Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Another optical effect often exploited by op is the moiré pattern, familiar in the shimmer of watered silk fabrics. Fundamentally, these flashes of apparent reflection are created whenever two or more grids of parallel or periodic rulings-window screens, for example-are overlapped. When misaligned slightly, they produce ripples and curves not actually inherent in the grids. The smallest angle of change yields the greatest, most disturbed pattern displacements...
...Ph.D. Op artists often work in teams. Vasarely's son, yclept Yvaral, has helped him start the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel in Paris-six researchers who resemble the Atomic Energy Commission more than café-sitting artists. Germany boasts a group called Zero, begun in 1959 by three artists who hold Ph.D. degrees; they call for "new idealism" as opposed to the "new realism" of pop. The Italians have two op groups, the Gruppo N in Padua and the Gruppo T in Milan, which hopes to "codify visual phenomena, just as music was codified into notes...
...loner living in Germany, a tall Brazilian, Almir de Silva Mavignier, 39, is the prototype op artist (lower right). He works slowly, sells for little, and does not care for fame. "Think about the anonymous craftsmen who built that," he said recently, peering from behind gold-rimmed spectacles at the Ulm cathedral. "They have been depersonalized, yet might have died with satisfaction that they helped create something still pulsating 500 years later." His works, dotted with neat cones of oil, are uniformly produced in permutations of the spectrum: a painstaking topography that seems to prick the retina...
British Coolth. An unusual number of op artists come from Latin America. One is a Venezuelan named Jésus Raphael Soto, 41, now working in Paris, who calls his work "vibrations" (left), though he states that he has never read a physics book. His colored aluminum bars, suspended from fine nylon threads in shadow boxes, sway in front of lined backgrounds and dematerialize. "See how the stiff bars become fluid and luminous," says Soto. Like conductors' batons summoning music from strings, they do assume a sonorous life...
...called Anonima. Composed of three young men, Francis Hewitt (below), Edwin Mieczkowski (next page) and Ernst Benkert, who met at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Oberlin College in 1958 and '59, they believe that the rule and the compass are proper artist's tools. Like other op artists, they dislike artistic preciousness, the expression of the prima donna personality on canvas, and psychic plumbing into the meaning of art. They also hold, says Hewitt, that "if people find our art dull, that doesn't really bother us that much. The quality and depth of the experience...