The Brooklyn Rail

The Vera Molnár retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris just missed being one of the very few centennial exhibitions to actually celebrate a living artist. Molnár, who died in December 2023, less than a month shy of her hundredth birthday and three months before Vera Molnár: Parler à l’oeil opened, was one of the earliest and most productive practitioners of generative, computer-aided art. She worked until the very end: the first piece included in the show is from 1946, the last from 2023. Always open to the new, she even produced a series of NFTs in honor of her ninety-eighth birthday.

Molnár was born in Hungary, where she received a traditional fine arts education at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, studying alongside Judit Reigl, Simon Hantaï, and her future husband, Francois Molnár. She moved permanently to France in 1947, joining the group of émigré avant-garde artists based in Paris and quickly immersing herself in overtly logical, geometrically-based abstract painting and drawing. A co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, whose members included François Morellet and Julio Le Parc, Molnár was an active participant in the set of painters who positioned themselves against the established and more traditionally expressive postwar School of Paris.

Throughout her life Molnár continued to produce crisp and assured handmade paintings like Icône (1964), a glowing orange square with a thin vertical band of gold floating in its center, but she became increasingly intrigued with the possibilities of a new tool, the computer. In 1959 she had developed a set of algorithms, fashioning them into what she referred to as a machine imaginaire—a means of determining the complex placement of lines, grids, and colors in her drawings and paintings. This speeded up her process, but also whetted her appetite for even more effective methods. In the 1960s when mainframes became a feature of large scientific and business enterprises, but were inaccessible (and often incomprehensible) to the general public, computer use was typically doled out in increments of seconds, and user-friendly devices like keyboards were unavailable. Molnár managed, against all odds, to persuade the director of the computer department of the University of Paris to allow her to use their machines to make visual art.

Molnár's use of computers and plotters was generally straightforward, often focusing on relatively simple morphing operations—tedious tasks that would otherwise take a long time or would be easy to damage. She was, however, intrigued by the aesthetic potential of error, particularly how a small programming mistake could produce surprisingly satisfactory results. She was fond of quoting Paul Klee’s dictum that “Art is an error in the system.” Disorder or visual noise figured prominently in her work. She, like many other artists and musicians at the time, embraced randomizing processes with great success. In works like Quatre éléments distribués au hasard (1959), a square painting composed of tightly packed, randomly placed aggregations of short black lines, sometimes straight, sometimes linked, and set on the vertical, horizontal, or 45-degree axes, she paralleled aleatory paintings by Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly, who were also in Paris in the 1950s and exhibited with her.

Molnár was drawn to series and progressions, and especially to series that led in logical steps from order to disorder. This is seen to good effect in 160 carrés poussés à bout (160 squares pushed to the limit) (1976), In this series of eight plotter drawings, an initial grid rectangles—four on the vertical axis, eight on the horizontal, with each cell consisting of five nested rectangles, yields a total of 160 discrete forms. For Molnár, such a precise and clean ordering was a state just waiting to be tampered with and gradually reduced to incoherence. The same is true with Molnaroglyphs (1977–78), a series of fourteen drawings that begins with an orthogonally ordered grid of 50 by 50 small squares that are then pushed vertically and horizontally, and eventually twisted and torqued into near incomprehensibility. It is as if you documented the slow metamorphosis of an Agnes Martin into a Jackson Pollock.

No matter what form her work took, Molnár threw destabilizing elements into the mix. Even a seemingly straightforward hard-edged geometric painting like the 2010 Identiques mais différents, becomes a nearly impossible puzzle to solve. The crisply executed painting (with its luscious red and white enamel-like surface) is a long horizontal diptych. It feels like an ornamental section of classical architecture, and looks as if it should repeat, as that kind of entablature normally does. And it does repeat—sort of. The two sections mirror each other just enough to keep your eye moving back and forth between them, trying to discern the identical and dissimilar components. But the partial horizontal mirroring starts to intrude on itself, the red figure and white ground keep shifting, and before too long you are lost.

In one of the last painting series in the exhibition, Huis Clos (or, No Exit) (2021), a group of four squares, each painted in black, white, and medium gray seems easier to decipher, at least formally, but is disturbing for other reasons. Reading like a gorgeous piece of graphic design, the paintings are a series of superimpositions of an edge-to-edge letter C situated on top of a letter H, all executed in a Helvetica-like type or something equally clear, readable, and logical. The colors shift from painting to painting, and sometimes a plane becomes a line, or the H and the C interpenetrate, or the C rotates counterclockwise 45 degrees. It feels restrained and elegant, like the Jasper Johns number superimpositions, or a Robert Mangold line and plane balancing act. The title however leads somewhere else. Huis Clos brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s rather grim existentialist play of the same name, where a trio of characters find themselves trapped in hell, but Molnár was also referring to another place: the nursing home to which she was confined for the last three years of her life, and by extension, her impending death.

Well-curated and compact, the exhibition is also helped considerably by the inclusion of twenty-two volumes of Molnár’s journals, running from 1996–2009, filled with drawings, photographs, ideas, and plans. They give us a vivid sense of an artist who never stopped working or thinking throughout her very long and fruitful life. The thought-provoking and enjoyable show brings to our attention an overlooked but groundbreaking artist.