Many artists working in the US looked to new possibilities for abstraction in the 1960s. Despite the radical inventiveness and unique departure of these approaches to painting and printmaking, what became known Op Art and Hard-edge have frequently taken a backseat role to the contemporaneous movements of Minimalism and Pop Art. Although the graphic quality and often high-key colors of Op Art and Hard-edge seemed to resonate with developments in graphic advertising and technology at the time—especially the ubiquity of color television—they resisted figurative representations of commercial culture and mass production. In a departure from the previous decade’s focus on existential questions via Abstract Expressionist painting, this next generation focused on painting as an impersonally rendered geometry and to the conditions of visual perception itself.

While overlapping in concerns with Kinetic Art—such as Fletcher Benton’s Synchronetic C-2135-S (1968)—most experiments in “optical art” and the new “perceptual abstraction” were characterized by the effect of vibration and illusion of movement hovering above a painting’s surface. In contrast, Hard-edge often focused on the constituent aspects of a painting’s structure and fundamental elements (paint on a flat rectilinear surface), which was notably adjacent to certain conversations in Minimalism around the artwork as an object in space—such as Leroy Lamis’s Construction No. 211 (1972). In an Artforum review of Lawrence Alloway’s influential 1966 Systemic Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim, critic Robert Pincus-Witten observed that in the works shown, “form becomes meaningful, not because of ingenuity or surprise, but because of repetition and extension,” which also brought the new abstraction into dialogue with contemporaneous developments of Minimalism.

Largely thanks to the more widely available acrylic paint and the use of tape, both Op Art and Hard-edge favored an impersonal and crisp paint application. Hard-Edge artists eschewed any emphasis on the artist’s gesture to focus instead on painting’s identity as a medium (again, defined by constituent elements of paint on a support) as well as the logic of a work’s structure, which according to curator William Seitz “responds most directly when nonessentials such as freely modulated shape and tone, brush gestures and impasto are absent.” Likewise, Op Art rejected the attention on artistic genius in favor of exploring the capacity of both painting and printmaking to alter the viewer’s visual perception.

Seitz described this new “optical art” or “perpetuation art” in the introduction to his influential MoMA exhibition, The Responsive Eye at MoMA:

Carefully controlled static images have the power to elicit subjective responses that range from a quiet demand made on the eyes to distinguish almost invisible color and shape differences to arresting combinations that cause vision to react with spasmodic afterimages. The countless possibilities of these mysterious phenomena are almost as difficult to enumerate as their psychological and physiological causes are to determine.

Along these lines, Richard Anuszkiewicz (one of Op Art’s most inventive practitioners) concerned himself with juxtapositions of flat color that gave primacy to the viewer’s visual experience based on physiological phenomena: light particles hitting the eye to generate flickering movement and warping. In his vibrant painting, Glory Red (1967), concentric squares and a grid of circles form allover patterns interrupted by cooler stripes and areas of electric green and blue that flash and vibrate. Anuszkiewicz, who studied at Yale University in the early 1950s with Josef Albers, was influenced by color theory and the concept that hue is perceived based on composition and the adjacency of color relationships. However, he also uniquely explored the boundary between what he described as “physical fact and psychic effect.” 

Lesser known figures experimenting with Op Art included Roy Ahlgren and Oli Sihvonen. Sihvonen studied at Black Mountain College, where he was influenced by Albers and then took his learnings to New Mexico where he became part of a group known as the Taos Moderns. In his Double in Dialogue (1966), an auburn canvas marked by a composition of four elongated circles in black, light brown, violet, and red produce a subtle glowing contrast; whereas psychedelic prints by Roy Ahlgren—such as Homage to the Cross III, (1968) and Reginald Neal’s Red Circle Moiré (1969)—generate flashes of color. Pittsburgh-born Edwin Mieczkowski’s work Diptych (Iso-Sinistrad Iso-Dextrad) (c. 1965) is a rare instance within Op Art of eschewing bright colors in favor of slight gradations in black and gray that nonetheless seem to shimmer. 

Also in a limited palette of grays and neutral tones (perhaps evolving out of his abstractions of cityscapes from the 1930s and 1940s), the work of Charles Green Shaw divides the canvas into a geometry that consciously calls attention to the canvas’s edge in White Polygon on Gray Field (1968). While the resulting forms were indebted to the non-hierarchical composition of non-figurative, “all-over” AbEx paintings, Hard-edge pushed this further to streamlined effect. In an Artforum review of Lawrence Alloway’s influential 1966 Systemic Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim, critic Robert Pincus-Witten observed that in the works shown, “form becomes meaningful, not because of ingenuity or surprise, but because of repetition and extension.”

The art critic Clement Greenberg categorized Hard-edge painting as a sub-movement of “Post-painterly abstraction” in 1964 after Abstract Expressionism fell out of favor. That same year, Tadasuke Kuwayama, whose work has also been identified with both Op-Art and Hard-Edge, made Spiral (1964), part of his cutting edge series defined by perfect concentric, repeating circles spiraling outward from the canvas center in alternating blue and red with the ground of the canvas exposed. Kuwayama grew up in Nagoya, Japan where he gained a background in engineering, which allowed him to construct a turntable mechanism that lent itself to a series marked by these exacting rings. With its rhythmically alternating red and blue circles on unprimed canvas, Spiral is a prime example of works that explored both specific color interactions internal composition. Ralph Iwamoto’s Structure #2 (1971) also embraced both structure and unexpected color arrangements as form and subject.

Hard-edge painter Neil Williams, whose work was included in Allloway’s exhibition, was known for experimenting with the limits of painting as a medium by helping to pioneer the shaped canvas. In Williams’s Blue Monday (1966), two identical, overlapping squares situated on their points challenge the regularity of the flat, rectangular support on which a painting is traditionally made.

The interior of the painting is characterized by pale green and blue checkerboard-like squares, oriented on their points to mimic the canvas’s rectilinear edges, emphasizing the work’s flatness, refusing to suggest an image or mental state beyond. The work’s interior features pale green and blue checkerboard-like squares, oriented on their points to mimic the canvas’s shape, again placing an emphasis on the painting as an object rather than a space of illusion or replication of “reality.” Despite receiving recognition in the 1960s as key practitioners of this invention, artists like Williams—or Carl Pickhardt who was another early adopter of the shaped canvas as in Abstraction #482 (1975)—have remained relatively unexamined in historical accounts of the period.