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Victor Vasarely, born Hungarian: Vásárhelyi Győző (9 April 1906, Pécs – 15 March 1997, Paris) was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art. Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art. Vasarely died in Paris in 1997.
Vasarely was born in Pécs and grew up in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest where in 1925 he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik’s műhely (lit. “workshop”, in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design.
In 1929 he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930 he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908-1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters. Victor Vasarely became a graphics designer and a poster artist during the 1930’s who combined patterns and organic images with each other.
Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930 working as a graphic artist and as a creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger and Devambez (1930-1935). His interactions with other artists during this time were limited. He played with the idea of opening up an institution modeled after Sándor Bortnyik’s műhely and developed some teaching material for it.
Having lived mostly in cheap hotels, he settled in 1942/1944 in Saint-Céré in the Lot département. After the Second World War, he opened an atelier in Arcueil, a suburb some 10 kilometers from the center of Paris (in the Val-de-Marne département of the Île-de-France). In 1961 he finally settled in Annet-sur-Marne (in the Seine-et-Marne département).
