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Jehan Georges Vibert |
Most people when they first see this painting can't believe that the surface is really flat! It looks so much like a round sphere that they have to walk around to the side of the painting to convince themselves that it really is two-dimensional!
Victor Vasarely painted this type of work for two major reasons. First, he wanted to paint in a way that everyone could understand without needing any kind of special explanations. Second, he was interested in how the eye and the brain work, and how he could fool them into seeing something that wasn't actually there. This type of painting is called Op Art. "Op" comes from the word "optical," which relates to your eyes. Many Op Art paintings are "optical illusions," which means that they can play tricks on your eyes, like this one does.
How did Vasarely manage to make a flat painting look like a three-dimensional sphere? Try to figure it out before you read further! He did it by using line, color, and shape in special ways. The two middle lines, one from top to bottom and the other from left to right, are perfectly straight. The others curve little by little from the middle to the edges of the sphere. The biggest shapes are in the center, and get narrower and narrower as they get to the edges-this helps to create the illusion that part of the sphere is farther back from our eyes. Also, the brightest colors outline the squares in the middle, which makes those squares look closest to us.
Can you think of a title for this work? Vasarely called it Vega-Nor. Vega is a star, and Vasarely wanted paintings like this to remind people of nature and how big the universe is. Since he called many of his paintings Vega, Vasarely added small words to their titles so people could tell them apart. To this one, he added the word "Nor," which isn't intended to mean anything in particular.