Collection: Op Art

Op Art, short for Optical Art, emerged in the early 1960s as a movement focused on optical illusion, perceptual instability, and the visual energy generated by precisely calibrated geometric pattern. The label was coined by Time magazine in October 1964 in response to Julian Stanczak's exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art from February to April 1965, drew more than 180,000 visitors and consolidated the public reception of the movement. The visual programme drew on Constructivist, Bauhaus, and Neo-Impressionist precedents.

The Hungarian-French painter Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) had developed the system through the late 1940s and 1950s and remained its central figure, with the canonical Vega series of the 1960s. Bridget Riley (born 1931) anchored the British wing, with the early black and white paintings Movement in Squares (1961), Current (1964), and Cataract 3 (1967) fixing the canonical examples of perceptually unstable composition. Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930–2020) developed the American chromatic variant under the influence of Josef Albers. The Venezuelan painters Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005) and Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923–2019) extended the programme into kinetic and chromographic registers, alongside the Israeli Yaacov Agam, the French Julio Le Parc and François Morellet, and the Polish Wojciech Fangor. Editioned silkscreens carried the work to its widest audience.