THE VASARELY COLLECTION

In their collection, Sonja Henie and Niels Onstad included the work of several of the artists who showed regularly at Galerie Denis Renée, but never Victor Vasarely (1908–1997). The same may be said of other public collections in Norway. The artist’s work, however, was shown in the country at an early stage, since, thanks to his connections with Galerie Denise Renée, exhibitions were organized there in 1948 and 1952. Much of Vasarely’s art found its way into private, Norwegian collections: Konrad Gromholt’s was the most important of these, but like so many of them, it was eventually dispersed.

In 1981, a private initiative undertook to gather together a selection of Vasarely’s work to form the core for a Vasarely Centre in Oslo. This was based upon a donation by the artist himself. After a great deal of disagreement and conflict, it ended with the artist demanding the return of his work ten years later. Another private initiative, in 1993, persuaded the artist to donate 82 of his artworks to the Henie Onstad Art Centre.

The collection consists of drawings, collages, screen prints and multiples, and spans the period between 1935 and 1982. It shows the artist’s evolution, from the figurative motifs of the 1930s to completely abstract work, based on the systematic principles he experimented with during the 1960s, through to his later work that explored the possibilities of the optical method he developed.

With an emphasis on the idea of the multiple, this collection gives an interesting insight into the artist’s attitude towards this art term and art’s function in society.

But everything changed with the introduction of the multiple, in the form of screen prints, reliefs and sculptural objects, as it was now possible to produce exact, true copies of an original work… Our perception of an artwork, the whole ethics of artistic practice became the subject of enormous change: a work of art no longer gained value from its unique “signature”, but from its statement, from a feeling and a sense of shock, from the message it mediated, no matter how.

The impact the multiple has had on art is therefore a double one. On the one hand, it embodies the possibility of multiplying art; a multiplication that means quality is no longer directly linked to quantity. On the
other hand, it destroys the completely obsolete myth of the unique masterpiece that cannot be imitated, since it is connected to the idea of being many.

The very fact that multiples exist allows art to move out into the streets, to force its way into the town and into nature, and to have an influence upon people’s consciousness – no longer the domain of a privileged elite, but also available to the masses.

(From Klaus Albrecht Schröder (edited by), Victor Vasarely, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1992.)

By making use of the technical means of reproduction existing at the time, Vasarely rejected the notion of the original artwork, and sought to disengage the visual idea from the uniqueness of the work itself. Multiplication, and thereby the availability of art to the general public, was a link in the chain of this strategy, and formed the basis of his gift to Norway. The fact that this work has found a final home at the Henie Onstad Art Centre – the country’s best-known centre for modernism – is fitting, and it has made an exciting supplement to the Art Centre’s Core Collection.

The essay is taken from the book The Henie Onstad Art Centre: The Art of Tomorrow Today : The Collection by Karin Hellandsjø, Torino : Skira, 2008