Vera Molnár: Entretien avec Vincent Baby

by Vincent Baby (Interviewer)

Vera Molnár a été lauréate du prix d’Honneur AWARE en 2018. Ce prix symbolise la nécessaire reconnaissance de grandes artistes femmes dont l'œuvre et la carrière ont trop souvent été méconnues ou redécouvertes tardivement dans le cadre de rétrospectives partielles. Ce prix s'accompagne de la publication d'un long entretien qui est l'occasion d'entrer dans les détails de leur vie, de leur parcours et leurs rencontres.

112 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2022

Reviews

[Matthew Wilder]

Vera Molnar created grids of tiny squares. She created an “algorithm” from which they deviated, and the called the deviations—the 1% of disorder—the beauty in the paintings. She sought to escape intuition, and, if you get down to it, the unconscious. She wanted to merge with the machine, yet also live this telltale hiccup of error that would connote humanness, and also make the work commercial (she is quite explicit about having set out to seduce “the art world”—which seemed to be taking shape in her late nineties and now is happening after her death). Much of what she says reminds me of something one of David Cronenberg’s kids told me once—that the old man hated surrealism because he thought “dream art” was intellectually sloppy and hippie-ish and he preferred the even-fake objectivity of the surgical amphitheater. Yeah, I get it—though when Vera uses the slanting, collapsing handwriting of her elderly, physically and mentally declining mother as a model of her “1% disorder,” there’s something weird about her not acknowledging any emotional impact of her mother’s “sentimental letters” falling apart. At the very end she cites Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but a reader can’t help but wonder, Lady, where’d that come from?

The most interesting section of her life to imagine comes when her husband Francois, described as the scion of “a real Hungarian right-wing soldier family,” starts arguing with Vera about political action around the time of May ‘68. It would seem the born-communist Vera and the born-Orbanesque Francois traded places in the “uprising versus status quo” debate (though you can’t be sure). There is also a rather remarkable moment where Vera is shlepped to San Francisco and shown a proto, very proto, Silicon Valley. Her computer-assisted art will henceforth be known as paleo AI art, and her prices will skyrocket. The most current thing about her, however, was her feeling that her work would not cause even a ripple in the culture—what I imagine literally every zoomer artist (can we put that in air quotes?) currently feels.