The opening event, one of the highlights of the anniversary year, will be attended by Pierre Vasarely, Valérie Costa and Katalin Getto.
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Victor Vasarely’s wife and artistic partner, Klára Spinner, was born in Budapest in 1909. Her family ran a fashion house in the city centre, which gave her early exposure to textile and fashion design. She received her artistic training at the Műhely (“The Workshop”), Sándor Bortnyik’s “Hungarian Bauhaus”, where she studied advertising graphics, typography and photo montage alongside her future husband, Győző Vásárhelyi. Her works were exhibited in several prestigious shows in Budapest.
In 1931, she followed Vasarely into exile in France. They settled in Paris, where, in their early years, both lived from commissioned graphic design work. They married and had two children. Klára painted self-portraits, portraits of Vasarely and of their life together, and already in the 1930s she was designing textiles for silk workshops in Lyon.
During the Second World War, following the German occupation of France, she spent an extended period in Hungary with her two children. She created fashion drawings, clothing designs, fashion reports, and articles on life in Paris for several popular Budapest magazines. Her writings were accompanied by her own illustrations depicting everyday life in Budapest and Paris.
In 1947, she began working with one of the historic Aubusson tapestry workshops. For the atelier led by François Tabard, she created tapestry designs inspired by the iconography of medieval French textile art. Between 1948 and 1950, fifteen tapestries were produced in the Tabard workshop based on her designs. During these decades, she also produced the majority of her gouache and tempera works, which explore the synthesis of figurative and geometric forms.
From the mid-1950s onwards, she gradually withdrew from independent artistic practice, devoting most of her time and attention to her family, supporting her husband’s career, and from the 1970s onwards to the organisation and operation of the Vasarely Foundation.
For the establishment of the Pécs museum, the couple donated Klára Vasarely’s valuable collection to the city alongside Victor Vasarely’s works. Her Bauhaus studies, gouaches and tempera paintings, graphics, tapestries and textile designs formed part of the permanent exhibition for fifty years. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the JPM Vasarely Museum presents Claire Vasarely’s complete collection in a dedicated temporary exhibition. For the first time, all works entrusted to the care of the Pécs museum by the couple will be shown together. The material is complemented by reproductions of graphics, paintings, textile designs and photographic documents held by the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence.
An exhibition presenting Claire Vasarely’s oeuvre was shown in Aix-en-Provence from June 2025 to February 2026. It was preceded by research work that significantly expanded knowledge of the artist’s life and work. The Pécs exhibition builds on the results of this research.
