GARY HUME
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

ARTISTS almost invariably start off doing something notably different from whatever it is that subsequently earns them fame. And if they do not, then there is probably something wrong with them; it is always a mistake to let your options be too closely circumscribed too soon.

On the other hand, those who have been cursed with the survival of their first tentative steps would often move heaven and earth to suppress them.

One wonders whether Victor Vasarely was one of that number. Perhaps he ought to have been. The ambitious and informative retrospective now at Robert Sandelson features (admittedly hidden away below ground, so as not to frighten passing horses) two resplendently kitsch items.

These are Etude en Jaune and Etude en Rouge, both dating from 1940, when Vasarely was already 34. The pinkish-red one features a parakeet amid (literally) hearts and flowers, and the yellow one an indeterminately Asian face with fruit and flowers, vaguely in the style of the notorious Tretchikoff lady with the green face, once inescapable in motel bedrooms.

This may all be sublimely irrelevant to Vasarely the virtual creator of Op Art. Or, then again, it may not. “By their beginnings ye shall know them” is a harsh judgment, but not necessarily without an uncomfortable element of truth.

It has seemed to many that the key to the sensibility of Finnegans Wake is to be found in Joyce’s early Dickens-decadence-and-water fictions: the later work may disguise, but not mitigate, the insidious faults of the early. In the same way, if we sense something disquieting in the works of Vasarely’s mature Op Art phase, Etude en Jaune might offer a clue as to what that is.

But perhaps the 21st century needs a little elucidation on who Vasarely was, and why he should be in need of this slightly aggressive revisiting. Born in Hungary in 1906, he settled in France in 1930 and became part of the Ecole de Paris. He began creating optically challenging though still representational images based on patterned creatures and objects such as zebras, tigers and chessboards. In the Fifties and Sixties he was virtually a household name, but by the early Seventies he had retreated rather, in public estimation, from Fine Art to decorator territory. His brightly coloured, eye-teasing patterns in paint fitted all too well into the aesthetic of the lava lamp.

All the same, in his day he was genuinely important. Perhaps more than any other single artist he invented Op Art, the form of painting and print-making that taught us how easy it was not quite to believe what we were seeing, but thoroughly to enjoy the experience. In a characteristic Vasarely work, the shapes seem to move and change, even as our eyes travel over the surface of the picture, and the moment we move a foot or two everything changes again. And yet this flickery, unresolved quality of the image seems totally at odds with the iron-clad geometry of what is actually on the canvas.

What is lacking in Vasarely’s art is any real sense of aesthetic discretion. Compare him with our own great exponent of Op Art, Bridget Riley, whose definitive retrospective opens at Tate Britain in a fortnight, and you see what the matter is. Her pictures also flicker and flame, but there is a wonderfully subtle sense of colour behind them, while Vasarely sets our teeth on edge with his garish colour confections. Riley’s art is fluid; his is rigidly cut to pattern. Perhaps he was, after all, the Tretchikoff of the Swinging Sixties.

Gary Hume (born 1962) may well be one of those artists who suffers from having been discovered too early and set in his style too soon. What has been mysterious about him, ever since he swam into our ken, along with Tracey Emin, in Damien Hirst’s Freeze show (1988), is not so much why he is liked — that is easy enough — as why he is liked by the people who like him. Admittedly he is a young British artist, but lower-case, surely, rather than a Young British Artist, and when he is coupled with such of the Britpack as Emin and Hirst it must have more to do with social links than a shared aesthetic.

From the start, Hume has believed in simple forms, mostly muted colours, and high- gloss paint. His Freeze pieces were abstract, but soon afterwards his images slid into the more informal, unmistakably representational. His subjects, like his colours, often suggest the nursery, and while there may be touches of menace lurking beneath their smooth, shiny surfaces, it is mostly the menace posed by the shadowy shape of the dressing-gown hanging on the nursery door.

His paintings are easy to like because they seem to offer little in the way of challenge — unless you find a caricaturally simplified image of Michael Jackson challenging, of course. Flowers, babies, smiley faces, pretty people, pop idols are all grist to his mill. The Dublin show of 29 pieces is a retrospective covering work of the past decade, and is most agreeable to visit, even if it offers no new insights, beyond a footnote that of late his colours seem to have become more sombre.