‘Godmother of generative art’ dies; known as digital pioneer
Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the “godmother of generative art” for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, has died in Paris. She was 99.
Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. 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 like 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 very few artists who had the conviction and perseverance to make computer-based visual art at a time when it was not taken seriously as an art form, with critics denouncing the emergent form since they did not believe that the artist’s hand was evident in the work,” Michael Bouhanna, the global head of digital art at Sotheby’s, wrote in an email.
Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of
computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer.
In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called “Machine Imaginaire” — imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper.
She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days
when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and ’60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was “very complicated and expensive,” she once said, adding, “They were selling calculation time in seconds.”
Still, she later said in an interview with the 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.” Even so, she was met with skepticism from the head of the computer lab.
“He gave me a look,” she said, “and I had the feeling that he was considering whether he should call for 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 like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results,
which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer.
One early series, “Interruptions,” involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: “She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines.” Another series, “(Des)Ordres” (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating.
Over the years, Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing “1% of Disorder,”
another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. “I love order, but I can’t stand it,” she told Obrist. “I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words.” And so, she concluded, “chaos, perhaps, came from this.”
Viewers of her work were not always entranced. Molnar recalled one exhibition at which visitors would, she joked, “look to the side so as not to get some kind of terrible eye affliction from looking at them.” She eventually spoke out, telling a skeptical visitor that computers, like artworks, were made by intelligent humans, and that therefore “the most human art is made by computer, because every last bit of it is a human invention.”
“Oh my, the reactions I got!” she said. “But I survived, you know.”