OP Art Is a Term

OP art is a term that refers to visual art that makes use of optical illusions in its overall aesthetic effect. Other names for op art include geometrical abstraction, perceptual abstraction, and hard edge abstraction - although the name op art has endured throughout most of its history. While op art is done in a variety of artistic genres, it has mostly been confined to painting throughout its relatively brief history. In this paper, we will evaluate the history of op art, looking to its humble origins, while investigating the genre's main characteristics and practitioners. We hope to show why op art has been popular not only among artists, but among the public at large, as well.

Traces of the origins of op art can be found in the German Constructivist School known as the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus were known more as a philosophical and design school than they were as artists. Their design philosophy was rooted in the idea of "form and function" over purely aesthetic pleasure. The Bauhaus filtered all their ideas through serious, rational analysis. This movement would be imported to the United States with the rise of the Third Reich in Germany in the early 1930s, when the original Bauhaus academy was forced to close and many of its leading personalities fled to America. The 1930s and 1940s would see the creation of several proto-op works, including several works by Victor Vasarely, a Hungarian artist.

John McHale created some of the first op art works in the 1950s. McHale's black and white Dazzle panels were featured in the important exhibition "This is Tomorrow," held in London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. It was not until 1964, however, that the term "op art" first came into being in an article in Time magazine.

The 1960s would see the explosion of op art as a formal genre in modern art. In 1965, the first major op art show was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Curated by William C. Seitz, the exhibition featured works by such artists as Frank Stella, Alexander Liberman, Vasarely, and Bridget Riley. Theoreticians and artists focused on art that not only deceived the eye into believing that movement was occurring in a picture, but also on the interaction among colors in these works. The public was thrilled with this exhibition, and op art became massively popular. Critics were harsher on op art, however. They felt that it represented nothing more than trompe l'oeil, or tricks of the eye - it was regarded as a gimmick, rather than a genuine artistic movement.

The visual language of op art is built on an interrogation in to the way human visual perception functions. It is rooted in a complex figure-ground relationship. Op art works consist of two planes that interact in a way that is dense and somehow contradictory. There are two dominant methods within op art. The best known of these involves the elicitation of effects via a utilization of line and pattern. These paintings tend to be either black and white or grisaille. One of the best-known instances of this method is Current, a painting by Bridget Riley from the 1960s. In this famous image, wavy black and white lines are situated to close to one another on the surface of the canvas. This gives rise to a volatile figure-ground relationship. If you look at it for too long, your eyes start to hurt. Thanks to the way our eyes perceive light, after-images of certain colors are also produced after looking at the painting for any significant length of time. This is because where dark and light cross paths, color comes into being, as darkness and light are the two primary properties that come into play in the creation of color.

Riley would later go beyond her black and white canvases to create works in full color. Many other op artists would turn to color as well as a field of expression. These works are not so well-known in the op art canon, but are still important. Josef Albers of the Bauhaus taught two of the most important color practitioners of the op art movement. Richard Anuszkiewicz and Julian Stanczak would both go on to become important op artists.

Op art in color tends to utilize the same methods as the figure ground movement, with the added element of contrasting colors, which tends to broaden the effects on the eye of the perceiver. In the "temple paintings" by Anuszkiewicz, for example, a sense of depth is elicited by the utilization of two contrasting colors. Looking at these works, we are under the impression that we are looking at something in three dimensions. It is almost as though an architectural work is invading the space in which we view the picture.

Stanczak went even further in his pictorial compositions with color. As a matter of fact, it could be said that Stanczak's oeuvre is based on an intense examination of the way that colors function when they are put together. In the words of Rand,

Stanczak created various spatial experiences with color and geometry; the latter is far easier to discuss. Color has no simple systematized equivalent. Indeed, there may be no way to describe it that is both meaningful and accurate. Descriptions of it (the color wheel or color solids, for example) are all necessary distortions. While color derives from the electromagnetic scale that corresponds to the magnitudes of energy expressed by musical pitch, in fact, the neurological occidentals by which we experience color make it seem multidimensional, while musical pitch (not timbre, volume, or duration) is experienced as a linear relationship... [the artist's] gift is for layering. He arranges transparent patterns upon patterns so that you see through them as gauziest screens, each one seeming to fold as if it moves (Rand 40 and 42).

The work of Ratliff (1996) on color theory is also useful to consider when analyzing op art. Ratliff contends that there are three main classes of color interaction - simultaneous contrast, successive contrast, and reverse contrast (also known as assimilation.) Simultaneous contrast occurs when one patch of color is surrounded by another color. Successive contrast takes place when one color is viewed, followed by another. This usually occurs when we are led to fix our eye on one color, then replacing that color with another. In the final form of contrast - assimilation - the lightness of white or darkness of black appears to spread into other regions of the canvas. This effect tends to make neighboring areas look more alike, rather than enhancing their differences.