Goodbye Op Art, Hello CGI!

Bridget Riley's 1961 Movement in Squares is often synonmous with the Op Art movement

In the 1960s a new movement burst onto the art scene. Termed “Op Art” (short for Optical Art) by The New York Times in 1964, the short lived movement was centered around creating art pieces that deceived the eye, played with pattern and form, and made the viewer question what existed on the plane of canvas and what was merely an illusion.

Though critically Op Art was received with a rather lackluster enthusiasm, the general public was widely pleased with the movement. Op Art quickly found its place among more commercial art forms and became integrated into modern culture (Op Art patterns were, for example, used in fabrics).  (If you’re interested, read more about Op Art on the Wikipedia page or this site).

Though optical illusions are still extremely popular and amusing today – do you remember looking at an image of an elephant and trying to count its legs back in elementary school? – it’s hard to find many who still appreciate these optical illusions as art.

And I don’t really blame them.

In the 60s, generating these optical illusions took careful planning and precision. The seemingly perfect rows of squares and curves and planes were all done by hand through an intense, time consuming process. The artists need to know about math, about the relationships between forms in space, and more importantly, about how the human eye perceived all these shapes and lines.

Richard Anuszkiewicz's Viridian Sanctuar from the Op Art Movement

Now however, these optical illusions require no talent to make; nearly anyone can use software freely available on the internet to generate optical illusions. It’s hard to appreciate the work of artists from decades past when their artwork can be simulated by computer generated imagery (GCI) in seconds. I remember just last year browsing through the modern section of the National Gallery of Art with a friend. She couldn’t understand why Op Art paintings were hung on the walls of one of the world’s most prestigious museums. To her, the paintings were just a collection of lines and squares that she was all too familiar with thanks to the internet.

Optical Illusions created by Computer Science for Fun (cs4fn.org)

But here’s one thing to consider. Would programmers, software developers, and graphic artists have even explored generating theses illusions on the computer if artists hadn’t first painstakingly explored them on canvas? I suppose I’ll never know – but it’s comforting to think that though Optical Art is a thing of the past, the artists who pioneered the movement are still making an impact.