François Molnár

François Molnár was born in 1922 in Hungary. He was an artist and researcher who devoted his career to understanding the relationship between perception, structure, and visual order. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1947, he moved to Paris with his partner and collaborator Vera Molnár, joining a community of Hungarian émigré artists including Judit Reigl, Marta Pan, and Simon Hantaï. In Paris, Molnár turned from painting to the study of perception, seeking to understand how visual forms engage the mind. He was among the first in France to apply methods of experimental psychology to art, bridging scientific research and aesthetic inquiry. His work examined how viewers respond to pattern, balance, and transformation. In 1960 he helped establish the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, which soon evolved into the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). The collective, which included Vera Molnár and François Morellet, investigated optical phenomena and public participation through experiments with movement, light, and perception.

From 1963 Molnár worked at the Institut d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’Art at the University of Paris I, where he later taught and became director of research at both the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Centre de Recherche Expérimentale et Informatique des Arts Visuels. There he helped formalize the study of perception and visual response as a field of artistic and scientific research, influencing a generation of thinkers associated with cybernetics and information aesthetics. His writings explored composition and visual order with scientific precision, including À la recherche d’un langage plastique pour une science de l’art in 1959, Contribution à l’étude expérimentale de la composition picturale in 1965, and Towards Science in Art in 1968. In the 1970s he collaborated with Vera Molnár on the Molnart software system, one of the earliest tools for computer-generated imagery. The research centers he led became spaces of exchange between artists, programmers, and psychologists, anticipating later developments in human–computer interaction and generative art. Molnár passed away in 1993.