Computer arts pioneer Vera Molnar dies at 99

Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her groundbreaking digital work that began with the colossal computers of the 1960s and evolved into the current era of NFTs, died on December 7 in Paris . She was 99.

Her death was announced on social media from the Center Pompidou in Paris, which will present a major exhibition of her work in February. Mrs. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947.

While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from 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 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career.

“Vera Molnar is one of the few artists who had the conviction and perseverance to create computer-based visual art at a time when it was not taken seriously as an art form, with critics denouncing the emerging form because they did not believe that the De The artist’s hand was clearly visible in the work,” Michael Bouhanna, the global head of digital art at Sotheby’s, wrote in an email.

Ms. Molnar began applying math principles to her work years before she had access to a real computer.

In 1959 she started implementing a concept she called ‘Machine Imaginaire’: an imaginary machine. This analogue approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works she created by hand, on grid paper.

She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she gained access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. At a time when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of 1960s grit and idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was “highly capable.” complicated and expensive,” she once said, adding, “They were selling computing time in seconds.”

Yet she 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 will open.” Still, she was met with skepticism by the head of the computer lab.

“He looked at me,” she said, “and I had the feeling he was debating whether to call a nurse to sedate me or lock me up.”

Creating art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages ​​such as Basic and Fortran and enter her data using punched cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper using a plotter printer.

One early series, ‘Interruptions’, consisted of a vast sea of ​​tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: “She set up a series of straight lines and then twisted some of them, throwing her rigorous set of marks out of sync. To add to the chaos, she then randomly erased certain areas, resulting in empty areas amid a sea of ​​lines. Another series, “(Des)Ordres” (1974), involved apparently orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she modified to make them appear somewhat disorderly, as if they were vibrating.

Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing. “1% of the disorder,” another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. “I like order, but I can’t stand it,” she told Mr. Obrist. “I make mistakes, I stutter, I muddle my words.” And so, she concluded, “maybe chaos came out of this.”

Viewers of her work were not always enraptured. Ms. Molnar remembers one exhibit where visitors, she joked, “looked to the side so as not to get some horrible eye disease from looking at them.” Finally, she spoke out, telling a skeptical visitor that computers, like works of art, are made by intelligent people, and that therefore “the most human art is made by the computer, because every last piece of it is a human invention.”

“Oh my, what a response I got!” 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 described it an interview from 2012.

“I went to his house to admire him; he painted clearings, thickets with dancing nymphets,” she said. “The smell of the oil paint, the small green and yellow leaves, enchanted me.” Her uncle gave her a wooden box with pastel colors, with which she drew evening sunsets in the family’s country house on Lake Balaton.

Mrs. Molnar went on to study 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 on her work.

Mr. Molnar died in 1993. Information about survivors was not immediately available.

After Mrs. Molnar graduated in 1947, the couple moved to Paris, where she began her art career and found herself getting together in cafes with leading abstract artists, such as Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger and Wassily Kandinsky, who also brought a geometric sensibility to their work.

By the early 1960s, she was enough of a recognized figure in the art world to form the influential collective with François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, Francisco Sobrino and others Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuelwhich aimed to integrate science and industrial materials into art making.

Her career continued to expand throughout the 1970s. She started using computers with screens, which allowed her to immediately review the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens it was “like a conversation, like a real conversation pictorial process,” she said in a recent interview with generative art maker and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. “You move the ‘brush’ and you immediately see whether it suits you or not.”

Ms. Molnar bought her first personal computer in 1980, which allowed her “to work the way I wanted, when I wanted,” she told Mr. Calderon. “It was wonderful to go to bed at night and hear the computer and plotter working independently in the workshop.”

Although the art world was slow to recognize Ms. Molnar’s work, her reputation has grown in recent years with the explosion of digital art. In 2022 she exhibited in the Venice Biennalewhere she was the oldest living artist shown.

Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with “Themes and Variations,” a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby’s. The series achieved $1.2 million in sales.

“I have no regrets” she said in a 2017 video interview. “My life is made of squares, triangles, lines.”