Vera Molnár (subject) — Vera Molnár — Parler à l'œil (Centre Pompidou retrospective)

2023

Artists: Vera Molnár (subject), Serge Lemoine (curator) · Year: 2023 · Medium: Major retrospective exhibition spanning seventy years of Molnár's practice · Substrate: Approximately 200 works — gouaches, plotter drawings, color plotter series, later digital works — organized across themed galleries · Place: Paris, France · Institution: Centre Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne) Vera Molnár: Parler à l'œil, the retrospective exhibition at Centre Pompidou from October 2023 to July 2024, was the most comprehensive institutional presentation of Molnár's seventy-year practice. Approximately two hundred works traced her career from the 1950s gouaches of the machine imaginaire period through her 1968 CNRS plotter breakthrough, through the Interruptions and (Dés)ordres series, through the color plotter work of the 1980s and 1990s, and into her 2010s and 2020s digital practice. The exhibition's scope made clear what the distributed museum holdings had obscured: that Molnár's practice was continuous, coherent, and more substantial than any prior single exhibition had shown. Molnár died on December 7, 2023 — during the exhibition's run, at ninety-nine. The retrospective became, retrospectively, her final living testament. The second half of the run (December 2023 through July 2024) continued with the exhibition unchanged; wall texts were updated to note her death; her presence in the exhibition's reception shifted subtly but unmistakably. The curatorial argument, made across the exhibition's galleries, was that Molnár belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century French abstract painters rather than as a specialized computer-art footnote. The positioning worked. Mainstream French art criticism covered the exhibition as the retrospective of a major modern artist, not as a specialized new-media show. The implicit argument — that the field's first-generation figures belong in mainstream art history rather than in a separate digital-art ghetto — was advanced significantly by Pompidou's institutional weight. Molnár's archive continues to be administered by her estate. Lore The exhibition's catalog — a substantial 250-page volume edited by Lemoine — is now the canonical monograph on Molnár. Her death during the exhibition transformed the final six months of the run; visitors reported an unusual quality of attention, and the Pompidou arranged additional archival materials to be displayed alongside the original exhibition plan. Her work prices rose significantly in the secondary market immediately after her death; the market correction has largely held through 2024 and 2025. Sources • Centre Pompidou — Vera Molnár: Parler à l'œil exhibition catalog (2023) • Le Monde, Artforum — retrospective coverage • Lemoine, Serge (ed.) — Vera Molnár (Pompidou monograph)