Projet pour une révolution. Vasarely et l'architecture

This monumental building is a veritable Sistine Chapel of optical and kinetic art, and one of the very few examples of an architectural legacy left to posterity by an artist. It is also Vasarely’s expression of his vision for how his work should exist. 

In the work of Victor Vasarely, heir to the historic avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century and more particularly Bauhaus, architectural tropism emerged during the post-war period.
In the early 1950s, he joined the Espace group founded by André Bloc and Félix Del Marle, who sought to create a synthesis of the arts.
In 1954, while the group was showcasing its work in an exhibition in Biot, Vasarely was completing his first architectural installations as part of the construction of the university campus in Caracas. Many such projects would follow, through to the uncompleted project of the Cité polychrome du bonheur (Polychrome City of Happiness).

The exhibition focuses on this major aspect of Vasarely’s artistic activity and the key episodes that punctuated it. 

Though architectural integration was the ideal setting envisaged by Vasarely for his visual artworks, as demonstrated by the Centre Architectonique in Aix, it was also part of an overarching strategy concerning the social dissemination of an artwork and, more profoundly, its very mode of existence.
Though he sought to make life more beautiful, Vasarely also aimed to revolutionise the status, nature and modes of production of art. A symbol of the post-war economic boom, Vasarely’s work is equally indicative of the concerns of the information society, insofar as it heralds programmed art.