Through the wavering and arching of the lines and circles flickering the chatter: Rarely in the museum was so much talk as here. Here and there, visitors knock the pictures down on their decorative content. In front of the dancing rectangles in autumn colors: "That in a bar!" - "No, I would like to have wallpaper ..." - "wallpaper? Way too blatant!"

Yes, visual and applied arts literally liquefy here, which the painter himself expressly welcomed: Art must be generous, begins one of the most famous quotes by Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), whose search for a pictorial language of modernism is now presented in the Städelmuseum. It should not be elitist but democratic, accessible to life and the people who deal with it - and vice versa.

This permeability between the disciplines was also reflected in Vasarely's own person. In his more than 60 years of activity, the native Hungarian worked as an artist and commercial artist, the logo of the Olympic Games in Munich is one of his most famous works. The expansion of form and color into the third dimension can be experienced right at the beginning: in the former dining room of the Deutsche Bundesbank, which here with its circular patterns on a yellow carpet wall gives the still rather delicate starting signal for the tour. Then follow the color raves.

The fall into these Op Art floods cost some overcoming. Not so easy to shake off their own aesthetic socialization: Cruel memories of psychedelic posters on wooden teenage room walls came up when the Städel Museum announced Victor Vasarely with the blue-red-green ball from the famous 'Vega' series. But on-site the magic of painting is quick and still reliable: hand-painted and full-size, all this looks amazingly impressive.

Through the assembled works there is a great thirst for research

Goa and youth room fantasies quickly fall into oblivion. This is also because Vasarely's originals are immensely more complex than what followed later on. He was not content with single color or shape effects; Through his collected works from the late fifties to the mid-seventies, there is a great thirst for research.

Vasarely's large-scale, in oil and acrylic taken experimental arrangements take up a lot of space. The Städelmuseum offers plenty of it - but it should hardly have been less. So that the individual images do not get in each other's way, the walls were placed at an angle to each other. And even then, the hyperventilating lines and flickering colors regularly overwhelm eyes and sense of balance.

photo gallery


12 pictures

"In the Labyrinth of Modernity": fall into the color raves

The beginnings of his optical Illusionsgemälde lie in the black and white photography, later developed the artist with the 'Alphabet Plastique' a modular system for the own imagery: Geometric shapes and color scales in infinite combination possibilities. And in each individual whimpering, flickering and arching into and out of the picture, often in several directions simultaneously or in constant change. A good idea: that these pictures are constantly in motion since their creation. Permanently blazing, almost chemical breathless since 1959. Only the smallest particle, the smallest unit, can be briefly fixed until the entire ensemble withdraws from its audience.

One floor up, the noise level drops: between paintings from the thirties to the fifties you only hear soft whispers and murmurs from time to time. The exhibition follows Vasarely's work in reverse order - which promises a spectacular start, but can be problematic in terms of attention economy.

The ongoing attempt to geometrize the world

Vasarely knows stylistic inhibitions like perhaps every real experimenter, and so ranges from elegant images with elliptical shapes in dull colors, which have their model in the flora and fauna of his French holiday island, to the precursors of his later illusion paintings: Floats there actually a lovingly-cheesy painted whale in the Op Art Sea? Yes, he is swimming.

In its second part in particular, the exhibition becomes a retelling of Vasarely's ongoing attempt to decorate the world until art can exist completely independently of it. Only then, again, out of this emancipated attitude, to be able to get in touch with her. And maybe they will overwhelm unrestrained.

Victor Vasarely "In the Labyrinth of Modernity" , until 13.01.2019 in the Städelmuseum Frankfurt. Catalog 39,90.