Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which began with the huge computers of the 1960s and evolved into the current era of NFTs, died on December 7 in Paris. She was 99 years old.
His death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which will present a major exhibition of his work in February. Mrs. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947.
While his paintings and computer-aided drawings, which were inspired by geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art In New York and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his work was not always well received early in his career.
“Vera Molnar is one of the few artists who had the conviction and perseverance to make computer visual art at a time when it was not taken seriously as an art form, and critics denounced the emerging form because they did not believe that the The artist’s hand was evident in the work,” Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby’s global director of digital art, wrote in an email.
In fact, Molnar began employing computing principles in his work years before he had access to a real computer.
In 1959, he began to implement a concept he called “Machine Imaginaire”: imaginary machine. This analogue approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes in works he produced by hand, on graph paper.
He took his first step into the silicon era in 1968, when he had access to a computer in the research laboratory of a Paris university. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of common sense and 1960s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was “very complicated and expensive” he once said, adding: “they sold calculation time in seconds.”
Still, he later said in an interview with art curator and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist: “In 1968 we thought that everything was possible, and all you have to do is knock on the doors and the doors open.” Still, the director of the computer lab received her with skepticism.
“He looked at me,” she said, “and I had the feeling he was considering whether he should call a nurse to sedate me or lock me up.”
Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Molnar had to learn early computer languages such as Basic and Fortran and enter his data with punch cards, and he had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer.
One of the first series, “Interruptions,” included a vast sea of small lines on a white background. As ARTNews pointed out in a recent obituary: “She would establish a series of straight lines and then twist some, causing her rigorous set of markings to become misaligned. Then, to inject more chaos, she would randomly erase certain parts, resulting in blank areas amidst a sea of lines.” another series, “(Orders” (1974), involved seemingly ordered patterns of concentric squares, which she modified to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating.
Over the years, Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine perfection and the chaos of life itself, as he did in his 1976 drawing. “1% of the disorder” Another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. “I love order, but I can't stand it,” he told Mr. Obrist. “I make mistakes, I stutter, I confuse my words.” And so, he concluded, “perhaps chaos arose from this.”
Viewers of his work were not always fascinated. Molnar recalled an exhibition in which visitors, he joked, “looked to the side so as not to suffer some kind of terrible eye condition from looking at them.” Finally he spoke up and told a skeptical visitor that computers, like works of art, were made by intelligent humans and that therefore “the most human art is made by computer, because every last bit of it It is a human invention.”
“Oh, the reactions I had!” she said. “But I survived, you know?”
Vera Gacs was born on January 5, 1924 in Budapest. She found early artistic influence from an uncle who was a “Sunday painter,” as she said in an interview from 2012.
“I went to his house to admire him; “He painted clearings, undergrowth with dancing nymphets,” she said. “The smell of the oil paint, the little green and yellow leaves, I loved them.” His uncle gave him a wooden box of pastels, which he used to draw sunsets at the family's country house near Lake Balaton.
Molnar studied art history and aesthetics at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where she met her future husband, François Molnara scientist who sometimes collaborated with her in her work.
Molnar died in 1993. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
After Molnar graduated in 1947, the couple moved to Paris, where she began her artistic career and found herself. mingling in cafes with prominent abstract artists, such as Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger and Wassily Kandinsky, who also brought a geometric sensibility to their work.
By the early 1960s, he was a sufficiently recognized figure in the art world to join François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, Francisco Sobrino and others to form the influential collective Visual Arts Research Groupthat sought to incorporate science and industrial materials into the creation of art.
His career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. He began using computers with screens, allowing him to instantly evaluate the results of his codes and adjust them accordingly. With screens, it was “like a conversation, like a real conversation.” pictorial process” he said in a recent interview with generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderón. “You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not.”
Molnar acquired his first personal computer in 1980, which allowed him to “work how he wanted and when he wanted,” he told Calderón. “It was great to go to bed at night and listen to the computer and plotter working alone in the shop.”
While the art world was slow to fully recognize Molnar's work, his reputation has grown in recent years with the explosion of digital art. In 2022 he exhibited at the Venice Biennalewhere she was the oldest living artist shown.
Earlier this year, he cemented his legacy in the blockchain world with “Themes and Variations,” a generative art series of over 500 works using nft technology that was created in collaboration with artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold to via Sotheby's. The series earned $1.2 million in sales.
“Have no regrets” he said in a 2017 video interview. “My life is squares, triangles, lines.”
