The 1960s saw major events like the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the first man in space in 1961. Art movements also emerged, including Op Art, which used optical illusions and was pioneered by artists like Victor Vasarely. The Responsive Eye exhibition of 1965 focused on perceptual aspects of art. Nouveau Realism emerged in the early 1960s and confronted consumerism, with artists like Yves Klein creating monochrome blue paintings and Niki de Saint Phalle making "shooting paintings" that were shot to create explosive marks. Lucian Freud was influenced by Francis Bacon and explored uncomfortable relationships between artists and models.

1. The 1960s

2. Events
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Assassination of President Kennedy (1963)
British pop/rock music
First man in space(1961)
Woodstock(1969)

3. 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 Stanczak were the
first Opital artists.
• In 1964 ‘Time magazine’ gave it the name‘op art’.
After reviewing the responsive eye exhibition.

4. ZEBRA
ZEBRA
‘ZEBRA’

5. 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.

6. The critics hated it.

7. The public loved it.

8. • After the Responsive eye
exhibition the public was
fascinated with optical art.
• Advertisements began to use it.
They took inspiration Riley’s
and
Vasarely’s
compositiona
l styles.
Riley tried to
sue one
fashion industry for printing her
work on dresses. 

9. 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…..?

10. 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.

11. Obsession (1960’s)

12. Vetical succession (1990’s)

13. Structural (1960’s)

14. 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.”

15. 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’

16. 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’

17. • The screaming scene from sergi Eisenteins ‘the
battleship potemkin’ was a huge inspiration in
bacons work, as one art critic, Michael
Peppiatt said ‘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.

18. Studio

20. 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.

22. 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.

24. Nouveau Realism
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Also known as new realism
Founded by an art critic Pierre Restany
He wrote “Constitute Declaration of New
Realism (the movements manifesto)
9 artists artists signed it
Artists joined the movement in the early
60’s
Confronts materialism and consumerism
in a post war society

25. Yves Klein
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Blue Monochrome 1961
Yves Klein created his own brand of blue
which other artists had attempted to
create. The attempts of creating Yves blue
never worked because they didn’t know
the formula to make it.
Klein made paintings which entirely
consisted of his particular brand of blue. It
is called Blue Monochrome. Klein made
the connection that his monocrhome
paintings as “an open window of
freedom.”

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Klein also experimented with this blue as
apposed to just making monochrome.
He would paint naked women in his brand
of blue and they would make a naked
print of them selves on the canvas

27. Niki De Saint Phalle
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Shooting paintings 1961
De Saint Phalle made polythene bags
which were filled with paint, plaster
was used to “enclose” the polythene
bags. All of these were mounted on
to a woodern board.
The idea was that you would shoot it
and the polythene bags would
explode letting the paint make a
mark on the plaster.
In 1963 De Saint Phalle stopped
making these paintings because she
felt she bacame addicted to shooting.
“I had become addicted to shooting,
like one becomes addicted to a drug”
These paintings were a cathartic way
of getting over her divorce.