As one of the abstract styles developing in the 1960s, Optical illusion (or Op) Art features games of lines and geometric shapes in both black and white—like in the case of Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto—or exploiting vivid colors—as in the case of Victor Vasarely and Julian Stanczak. Continuing the legacy of the early avant-gardes, this art is distinguished by its scientific foundation, drawing on theories of color and perception to create optical illusions of movement, depth, flashing, vibration, swelling, and warping.
Optical Illusion Art: Ancient Origins and Affirmation
Optical Art came to public attention when William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the exhibition The Responsive Eye in 1965, identifying itself as a reaction to the individualism, commercialization, and subjectivism of Informal Art and Abstract Expressionism, in the broader 1960s fashion and post-World War II context.
Looking back, we find the origins of Op Art in the first avant-gardes and their social objectives, in pure modern abstraction, in the geometric forms and technical experiments of the Bauhaus school, in Futurism for the representation of movement, Constructivism for the use of geometrical structures and Dadaism for the involvement of the viewer, in Kinetic art and the exhibition Le Mouvement (1955), and some 1950s sculptors such as Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder, and George Rickey.
Op Art is based on games of lights, movement, space, and time structured in patterns to create visual effects that engage viewers’ perceptions. Op artists exploit the science of how the eye’s retina and the brain’s interpretation work together to perceive color, light, depth, perspective, size, shape, and movement, creating subtle disturbing, or even disorienting effects.
Its artists were concerned with the creation of the impression of real or illusory movement, vibrations, rotations, and oscillations—then applied to a static two-dimensional surface—originated from the fallibility of the eye perceiving repetitions of patterns, lines, surfaces, and volumes with high contrast. It assumes the awareness of the physiological and psychological process of seeing, which has been studied since the 1800s. Other tricks could derive from the careful use of early-modern, Renaissance perspective, applied to non-representational subjects, to create a sense of space and depth, or also from color theories about the effects given by the associations of colors and the distinction between recessive colors (cool range) and emergent (hot) colors. All in all, perception and the visual process were the true subjects of Op’s works, as we will see by looking at the most famous representatives.
Victor Vasarely
The French-Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) is considered one of the founders of the Op Art trend and its hypnotic motifs, pulsating and flickering patterns. After attending lectures at the medical school in Budapest, he enrolled at the ‘Hungarian Bauhaus’ for commercial design in Mühely founded by the Bauhaus alumni Sándor Bortnyik. Here Vasarely came into contact with Constructivism and abstract concrete art (deriving from De Stijl and Suprematism), as well as the social utopia of design importance into everyday life, starting to experiment with the formal possibilities inherent in geometric forms.
He developed his typical themes between 1929 and 1946, especially when working on optical effects as a graphic designer in advertising in Paris (1930). Between 1935 and 1947, he created figurative paintings inspired by Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism to then move to abstraction using incomplete or overlapping large geometric and curvilinear elliptical forms based on natural geometry of found objects (Belle-Isle period, 1947-1958, from his stay at Belle-Ile-en-Mer in Brittany).
Vasarely found inspiration in the cracked lines and zones of the white tiles at the Denfert-Rochereau Metro station in Paris (Denfert period, 1951-1958). He draws on the strong juxtaposition of color contrasts inspired by the changing visual experience of the medieval landscape of Gordes (Cristal-Gordes period, 1948-1958), by mathematical systems and Gestalt psychology, for which the inconsistencies of a pattern are able to guide the eye in a dynamic path. Vasarely then resumes the movement studies and creates the optical impression of depth and dynamism of squares in the photographismes, “objects made of layered acrylic glass planes with black geometric patterns that seemed to vibrate and change as the viewer shifted their vantage point,” during the Black and White period (1950-1965), inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s Black square.
In 1955, Vasarely displayed his graphic studies in the Galerie Denise René’s exhibition “Le Movement” of Kinetic Art (with Alexander Calder’s mobiles and Jean Tinguely’s activable sculptures) and published the Manifeste Jaune seeking to solve the problem of movement within visual images through optical illusions flickering in the viewers’ eyes.
His “plastic alphabet” structured in “plastic units” (Folklore Planétaire, 1963), made up of the combination of numerical systems of the square with other basic geometric forms and six predetermined basic colors to be contrastingly nuanced, could be continuously combined.
As the viewer central to the process moves, the motifs created by optical illusions change, working on the negative-positive principle of photography and creating kinetic depth paintings or appearance of spatial volume. The alphabet made Vasarely’s works reproducible by his studio assistants or saleable in building sets. He continued working for both museums and companies as a designer. For example, he designed the Renault logo and the dining room of the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt.
Vasarely showed his works in the 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye mentioned above, becoming famous during his lifetime. His exploration of movement and perception continued in the form of drawing and combining loudly colored linear and graphic themes (Vonal period, 1964-1970). To create an optical illusion of swollen surfaces, he began deforming compositional elements (Vega period, 1960s). In this series, Vasarely went back to color, playing on size, tonal brightness, and values.
In the series Homage to the Hexagon (1965-1971), Vasarely revisited in optical games the three-dimensional swelling and trompe-l’oeil effects to create visual instability, depth, and volume given by triangles, lozenges, hexagon, and axonometric cubes of various sizes using contrasting colors. By the 1970s, he was also commissioned to design architecture and interiors.
A distinctive aspect of Vasarely’s work is his exploration of scientific, mathematical, and medical knowledge of perception to structure his artistic method. He aimed for objectivity in art, making it socially accessible within designed environments while blurring the boundaries between fine and applied arts. By developing universally reproducible and comprehensible systems, he continued the mission of Bauhaus and De Stijl.
Julian Stanczak & Jesús Rafael Soto
Color is abstract, universal – yet personal and private in experience.
(Julian Stanczak)
Another important artist in this artistic movement was the Polish-American painter and printmaker Julian Stanczak (1928-2017). Stanczak is a central figure in the Op Art movement in the United States. Basing his art on his personal immigrant story and a methodical technique, he studied with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at Yale University in 1956 and participated in the 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye” and other popular exhibitions such as “Paintings in the White House” (Smithsonian Institution Washington D.C., 1966).
Unlike other Op artists like Bridget Riley, he paid particular attention to the use of wavelengths, juxtapositions, and light energy of abstract color. Stanczak was particularly interested in color’s plastic potentials, and its metamorphic effects in structuring a sense of ordered totality in the construction of the work of art. In his thought, the effects of vibration and/or rhythmic oscillations could translate natural power into a universal image. For this reason, he created his multi-layered canvases through a complex process of tape stencils in which colors are then added and progressively revealed.
The Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005) is one of the most important artists of Op and Kinetic Art, the art that gives the impression of movement. Interested in geometric, constructivist art, Malevich, and Mondrian, he won a scholarship to study in Paris. There, he joined the group The Dissidents and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where he met Yris Clert, Denise René, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Pol Bury, and Daniel Spoerri. With Vasarely, Soto exhibited in The Movement (1955), the show at the Denise René gallery that gave birth to Kinetic Art, as well as with the German Group Zero, which shared Soto’s notion of immateriality. For Soto, repetition is revealed as a means of generating movement and three-dimensionality, which is experimented with in the superimposition of plexiglass panels and in immersive spatial installations.
Vibration (1957) is one of the first works to use various metal elements superimposed on a support to create a moiré effect that appears and disappears with the changing movement of the viewer. Starting from the centrality of the viewer, he made the so-called Penetrables from 1967, works of suspended metal or nylon rods into which the viewer is invited to penetrate and move in/through, becoming an interior constituent of the art experience itself.
His retrospectives were held at the Kunsthalle Bern (1968), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1969), the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1969), the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York (1974), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (1983) and the institutions commissioned monumental public works that developed his art in space and in an architectural sense. He also built, with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, a museum in Ciudad Bolívar in 1973.
Bridget Riley
Another important representative of the Op movement in Great Britain who participated in the MoMA exhibition The Responsive Eye, along with Vasarely, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, is Bridget Riley (b. 1931). Raised in Cornwall during World War II by her aunt, the painter Bertha Joyce, she established her formal vocabulary in the 1960s, which was characterized by contrasting black and white geometries, tensions of simple forms, lines, circles, curves, and squares, arranged according to an internal logic.
Like Vasarely, Riley studied design at the Loughborough School of Art in the late 1950s, taught in art schools, and worked as an illustrator for the J. Walter Thompson Group advertising agency. At Goldsmiths College (1949-1952) and the Royal College of Art (1952-1955), her main sources of inspiration were Impressionist and Pointillist landscapes. She also liked Georges Seurat for understanding the mechanisms behind color, tone, repetition, Cézanne, Mondrian, Matisse, and Monet’s Water Lilies series.
Her Op Art pieces of the 1960s produce disorienting optical effects. Riley’s simple forms indeed build illusions of movement and vibration in the moment of the viewer’s engagement with one of her works. In the same formative years, she came into contact with Vasarely’s black and white paintings. Turning to color in 1967 to explore new perceptual and optical possibilities, she gained popularity in several London galleries and group exhibitions and won several prizes, including the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale (1968). Traveling to Egypt in the early 1980s, Riley further explored color contrasts. Her experimentation with human perception guided her investigation of color, form, and optical phenomena in a process of constant self-questioning. In 1986, inspired by Ross Bleckner and Philip Taafe, Riley introduced diagonal elements.
Op Art Groups
Op Art and Kinetic Art aroused the interest of different experimental groups all over the world that emerged simultaneously between the late 1950s and the 1960s. They share the same search for objectivity, pragmatism, and the affirmation of conceptual ideas over the process of construction in a synthesis of art and science. The exhibition venues linked these Op groups with other contemporary artists. Just to mention some of them, we can think of the aforementioned Group Zero (Germany, 1957), Exat 51 (Zagreb, 1951), Equipo 57 (Spain, 1957), Group N and Group T (1959, Italy), GRAV (Paris, 1961), the Anonima Group (Ohio, USA, 1960), and Nul (Amsterdam, 1961). These groups met in exhibitions, like those at Denise René Gallery in Paris, as well as in festivals such as the Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale.
Group Zero (1957-1966) was founded in Düsseldorf by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Gunther Uecker. They wanted to start from a silent tabula rasa in order to utopically create a new beginning, a better world after the catastrophe of World War II. Zero had affinities with Minimalism and the Italian Arte Povera but with a focus on simple forms/colors varying in light, color, and movement based on science and poetic existentialism. To quote Piene, Zero was “a zone of silence and pure possibility for a new beginning in art, like the countdown for a rocket launch. It is when the old state turns into the new.” Piene focused on the effects of light and shadow on monochromatic paintings, projecting light into space using stencils and perforated panels. Mack concentrated on the study of vibration in sculpture, whereas Uecker sought to destroy geometric order.
The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV, 1961-1968) was born in Paris on the initiative of the optokinetic artists, painters, and sculptors Horacio García Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Joël Stein, Francisco Sobrino and Yvaral (Jean-Pierre Vasarely, son of Victor Vasarely). As a research group, their scientific approach was expanded to artistically exploring the use of modern industrial materials, light structures, and screens with the aim of making the spectator a participant.
The Anonima Group (1960-1971) was a collaborative group of artists consisting of Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt, and Ed Mieczkowski, that emerged in Cleveland, Ohio. Their emphasis on an analytical, anonymous, and impersonal viewpoint was a direct reaction to the individualism, automatism, and commercial heroes of the American Abstract Expressionists. The Anonima Group wanted to emphasize their freedom to make their work independent from the pressures of galleries, biennials, competitions, prizes, and the art market in general. They collaborated on grid-based, spatially fluctuating paintings and drawings, accompanied by informative writings (proposals, projects, manifestos) to explore scientific phenomena and the psychology of perception as theorized by Frank Hewitt, drawing influence from artist Ad Reinhardt and Russian Constructivism.
In Northern Italy, there were two groups that used scientific means to produce optical, kinetic and programmed art: the Group T in Milan (1959) and the Group N group in Padua (1960). The Group N wanted to renovate the local artistic scene by linking its practice to international contemporary art. It was made up of Alberto Biasi, Toni Costa, Ennio Chiggio, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi, to whom the Trieste-born artist Marina Apollonio was close. As in the case of GRAV and Anonima, collective research and the refusal of authority were the basis of artistic experience, together with the application of technology and industrial techniques, as well as psychological studies on perception and Gestalt carried out by the University of Padua.
In the rebuilt Milan, with the declaration of Miriorama (meaning “Thousand Images”) by some Brera artists like Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi, and Grazia Varisco, the Group T was born. The variation of the image in the temporal sequence and the resulting infinite visions of it is the group’s main concern. Through the use of Gestalt research and technologies, they created “programmed art,” giving rise to so-called “open” or “multiple” works that stimulate and question the viewer’s perception. Between 1960 and 1964, they organized 14 exhibitions. Their industrially reproducible art could be technologically planned and was made up of several individual elements, so that the observer can make an open interpretative choice, identifying different links and possibilities in the reciprocal position of the constituting elements. In this sense, it is a form of interactive art as the visitor makes the work itself.
Traces of Optical Illusion Art Today
Vasarely’s graphic design, such as the newly adopted lozenge of the Renault cars, and its visual effects of pulsation and vibration were popularized by reproduction techniques and are still found in those generated by present-day computers. Op Art inspired commercial artists and game designers who digitally animate moving structures and patterns.
Looking at contemporary pop culture, Vasarely’s highly technical designs produced psychedelic effects that proliferated in popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Even Bridget Riley’s black and white patterns were inspired and used by fashion and interior designers from the 1960s until recently. Numerous contemporary Op artists and “museums of illusion” around the world base their tricks on deceiving the eye and creating immersive installations on the principles explored in the 1960s.
On an abstract level, as noted in tracing the histories of individual artists and groups, Op artists pursue the socialist dream of the avant-gardes to create a Gesamtkunstwerk thanks to art, designing all the elements of everyday public environments with an artistic ideal. In continuity with Minimalism, the use of industrial and reproducible media, techniques, and technologies allows this art to be adapted to other contexts, using simple patterns and geometric elements that are repeated and varied to create the work itself. When several Op artists became university professors, they not only continued to experiment with light, color, form, and theories of the psychology of perception applied to and through art, but they also promoted the utopian ideals that underpinned their art, their hope of making a pacifist social contribution.
