Victor Vasarely – Planetarische Folklore

Planetarische Folklore by Victor Vasarely is a portfolio of six screenprints representing one of the most ambitious print projects of his mature period — a sustained demonstration of the visual system he had been refining since the mid-1940s. Executed in 1964, as Op Art moved toward its mainstream apotheosis with MoMA's landmark The Responsive Eye exhibition, the portfolio reads as both formal manifesto and proof of screenprint's capacity for optical precision at the highest level.

The six compositions traverse the full grammar of Vasarely's plastic language: circles, squares, and rhomboids nested within repeating grids exploit simultaneous contrast and figure-ground ambiguity to generate movement across a static surface; the mosaic panel anticipates a pixelated image logic that would not become culturally legible until the digital era; and the purple-on-yellow composition — in which a regular field of squares appears to buckle toward an implied vortex — remains among the most viscerally disorienting works in the Op Art canon. Rather than repeating a single effect, Vasarely maps the territory, from tight optical vibration through to the bold, sign-like clarity of the final composition, where primary forms assert themselves against saturated grounds with the directness of architectural colour.

The choice of Schoellershammer card speaks to the production standards Vasarely demanded, and each sheet bears his pencil signature, conferring individual authentication across the edition of 125. Offered complete with its original black case box and title page, intact as issued.

Planetarische Folklore is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) was a Hungarian-French artist widely regarded as the father of Op Art — the movement that would redefine the relationship between painting, perception, and the viewer in the postwar decades. Born in Pécs and trained at the Mühely in Budapest under masters steeped in Bauhaus principles, he relocated to Paris in 1930, where early work in graphic design sharpened his understanding of visual contrast, figure-ground relationships, and the mechanics of optical illusion.

By the 1950s Vasarely had developed the foundational grammar that would define his practice: the unit-cell, a geometric form — circle, square, rhombus — repeated across a structured grid and modulated in colour and scale to produce sensations of movement, depth, and spatial expansion in a purely flat surface. This system was not merely aesthetic but theoretical; Vasarely documented it extensively in his Notes Brutes and subsequent writings, positioning his art as a democratic, reproducible visual language accessible to all. The 1965 MoMA exhibition The Responsive Eye brought international recognition, cementing his place at the centre of a global movement.

Vasarely was a committed and technically demanding printmaker, and his screenprints and multiples — produced in close collaboration with specialist workshops — are among the most rigorously executed works in the edition art market. Portfolios and signed multiples from the 1960s, when his formal language was at its most concentrated and edition sizes remained tight, are particularly sought by collectors and institutions alike.