Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Preying and playing on the fallibility in vision is the new movement of "optical art" that has sprung up across the Western world. No less a break from abstract expressionism than pop art, op art is made tantalizing, eye-teasing, even eye-smarting by visual researchers using all the ingredients of an optometrist's nightmare. Manhattan's commercial galleries are beginning to find space on their walls for it, and the Museum of Modern Art is planning an op show titled "The Responsive Eye" early next year. Says the show's organizer, Curator William Seitz: "These works...
Gallery of Modern Art, which will not show any. Some critics already are throwing their weight behind op in dubious battle with pop. Actually, they both share an everyman's land. If anything, they are opposite sides of the same coin, gambled on what art can become...
Scornful of the emotionalism and accident in abstract expressionism, op artists know where they stand. Precision is their pleasure. Their art instantly engages the beholder, yet does not demand his involvement or insist that he relate it to the world of objects, emotions or experiences. Op fascinates the way a kaleidoscope does a child. Its pitfall is that fascination often turns, by repetition, to boredom...
...Op art has a legitimate ancestry. Cezanne, Seurat and Monet seized upon newly proposed theories of optics when they painted. In this century, such constructivists as Mondrian and Malevich were the forebears of op art's dry, highly controlled use of color, which sometimes-as in the work of Britain's labyrinth-making Jeffrey Steele, 33 (above) -amounts to rejecting color. When they do use color, however, it is to stimulate the first sense directly rather than to enhance forms...
Sleights of Art. The immediate father figures of op art are Josef Albers, 76, that pioneer in the perception of color, and Victor Vasarely, 56 (see opposite page), a Hungarian who lives in Paris. Albers paints only colored squares. Vasarely dons the craftsy lab coat instead of the smock and refers to his work as visual research. Their influence has given birth to optical artists in a dozen countries, from Israel's Yaacov Agam to remote Iceland's poet-painter Diter Rot. Last summer the pavilions at the Venice Biennale and the attics of Germany's Dokumenta...