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Victor Vasarely
(Vásárhelyi Győző) (1906-1997) |
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Hungarian artist,
the father of
Optical Art, the style's leading theorist and
its most inventive practician, a man of science who understood ahead
of everybody else how technology would radically change our world,
an intuition that he projected into his works. An artist and
socialist whose goal was to create designs that were universal, to
produce an art that could be mass produced and affordable for
everyone. A man who was fascinated with an art of pure visual
perception without traditional themes. A man whose
works are represented at major museum all over the world. A man who
received many artistic
awards and honorary awards, e.g. he was awarded the rank
of Officer in the French Legion of Honor and honorary citizen of New
York, he received the Guggenheim Prize and the Art Critics Prize in
Brussels, and he won a gold medal at the Milan Triennale.
Vasarely was
born in Pécs in 1906 and died in Paris
in 1997 at the age of 91.
He spent his childhood and teenage years living in Pöstyén
(now
Pietany,
Slovakia
) until his family moved to Budapest
in
1919. In
1925 after finishing secondary school he studied
medicine at the
University
of
Budapest.
Throughout his early life Vasarely found himself drawn more towards
the sciences than the arts. In 1927 he decided to change direction
completely. He abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic
painting in
Budapest, first at the private
Podolini-Volkmann
Academy, and in
1929 he enrolled at Alexander
Bortnyik's
Műhely Academy,
then widely
recognized as the center of
Bauhaus studies in Budapest.
Bortnyik followed the principles of the Bauhaus School of Dessau.
The German Bauhaus
(1919-1932) was the most important school of
architecture, art and design of the 20th century. Cooperation
between architects, painters, sculptors, designers and craftsmen -
an interplay between art and technology should create a harmonic
whole, and all sorts of applied art and artistic products should be
summarized into a common manifesto. Design could improve society,
not just be a reflection of society. Bauhaus' style was
characterized by economy of method, a strict geometry of form and
design that took into account the nature of the materials employed.
The Bauhaus thoughts had an enormous impact in
Vasarelys work, leaving an indelible mark in his creation up until
the end. It was during this period that he initiated himself into
the tendencies of
Constructivism and discovered
Abstract Art. At Mühely he became acquainted with the abstract
geometric art of
Klee
and
Kandinsky
and Wilhelm Ostwalds colour system.
These years studying medicine were far from wasted though as the
formal scientific training provided him with a strong sense of
scientific method and objectivity - something that stood him in good
stead throughout his artistic career.
In 1930 Vasarely settles in
Paris, where he worked as a graphic
artist for various advertising agencies, and he began his "Zebra"
studies. In the following years he explored optical effects in his
graphic works, and in the next two decades he developed his own
(scientific) abstract geometric style - paintings, drawings and
designs in black and white.
In 1931 he married Claire Spinner, who was also an
artist, she gave birth to their two sons André and
Jean-Pierre, the latter
became an artist
known as
Yvaral, he died in 2002, he also
worked in the fields of Op Art.
From the 1950's on, Vasarely insistently questioned
himself about the role of the artist in society and eagerly searched
for a way to create a social art, accessible and available to all.
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In the
1950s he introduced new materials in his
paintings e.g. glass and aluminium, and
completed several architectural integrations e.g.
the
ceramic wall from 1954 "Tribute to
Malevich"
at the University of Caracas, Venezuela -
(Integration of Art in the City). In 1955 he
published his "Manifeste jaune"
("Yellow Manifesto") - he was aware of
that the easel painting was outdated and
suggested the necessity of homogeneity in
plastic art. He imagined a new function of art,
he concluded that a work of art was not a
reflection of the inner world of the artist,
more like objects, a result of a work - the only
justification of art was to give beauty and joy
to human beings and to create peace and harmony.
During the 1960s and 1970s his optical
images became part of the popular culture,
having a deep impact on architecture, computer
science, fashion and the way we now look at
things in general. Even though he achieved great
fame he insisted on making his art accessible to
everyone. His motto was "Art for all".
In 1965, he
participated in the "Responsive
Eye" exhibition at
MoMA,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York, dedicated exclusively to "Optical
Art". It instituted a new relationship between
artist and spectator, where the observer cannot remain passive,
he is free to interpret the image in as many visual scenarios he
can conceive. Received with great acclaim, the press and the
public hailed Vasarely as the inventor and creator of "Op-Art".
In the late 1960s he achieved great success in the Op Art
exhibition "Lumière et mouvement" at Musée d'Art
Moderne in Paris. |
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1970 he inaugurated his own
Museum - Musée Vasarely in
Château de Gordes in Vaucluse
in the South of France. After his death in 1997 law of wills and
succession caused that his paintings were removed from the
museum. |
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In
1982 The French-Soviet team of
cosmonauts of the Salyut 7
transported into space 154 of
Vasarelys prints specially created
for such event. The prints were
later sold for the benefit of
UNESCO.
Vasarely remains one of the pillars
of contemporary art for having lead
abstract geometric painting into its
extraordinary culmination under the
name of Op Art or Kineticism. His
entire works are characterized by
great coherence, from the evolution
of his early graphic art to his
determination to promote a social
art.
In 1960 Vasarely said "The end of
personal art for a sophisticated
elite is near, we are heading
straight towards a global
civilization, governed by Sciences
and Techniques. We must integrate
visual sensibility into a correct
world
"The art of tomorrow will
be a common collective treasure or
it will not be art at all."
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Vasarely
Múzeum Budapest
In 1987
the
Vasarely
Museum
in
Budapest
was inaugurated, the museum houses a great
collection of his works and works by other
Hungarian artists, who worked outside the
country |
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Victor Vasarely
- PERIODS |

1 |
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Early Graphic
Period
(1929-1946) |
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Vasarely experimented with textural
effects, perspective, shadow and light. |
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3 |
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Wrong Ways aka
Fausses Routes
(1935-1947) |
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Vasarely was influenced by
Cubism and
Surrealism. He focused on still lives,
landscapes and portraits. |
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4 |
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Belle-Isle
Period
(1947-1958) |
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A
turning point in Vasarely's career
- a
transformation of natural elements into
abstract art, a return to nature by
using geometrical forms such as the oval
which symbolizes the
oceanic feeling. |
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5 |
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Denfert Period
(1951-1958) |
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Primarily paintings influenced by the
walls at the Denfert-Rochereau metro
station located near Arcueil, where
Vasarely lived for more than 30 years. |
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7 |
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"Pensar
5", 1956 - 68
(Pensar Spanish verb, to think). |
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Planetary
Folklore
(From 1960) |
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Brightly coloured shapes which led to
the invention of his fine arts alphabet
"Alphabet Plastique", a
comprehensive "alphabet", a
universal fine arts language to be
understood by everyone, a step towards
truly collective art. |
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10 |
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Hommage à LŽHexagone
(1964-1976) |
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Vasarely was attracted by cellular
structure in a series of works belonging
to "Homage to the hexagon"
theme. |
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Vonal
Period
(1964-1970) |
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In the 'Vonal' series, he revisited his
earlier line studies (e.g. the Zebres
series) and graphic works but this time
making full use of colour. |
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12 |
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"Vega
Nor", 1969, shows the
warmth of Vasarely's colours and the
freshness.
From his "Vega Period". |
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Expansive-Regressive
Structures
(From 1968 onwards) |
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Op
Art or Optical Art
was a
painting style used by European and
American artists
during the 1960s.
The
style can trace its roots
back to
de Stijl, Futurism and Constructivism
Common to de Stijl, Futurism, Contructivism and
Op Art are the illusion of motion, dynamics
and elements such as straight lines, geometrical
forms, black and white and bright colours |
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De Stijl was a Dutch
artist movement founded in
Leiden in 1917 by Theo van
Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.
De Stijl's style was
Neoplasticism influenced by
Cubism, it is non-figurative
plane geometrical simplified
abstract art consisting of
straight lines and the three
primary colours (yellow,
red, blue) and black and
white. |
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Piet Mondrian,
"Composition No. II, with Red
and Blue",
1929,
MoMA,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York. |
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Futurism
was an artistic movement in
Italy between 1909-1918
founded be the Italian poet
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
who declared "... a new
beauty, the beauty of
speed", he said "A racing
motor car ... is more
beautiful than Nike from
Samotrache (the Victory of
Samotrahrace)".
Futurists tried to express
the energy and values of the
machine age - they expressed
motion in their paintings by
repetition of forms e.g.
wheeled traffic or walking
people, and the most famous
painting is "Dynamism of a
Dog on a Leash", 1912, by
Giacomo Balla. |
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Giacomo Balla,
"Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash" (Dinamismo di
un cane al guinzaglio),
1912, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo,
New York. |
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Constructivism was an artistic and
architectural Russian
movement (1919-1934),
non-figurative art
contemporary with the
Bauhaus School i Weimar,
founded in 1919 by
Walter Gropius, in which
a basis for Functionalism
was made. Always mentioned
as the most typical
architectural example of
Constructivism is "Tatlin's
Tower" from 1920. It was
a monumental building
envisioned by the Russian
artist and architect
Vladimir Tatlin, but never
built. It was planned to be
erected in Petrograd (now
Saint Petersburg) after the
Bolshevik Revolution of
1917, as the headquarters
and monument of the
Comintern (the Third
International). The
constructivist created a new
mode of expression, a
collage, containing a
time/motion aka the fourth
dimension. |
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El Lissitzky, "Proun
19D",
1920-21,
MoMA,
New York. |
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Going
further back it is possible to see a natural progression
which lead to Modern Art movements, to Op Art. One can
say that artists, even the ancient Greeks and Romans,
created illusions of visual reality by using the basic
geometric principles, the ancient techniques was
rediscovered by the
Renaissance painters who
experimented with optical illusions so a flat surface
could appear three-dimensional. The optical illusions
were continued by the
Mannerist painters, the
Baroque
painters and so on.
Artists such
as the Impressionist
Claude
Monet,
(1840-1926), the Impressionist and Pointillist
Georges
Seurat
(1859-1891) and the Postimpressionist
Paul
Cézanne (1839-1906),
Vasarelys favourite painter, have
inspired the Op Artist with there theories of optics.
Sometimes Impressionism is called Optical Realism because
of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual
experience and effect of light, and movement on
appearance of objects. The Impressionists famous motto
was: "human eye is a marvelous instrument".
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Optical Art is a method of painting,
it is abstract
art using geometrical forms to create an optical
illusion, it is dynamic
visual art.
Colours are used in creating visual effects, such as
afterimages and trompe-l'oeil. Paintings and sculptures
created of black and white planes or contrasting colours
seem to move and vibrate.
Time
magazine gave in an article called "Op
Art: Pictures that attack the eye"
published in October 1964, the
term "Op Art" to
paintings that focused on manipulation of the eye.
The
idea of Op Art was poetic play with light, to confuse
the eye, and not
visual irritations, and it was to highlight the fact
that the eyes can trick the mind in to seeing things
that are not there and that if visual illusions can
trick the eye so can words and propaganda.
Op Art strived to
break down the barriers between art and technology, as
well as to establish relationships between the various
branches of science, such as optics and cybernetics. It
embodies new uses of form and shape, including
industrial aesthetics.
Is Op Art
synonymous with
Kinetic Art? The answer is Yes or No.
A simple
explanation is that both Op Art and Kinetic Art
concentrate on the idea of creating illusion of movement
on a flat plane.
However
Kinetic art is first and foremost art that contains
moving parts or depends on motion for its effect, e.g.
Alexander
Calder's mobiles that are moved either by
air currents or by some artificial means - usually
electronic or magnetic.
Kinetic
Art originated
in Russia by Constructivists such as the Russian
sculptor Naum Gabo (1890-1977),
a pioneer of Kinetic Art. Also the Hungarian painter,
photographer and Bauhaus-professor
László
Moholy-Nagy was
highly influenced by constructivism and a strong
advocate of the integration of technology and industry
into the arts.
The emergence
of Op art and kinetic art in the early 1960s
evinced a
strong interest in objectivity and in scientific
experiment.
Fascinated by the physical laws of light and optics, a
whole
generation of artists devoted themselves to explore
visual
phenomena and principles of perception.
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Joseph Albers,
(German/American, 1888-1976) "Homage to the
Square: Soft Spoken", 1969. |
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Victor Vasarely,
(Hungarian/French, 1908-1997) "Vonal-Ksz",
1968. |
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Yaakov
Agam, (Israeli, 1928, "Synthesis:
Solfage Fusion", Serigraph from
"Fusion suite", 1978. |
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Julian
Stanczak, (Poish/American, 1928),
"Passing
Contour", 1960s. |
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Bridget
Riley, (English, 1931), "Blaze
1", 1962. |
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Almir
de Silva Mavignier, (Brazilian, 1925),
"Two squares", 1967. |
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Richard
Anuszkiewicz, (American, 1930),
"Deep
Magenta Square", 1978. |
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click
here
for full size |
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TIME
THE WEEKLY NEWS
MAGAZINE
Friday, Oct. 23,
1964
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OP ART:
PICTURES THAT
ATTACK THE EYE |
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Op
Art contains all the ingredients of an
optometrist's nightmare. |
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Optical
art is this year's dress length. |
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Op
fascinates the way a kaleidoscope does a
child. |
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Its
pitfall is that fascination often turns,
by repetition, to boredom. |
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Op art
are the essentially static visual
phenomena that enslave and enthrall the
eye. |
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We
consider ourselves technicians, in the
medieval sense, rather than artists. |
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Optics
is a tool, as perspective once was. |
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MAN'S eyes are
not windows, although he has long regarded them as such.
They can be baffled, boggled and balked. They often see
things that are not there and fail to see things that
are. In the eyes resides man's first sense, and it is
fallible.
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 exist less as objects
than as generators of perceptual responses."
Pleasure in
Precision. "Optical art is this year's dress
length," says Carl J. Weinhardt Jr., director of
Manhattan
's
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, gambling 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. Cézanne, 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 sometimesas
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 III dickered and chattered with
electrically driven, and even electronically musical,
kinetic op. At the square root of op art are the
essentially static visual phenomena that enslave and
enthrall the eye. The op artist's job is to turn those
illusions into sleights of art. Some examine the way a
single color looks darker than it is against a lighter
background. Some, like Steele, place contrasting
shapes together, which cause the eye to perceive them
alternately as figure and ground; the theory is that
such shifts move between stimulation and repose,
possibly to relieve eyestrain. Richard Anuszkiewicz,
34, plays with afterimages, or the way one color
engenders the false sensation of its complement on the
retina. In his
Union
of the Four (at right), the red pigment throughout the
painting is the same hue, despite what the eye sees.
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 rulingswindow screens, for
exampleare 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.
AEC &
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."
Dating from 1959, Gruppo N numbers
five young artists more adept with pliers and power
drills than brushes who meet for seminars once a week.
Says N-Man Manfredo Massironi, 27, "We consider
ourselves technicians, in the medieval sense, rather
than artists." Going to the Nth degree, they use
prisms and grids, often machine-driven, whose rippling
moiré patterns look more vibrant through spotlighted
darkness (at left, top). A similar splinter group is
Spain
's Equipo 57, who like others sign their work
collectively (lower left). Their theory starts with
"interactivity," in which any two planes in
a painting are separated by an S curve, and end up as
mathematically interlockedand complicatedas a
Bucky Fuller dome.
One 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.
The British have already scored
with Bridget Riley, 32 (TIME, May 1), whose stark
black-and-white patterns have made viewers physically
sick. She generally lets craftsmen execute her
designs, has a standoffishness and coolth matched by
her countryman, Steele. "These pictures are not
necessarily meant to be looked at," says Steele.
Another Englishman is Cambridge-educated Michael
Kidner (below), at 46 one of the oldest of the flicker
boys. Years ago he bashed away at abstract
expressionism, but, says he, "never convinced
myself that the gesture I was making had much
significance." Then he learned that he could make
people see colors that, in fact, he did not paint.
"I use optics," says he, "as a means to
an end that is biggerin short, a good painting.
Optics is a tool, as perspective once was."
American
Impersonality. The Americans, such as Julian Stanczak, 35, who roomed
with Anuszkiewicz while studying under Albers at Yale,
try not to imitate nature. "I use visual
activities," says Stanczak, "to run parallel
to it" (right). There is even a
U.S.
group, impersonally 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 depend on the
willingness to perceive and persistence to overcome
certain levels of frustration. We don't want to make
our paintings popular."
Much
op art is removed from the artist's subjective discovery.
It is the result of a mechanical muse, and the artist
becomes a computer programmer churning out visual
experiences. Some, like moiré patterns, suddenly reveal
new sensations that man never knew were within his
visible province. But is it therefore science and not
art?
Perhaps. By analyzing wave lengths of
visible light, scientists might well make the paintings
on these pages. But they have not bothered, and if they
had tried, the man-hours would have far outnumbered the
time spent by artists using intuition. Still, what makes
the end product not the same as waves on an oscilloscope?
One artist has an answer. He is John Goodyear, 34, an
associate professor of art at
Rutgers
University
, whose work consists of gently moving colored lattices
(above). Not as chilly an artist as most oppers, he lets
his eight-year-old daughter pick his colors. Says
Goodyear: "I want to include real space in my paintings,
to squeeze it, negate it, play in it." From all that
caprice, come surprises, and there is always the
possibility of more. Says he, "These realities in some
sense not conceived by man give us insight into a world
which was certainly not conceived by man."
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