Vera Molnar, Mother of Computer Art, Pioneered the Future of Abstraction

“One of my dreams,” the artist Vera Molnar said in the early ’80s, “is to create a robot named Vera Molnar.” She imagined this robot would work every night and do exactly what she wanted. It would know everything she had ever created and, based on what she’d already produced, make a list of everything she hadn’t yet done.

Molnar never created this robot, though she did become known as the queen of computer-generated art. The current exhibition “Parler à l’oeil” (“Speak to the eye”) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, on view through August 26th, shows how quickly she understood the artmaking possibilities new technologies offered at a time when few people did.

Molnar, who died late last year, received little recognition for most of her lifetime, though this began to change as interest in digital art grew. In 2022, she was notably included in the Venice Biennale, the oldest artist to participate that year. And the influence she’s had on contemporary artists is evident in an exhibition running concurrently to the Pompidou show at the Ludwig Múzeum in her native Hungary. The artists, which include Refik Anadol, Mark Wilson, and Antoine Schmitt, among others, all favor a variety of media, from prints to the metaverse, as well as kinetic sculptures and video. “The diversity of their approaches demonstrates the wide-ranging potential of Vera Molnar’s work for inspiration,” the show’s curator, Richard Castelli, noted in an email.

Born in Hungary in 1924, Molnar studied fine art at the Budapest University of Fine Arts and moved to Paris in 1947. Some of Molnar’s earliest works at the Pompidou—graphite drawings of landscapes from the late 1940s—show her tendency towards simple, geometric shapes even when creating figurative work. In these early drawings, trees become circles perched on top of a line, while mountains take on the silhouette of a plotted graph. As the exhibition is organized chronologically, it’s clear how quickly Molnar abandoned figuration when she fell in with a Left Bank artistic crowd that included Sonia Delaunay. Typical of this period is Cercles et demi-cercles (1953). Composed of red, black, and gray circles and half-circles arranged by size across three rows, its composition is both uncompromising and visually appealing.

Elsewhere, we see Molnar’s pre-algorithmic work already challenging the boundaries of abstraction and painting through color and material. Piet Mondrian argued that abstraction should only be done in the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. In response, Molnar made a neon orange monochrome adorned with a single gold rectangle and called it Icône (1964), joyfully breaking with his tenets for the genre.

In the 1966 work 4 éléments distribués au hasard, or “four elements distributed randomly,” she arranged short strips of adhesive film horizontally, vertically, or slightly leaning to the left or the right. Sometimes isolated or joined, these basic signs create geometric motifs that surprisingly never repeat.

In the 1960s, Molnar started making works using what she called her machine imaginaire, or “imaginary machine.” She decided to work as if she were a machine, setting guidelines and restrictions that limited the set of possible marks and then creating iterations of a specific pattern or shape. An example of her imaginary machine is the series “À la Recherche de Paul Klee” (“Searching for Paul Klee”) from 1969–70. Klee’s original work from 1927 used variations of striped, colored squares to suggest a church building. In Molnar’s version, she filled in a grid of 81 squares with parallel or criss-crossed lines. Some of the squares are so densely lined that they seem colored in. The result is an intricately patterned image dizzying in detail and dynamism.

In 1968, Molnar’s imaginary machine became real. Her husband tipped her off about the arrival of an IBM computer at the research center where he was working. At the time, computers were such an expensive technology that the center sold its use by the second. Molnar taught herself to code, fed the screenless computer punch cards, and often waited hours or days for the results. One series from this time is “Molnaroglyphes” (1977–78), which explores the deformation of a grid of squares. While the squares are tidily arranged in the first version, in subsequent drawings they begin to move around and overlap, like cells in a petri dish. The title, meanwhile, shows some of Molnar’s sense of humor, which runs as a common thread throughout the exhibition.

For Molnar, the computer was a fast, efficient tool that helped her move past the limits of her imagination and her body’s fatigue. The response to her computer-generated work, however, was so hostile that Molnar came to include a disclaimer in her exhibitions. “Many of my works are produced and often executed by computer,” it read. “But if they have any value, or if, on the contrary, they have none at all, the machine is in no way responsible.”

The exhibition also presents, for the first time, some of the journals Molnar kept throughout her life. Placed in the center of two rooms and surrounded by her abstract, computer-generated works, the journals show that many of her ideas for shapes and motifs came from real-life objects, such as shadows created by a fence on tiles, matchsticks arranged in a line, or the marble inlaid floor of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The large painting Le Carré devoyé, or “the errant square,” from 1999, might initially appear like pure geometry, with its collapsing black square set against a white background. But as the journals show, the work comes from Molnar’s studio experiments with a loop made from paper.