Snap, crackle and op

Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve. Something you normally expect to be static and stable — a panel covered with painted lines — undulates and pulses. In addition to just black and white, the pigments actually present, other hues appear and disappear: faintly luminous pinks and greens.

To her irritation, the artist was once told, ‘as though it were some sort of compliment’, that ‘it was the greatest kick’ to smoke dope while looking at this painting. The remark, much though it affronted Riley, is wonderfully characteristic of its epoch, the mid-1960s. We usually think of op art itself as dating from the era of Mary Quant, the Beatles and LSD.

Seurat to Riley: The Art of Perception, a jolly and entertaining exhibition at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, takes issue with that view. Op, it argues, has a much longer history. The exhibition begins, as its title suggests, with a landscape by Seurat from the mid-1880s, and it ends with a room — an 18th-century one, since Compton Verney is a Georgian mansion — enlivened with a jazzy wall painting by the contemporary artist Lothar Götz. The idea is to embed op more deeply in art history.

The term, short for ‘optical art’, originated in the autumn of 1964. It was a neat pun, originally invented by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, and recycled by a writer for Time magazine: remove the initial ‘P’ from ‘pop art’, and you are left with op. The name, and what it stood for, quickly swept not just the art world, but also the places where people lived and shopped.

It appeared on dresses, wallpaper, handbags and knick-knacks. When Riley turned up for the opening reception of The Responsive Eye, a mammoth global survey of op-type art at the Museum of Modern Art the following spring, she was appalled to find that half the grandes dames of Manhattan culture were clad in rip-offs of her paintings.