Op Art is a 1960s movement using precise geometric patterns to create powerful optical effects — dazzle, vibration, illusory motion.
Op Art (short for Optical Art) emerged in the early 1960s as a movement using rigorously calculated geometric patterns — concentric circles, parallel lines, grids of contrasting colour — to produce powerful optical effects in the viewer: dazzle, after-images, illusory motion, depth, and vibration. The 1965 exhibition 'The Responsive Eye' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by William Seitz, brought the movement to international prominence. Its leading figures were the Hungarian-born French artist Victor Vasarely, often called the father of Op Art, whose grid-based compositions explored systematic perceptual deception, and the British artist Bridget Riley, whose black-and-white paintings of the early 1960s ('Movement in Squares', 1961; 'Current', 1964) achieved dizzying optical force from very simple means. Other significant artists included Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Yaacov Agam, all working in kinetic and op directions. Op Art's connections with the contemporary fashion industry — its patterns appeared on dresses and fabrics within months of Seitz's exhibition — made the movement enormously visible but also led some critics to dismiss it as decoration. Fifty years on, Riley and Vasarely retain a distinctive place in late-20th-century painting.