Art: OP ART: PICTURES THAT ATTACK THE EYE

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Sleights of Art. The immediate father figures of op art are Josef Albers, 76, that pioneer in the perception of color, and Victor Vasarely, 56 (see opposite page), a Hungarian who lives in Paris. Albers paints only colored squares. Vasarely dons the craftsy lab coat instead of the smock and refers to his work as visual research. Their influence has given birth to optical artists in a dozen countries, from Israel's Yaacov Agam to remote Iceland's poet-painter Diter Rot. Last summer the pavilions at the Venice Biennale and the attics of Germany's Dokumenta III dickered and chattered with electrically driven, and even electronically musical, kinetic op. At the square root of op art are the essentially static visual phenomena that enslave and enthrall the eye. The op artist's job is to turn those illusions into sleights of art. Some examine the way a single color looks darker than it is against a lighter background. Some, like Steele, place contrasting shapes together, which cause the eye to perceive them alternately as figure and ground; the theory is that such shifts move between stimulation and repose, possibly to relieve eyestrain. Richard Anuszkiewicz, 34, plays with afterimages, or the way one color engenders the false sensation of its complement on the retina. In his Union of the Four (at right), the red pigment throughout the painting is the same hue, despite what the eye sees.

Another optical effect often exploited by op is the moiré pattern, familiar in the shimmer of watered silk fabrics. Fundamentally, these flashes of apparent reflection are created whenever two or more grids of parallel or periodic rulings—window screens, for example—are overlapped. When misaligned slightly, they produce ripples and curves not actually inherent in the grids. The smallest angle of change yields the greatest, most disturbed pattern displacements.

AEC & Ph.D. Op artists often work in teams. Vasarely's son, yclept Yvaral, has helped him start the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel in Paris—six researchers who resemble the Atomic Energy Commission more than café-sitting artists. Germany boasts a group called Zero, begun in 1959 by three artists who hold Ph.D. degrees; they call for "new idealism" as opposed to the "new realism" of pop. The Italians have two op groups, the Gruppo N in Padua and the Gruppo T in Milan, which hopes to "codify visual phenomena, just as music was codified into notes."

Dating from 1959, Gruppo N numbers five young artists more adept with pliers and power drills than brushes who meet for seminars once a week. Says N-Man Manfredo Massironi, 27, "We consider ourselves technicians, in the medieval sense, rather than artists." Going to the Nth degree, they use prisms and grids, often machine-driven, whose rippling moiré patterns look more vibrant through spotlighted darkness (at left, top). A similar splinter group is Spain's Equipo 57, who like others sign their work collectively (lower left). Their theory starts with "interactivity," in which any two planes in a painting are separated by an Scurve, and end up as mathematically interlocked—and complicated—as a Bucky Fuller dome.