‘Among our favorite Polish artists was Wojciech Fangor, one of the most important artists in post-war Poland. As we looked through the stack of paintings at his home, he directed us to a large-sized circle painting which he told us was one he favored among his circle paintings. We were intrigued by its blue tones and a red color that seemed to reverberate off the canvas and we bought it directly from him that day.’
Exploring forms, colour and light and their interaction in space, creating impressions of movement and optical illusions, Fangor was a precursor of Op art, and the first Polish artist to have a solo show dedicated to his works at the Guggenheim museum in 1970. M73 was painted explicitly for the Guggenheim show in 1970 but was not included in the exhibition in the end due to its size. Fangor was so fond of the painting that he held on to it until 2000, when he agreed to sell it to Anne and Bill Frej.
Optical art was an important concept in the mid-sixties, as was Chromatic Abstraction or Colour Painting, another tendency to which Fangor’s art might be related. However, it is important to note that Fangor arrived at his highly personal style in isolation in Poland where he remained until 1961. His halated chromatic zones – dissolving colour, hue and plane – and the optical illusions which they create, appeared in his works as early as 1956.
Fangor’s works were first introduced to an international audience in New York, in the 1961 exhibition 15 Polish Painters at the Museum of Modern Art. Fangor was living in Warsaw at the t.mes . This was followed by another Op art exhibition curated by the MET, The Responsive Eye in 1965, which subsequently travelled to St Louis, Seattle, Pasadena and Baltimore.
The development of Fangor’s art towards optical illusions was stimulated by his desire to produce more forceful, direct experiences than could be obtained through traditional painting styles, and was likely a form of dissent against the prevailing, government sponsored, figurative Social Realist propaganda paintings than dominant in Poland. In contrast, Fangor’s artistic preoccupations moved increasingly to working with incandescent or saturated colours creating optical illusions, kineticism, suspension and dissolution of abstract shapes, and destruction or reinforcement of the two-dimensional plane.
In M 73 Fangor created a two-dimensional field in which blurred, non-focused lines and edges dissolve the distinctions of colours and thus form a synoptic, pulsating configuration. Indeed, Fangor’s spatial dynamics take place somewhere between the viewer and the canvas, at a point mid-air where the eye perceives. Any attempt to focus on the blurred, fluid images provokes an activation of colour and contour, which disintegrate and reintegrate and thus elude the eye’s fixation. Fangor called this area in front of the canvas P.I.S. - Positive Illusory Space. This was his preferred ‘field of action’, the space where the object’s virtual space and the perceiving objects real space overlap and merge.
Colour is key to producing the effects Fangor sought to create in the P.I.S.. “Fangor’s paintings appeal to the pleasure principle. They are sumptuous in colour, sensual in form and expressive in content. The choice of colour is intuitive and encourages an emotional response. (…) To the mind’s eye colour is both allusive and elusive. It generates its own space, light, forms and content. Josef Albers explains the phenomenon in the following terms: ’We almost never see in our mind what colour physically is, because colour is the most relative medium in art. This is the result of both the interdependence of, as well as the interaction between colour and colour, colour and form, colour and quantity, colour and placement.’ The autonomy of colour and its expressive ambiguities are rarely as eloquently substantiated as in Fangor’s art.” (Margit Rowell, Fangor, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1970, p. 13).
