Art How Op Artists of the 1960s Created 6eir Hallucinatory Effects
Alina Cohen Aug 21, 2018 4:55 pm
Bridget Riley Untitled (La Lune en Rodage- Carlo Belloli) Victor Vasarely Duo-2, 1967 (Schubert 6), 1965 Masterworks Fine Art Forum Auctions According to ancient Greek legend, the artist Zeuxis, who lived around the 5th century B.C., rendered grapes so realistically that birds Iew into his painting in attempts to eat the fruit. People have enjoyed such painterly illusions for millennia. Artists have manipulated color, shape, and form to trick viewers into seeing depth on a two-dimensional plane (the prominent artistic technique called trompe l’oeil literally means “trick the eye”). Such deception and perceptual games are the point of the modern Optical art (or “Op art”) movement. (Notably, Kinetic and Op art are often linked: 6e former designation declares a work’s real, instead of perceived, movement.)
Around the 1960s, artists from around the world such as Josef Albers (Germany/America), Yaacov Agam (Israel), Carlos Cruz-Diez (Venezuela), Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Bridget Riley (United Kingdom), and Victor Vasarely (France/Hungary) began using color theory and geometric principles to create optical illusions. Typical works from the era are either bright or stark black-and-white, with graphic shapes that appear to oscillate or swirl, fooling viewers into seeing movement and change within static paintings or prints.
In Riley’s Untitled (La Lune en Rodage – Carlo Belloli) (Schubert 6) (1965), for example, the artist renders a series of horizontally oriented, curved black lines so close together that they seem to vibrate. For Duo-2 (1967), Vasarely painted a series of linked squares in alternating bright (orange, chartreuse) and dark (navy, mauve) hues. 6e result: stacks of three-dimensional cubes that appear to advance and recede. Many Op artworks recall the drawings of M.C. Escher: impossible patterns that, rendered in two dimensions, subvert perspectival rules. In 1965, curator William C. Seitz mounted “6e Responsive Eye” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a group exhibition that gathered the day’s leading Op artists. Seitz posited that the movement’s origins lay in Impressionism, which had celebrated artists’ unique perceptions of the world around them, and therefore suggested that a single, common visual experience of the world is mere myth.