CLE OP: A showcase of Cleveland Op Art Pioneers

CLE OP
A showcase of Cleveland Op Art Pioneers

On Sat 4/9, the Cleveland Museum of Art opens its new exhibit CLE OP: Cleveland Op Art Pioneers. Short for optical art, OP Art is based around abstract compositions, dynamic patterns and art with a pulsating rhythm. Even more intriguing, this internationally recognized movement has roots in 1960s Cleveland with America’s only artist collaborative Anonima Group devoted to the field.

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s modest exhibition includes 10 works, mostly drawn from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s permanent collection featuring paintings, drawings, and screen prints by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Hewitt, Julian Stanczak and Edwin Mieczkowski. In fact, the museum recently acquired “Blue Bloc,” a work by the latter artist, who is a former Cleveland Institute of Art teacher.

CoolCleveland talked to Cleveland Museum of Art Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture Mark Cole about OP Art, the new exhibit and its history in Northeast Ohio.

CoolCleveland: For those art neophytes, what exactly is OP Art?

Mark Cole: It’s a style of geometric abstraction. It’s not figurative at all and the artists are very much interested in studies of perceptual psychology. They’re interested in enhancing the viewers’ active looking and also sometimes to investigate contradictions that are inherent in viewing things. They’re interested in having the viewers sort of interactive in a very physiological way with the artwork because of the shapes and the colors and that sort of thing.

Granted this may be simplistic, but it seems like one of those paintings you have to stare at for a while in order for it to fully reveal itself?

(Laughs) It’s more complex than that but a lot of these artists are interested in color relationship, shape relationships and overlapping and other visual cues and having a viewer interact in a sense just by looking at the piece. And in a way that was an important part of Op Art too, the fact that a lot of Op artists thought that art viewing could be a very passive experience for viewers and they really wanted to foreground that experience with the viewer looking at a work of art. And one of the artists featured in the exhibition, who is very well known in Cleveland and a valued member of our art community, Julian Stanczak, once said, ‘I’m not important, the viewer is.’ And that sort of summarizes one aspect of Op Art. That it’s really viewer-oriented.

How unique is this movement in the art world?

It had precursors in earlier modern art movements. Artists have long been interested in color relationships and that sort of thing, but this is a movement that artists really, really focused on having sort of the physiological response of the viewer. So in that sense it is quite groundbreaking.

OP Art was explored in the ’60s. How did that turbulent decade affect the movement?

As it turns out, Madison Avenue really caught on to art motifs and they sort of ran rampant with it. It began to proliferate in fashion and graphic design, everywhere you went during the mid-to-late ‘60s there was Op Art motif stuff everywhere. And in a way that sort of soured the movement for some people. There are a lot of art purists out there who have a strong division between art and commerce. But in terms of the ‘60s, I think what these artists were doing was actually rebelling against what was sort of critically regarded in the previous decade, the previous generation of ours. That’s abstract expressionism. Where you have artists who are expressing their emotions on canvas. It’s really about the artist, and the compositions are seemingly very improvisational. You have Jackson Pollock dripping paint on the canvas in a seemingly random way and the compositions seem very improvisational. When you look at Op Art, it’s completely different. It’s very structured and it’s often modular and repetitive, which is quite different from what the previous generation of artists were doing. So I think that’s the frame of reference in the art world that the artists are looking at.

Finally, why is CLE OP: Cleveland Op Art Pioneers an important exhibit for the museum?

I think these are stunning works of art in and of themselves but also it’s an important part of Cleveland art history. And these are works that are nationally and internationally famous. It’s going to be a wonderful show. It’s quite spectacular.

The CLE OP: Cleveland Op Art Pioneers exhibition appears Sat 4/9 through Sun 2/26/12 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Admission to the Cleveland Museum of Art is free. For more information, call 888-CMA-0033 or visit http://ClevelandArt.org.

Freelance writer John Benson spends most of his time writing for various papers throughout Northeast Ohio.

When he’s not writing about music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his two boys in basketball, football and baseball or watching movies with his lovely wife, Maria. John also occasionally writes for CoolCleveland.com.

[Click here to return to the current issue of Cool Cleveland]

Post categories:

Leave a Reply

[fbcomments]