Vasarely's vocabulary

The history of art knows relatively few painters who, in addition to practicing their craft of executing drawings, paintings and frescoes, were also concerned to talk, and above all write, about their works, their technique, themselves and their contemporaries, or, in general, their "philosophy of art". Among the most illustrious are Leonardo da Vinci and Delacroix, but there are also a few "moderns", such as Maurice Denis and Paul Signac. Vasarely, too, was one of those artists who had a lifelong "desire to write". His preoccupation with language, not to say lexicography, accompanied his artistic activities from the moment he arrived in Paris in 1930. As an iconoclast, he changed the semantic understanding of words as "banal" as créer, créateur or création, not to mention expressions such as alphabet plastique, cité polychrome, folklore planétaire or unité plastique. These - despite comprising words that, separately, have nothing new in terms of their signifiers - will be filled in his usage with meanings never seen before.