Victor Vasarely
The father of Op art, who wanted paintings to be reproducible and designed a system for it.
Victor Vasarely was born at Pecs in Hungary in 1906, studied at the Budapest Bauhaus, and worked for years as a graphic designer in Paris before the optical work began in earnest in the 1950s. He built a formal system he called the plastic unit — a coloured square containing a coloured shape — from which images could be composed by anyone following the rules, because he genuinely believed art should be reproducible and widely owned rather than unique and expensive. The Vega spheres, chequerboards and zebras are the results. He founded two museums in France and one in Hungary, and died in 1997.
That democratic intention is the market's central complication: Vasarely authorised enormous numbers of serigraphs, multiples and reproductions, many published in editions of several hundred, and the difference between an original acrylic on canvas or board and a signed serigraph is not obvious in a photograph. Owners routinely overestimate the prints. Estate disputes after his death produced a period of contested attributions, and the Vasarely Foundation is the reference. Flat unmodulated colour makes fading and any retouching immediately visible.
If you own a work by Victor Vasarely
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.