The 1960s

Events

• Assassination of President Kennedy (1963)

• British pop/rock music

• First man in space(1961)

• Woodstock(1969)

Op art• Victor Vasarely began this movement with his

1938 painting ‘zebra’ • Abstract and Expressionist movements helped

form op art due deconstructing subject matters.• Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Marina Apollonio,

Richard Anuskiewitz and Julian Stanczakwere the first Opital artists.

• In 1964 ‘Time magazine’ gave it the name‘op art’. After reviewing the responsive eye exhibition.

‘ZEBRA’

ZEBR

AZEBRA

THE RESPONSIVE

• In 1965 William. C. Seitz held an exhibition at the museum of modern art in New york city

• It focused on perceptual aspects of art which result of illusion of movement and the interaction of colour relationships.

The critics hated it.

The public loved it.

• After the Responsive eye exhibition the public was fascinated with optical art.

• Advertisements began to use it. They took inspiration Riley’s

and Vasarely’scompositional styles. Riley tried to sue one

fashion industry for printing her work on dresses.

Julian Stanczak

• Born in Poland in 1928. • In 1940 he was taken to a

concentration camp in Siberia. • There he lost the use of his right

arm (which he drawn with.) He was only 10.• AT JUST 13 HE ESCAPED. He made it to Persia and joined a resistance

army. Then to a refugee camp in Uganda.• At 21 he made it to America with an idea in his head of the ‘American

dream’. There he made it to a shelter and was fed. The American dream was to him. ‘The feeling of being full’

• In the 50s he attended Yale.• But was his art influenced by his personal experience…..?

NO!

• “Everybody was trying to push me to paint from my experience. Why do you drown in the misery of your problems? Who cares if you suffer? Everyone suffers!”

• HOWEVER. The lost of his arm caused him to be careful with geometry. Any precision requires tape to create guides before paint was applied.

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QUOTES

“I was trying to understand how I see- how we see altogether.”

“Any line creates energy”

“I’m not painting for myself. I’m painting for curiosity.”

“I didn’t know I was making art.”

School of London

• The term ‘School of London’ was first coined by R.B. Kitaj in 1976 in his cataloge introduction to the exhibition ‘the human clay

• ‘A collection of individual artists who knew each other, working in london,at the same time in the figurative style during the doom years of abstract painting’

Francis Bacon

• Bacon was the inspiration and trend-setter of ‘school of London’, his success’ spurred the others to do better and be stronger artists.

• Despite seeming disturbed through his painting, bacon had quite an eventful life spending his middle ages eating and drinking in London’s ‘Soho’

• The screaming scene from sergiEisenteins ‘the battleship potemkin’ was a huge inspiration in bacons work, as one art critic, Michael Peppiattsaid ‘If one could really explain the origin of this scream, one would be far closer to understanding Bacons whole art’.

• He also preferred to paint on the un-primed side of the canvas.

Studio

Lucian Freud

• ‘I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be’

• Intimate friend of Bacon, Freud benefited most from his guide.

• German born British painter.

• Often explored the relationship between model and artist to an uncomfortable degree.

In his later years, Freud took up a more illustrative style, with out of scale facial features and muted colours, painted with tiny sable brushes and evoke early Neatherlandish painting.