Artwork
(Des)ordres
Themes & Variations #404
Themes & Variations #368
Themes & Variations #51
On-chain algorithm, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2023
Private collection
Toward the end of her life, Vera Molnár found herself celebrated as the “godmother of generative art” by a new generation of artists working with blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). At the age of 99, she released Themes and Variations, a collection of 500 unique computer-generated works created in collaboration with artist Martin Grasser. This would be her first and only blockchain-native work. She passed away later that year.
Themes and Variations pays homage to many of Molnár’s long-standing motifs: grids, geometric abstraction, order and disorder, and typographic text. Molnár played with the letters N, F, and T as abstract forms reduced to triangles, rectangles, and squares. She rotated, stretched, and pushed them to the limits of legibility. “All these variations around letters resonate in me like music,” she said. “I immediately think of Goldberg Variations or Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations on a Waltz.”
©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Histoire d’I
Histoire d’I
Histoire d’I
Four computer drawings in multicolored ink on Benson plotter paper, 1977
Private collection
Vera Molnár frequently used letters of the alphabet in her drawings. She stripped them of their meanings and context and worked with them as pure geometric forms. In the series Histoire d’I (History of I) she focused her attention on the letter I, experimenting with various color combinations, rotations, and levels of density within a square image plane.
The intersecting perpendicular lines of the I and its randomized placement and rotation on the page are reminiscent of the techniques Molnár employed in Interruptions (on view nearby).
©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
(Des)ordres
Computer drawing in black ink on Benson plotter paper scroll, 1974
Private collection
In the Des(Ordres) series Vera Molnár generated numerous variations on grids of concentric squares, a motif she returned to throughout her life. To create this series, she used a custom program called Molnart. She developed Molnart with her husband, François Molnár, an artist turned scientist who studied perceptual psychology and experimental aesthetics. By the early 1970s, some computers featured a new innovation: the graphical display. This enabled Molnár to see the results of her programs instantly, rather than waiting for a plotter machine to reveal the image hours or days later.
Molnár gradually removed squares from a five-by-five grid, introducing negative space and breaking up the grid’s regularity. She then injected more disorder into the image, simulating a hand-drawn line or offsetting the concentric squares from their axis. The title suggests a play on words in French between two meanings: désordres (disorder) and des ordres (some orders).s (disorder) and des ordres (some orders).
©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris