbanologists, architects and artists can meet. Their goal, as set by Vasarely, will be "to improve the plastic beauty of the city housing development, as indispensable to man's health as vitamins or love."

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