The Adventure of Victor Vasarely, Denise René and Geometric Abstract Art in Hungary

In 1959, Vasarely and Denise René invited the “Master”, 72-year-old Lajos Kassák – the progenitor in Hungary of constructivist art with architectural principles – to stage his own exhibition in the Galerie Denise René in Paris. In spite of the Cold War, Kassák managed to hold two exhibitions in the French capital, in 1960 and 1963.

The museums of Cold War Hungary did not purchase contemporary art from Western Europe; the word abstract itself was taboo. And yet, against all odds, people took up the cause of Kassák’s Paris exhibition and the plan of Vasarely and Denise René found supporters. At the exhibition Contemporary French Painters held in the Budapest Kunsthalle in 1966, one of Vasarely’s works was also featured. In 1967 French Minister of Culture André Malraux was the patron of the exhibition Drawing and Aquarelle in France from Matisse to the Present in which one or two works by Étienne Hajdú, Árpád Szenes and Victor Vasarely were shown among others. In 1968 the Museum of Fine Arts arranged a travelling exhibition in Hungary under the title French Graphic Art.

The same year Vasarely made a gift of 200 screen prints to Hungarian public collections, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs. In 1969 the original plan could at last be realized: starting with Vasarely’s major retrospective in the Kunsthalle, works were donated to Hungary in several stages (in 1969, 1971, 1974 and 1977). This exhibition to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Vasarely Museum is the first occasion when these works can be seen together – in Budapest from May 2012, and then in the Vasarely Museum in Pécs.

The donations established an environment of geometric abstract art in Hungary, and it was in this context that the artist’s home-town, Pécs, opened its Vasarely Museum in 1976, to be followed by the Budapest Vasarely Museum in 1987.

The donations, as well as the exhibitions of the Galerie Denise René also illustrated the post-war continuity of 20th-century geometric abstract art: they presented the new geometric trends of young artists who were active after the Second World War in a way that established their relationship to the abstract art of the first decades of the century, the traditions of the École de Paris and the Bauhaus. The pioneers – of whom we now feature František Kupka, Auguste Herbin, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, Le Corbusier, Marcelle Cahn, Josef Albers and Alberto Magnelli – were shown in the company of the contemporaries. In our exhibition, the contemporary art of the 1960s is represented by a work each of Michel Seuphor, Victor Vasarely, Robert Jacobsen, Richard Mortensen, Jean Jacques Deyrolle, Olle Baertling, Luis Tomasello, Alfonso Nadir, Jean Dewasne, Carlos Cruz Díez, Jesús Soto, François Morellet, Monique Arradon and Yvaral.