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One loner living in Germany, a tall Brazilian, Almir de Silva Mavignier, 39, is the prototype op artist (lower right). He works slowly, sells for little, and does not care for fame. "Think about the anonymous craftsmen who built that," he said recently, peering from behind gold-rimmed spectacles at the Ulm cathedral. "They have been depersonalized, yet might have died with satisfaction that they helped create something still pulsating 500 years later." His works, dotted with neat cones of oil, are uniformly produced in permutations of the spectrum: a painstaking topography that seems to prick the retina.
British Coolth. An unusual number of op artists come from Latin America. One is a Venezuelan named Jésus Raphael Soto, 41, now working in Paris, who calls his work "vibrations" (left), though he states that he has never read a physics book. His colored aluminum bars, suspended from fine nylon threads in shadow boxes, sway in front of lined backgrounds and dematerialize. "See how the stiff bars become fluid and luminous," says Soto. Like conductors' batons summoning music from strings, they do assume a sonorous life.
The British have already scored with Bridget Riley, 32 (TIME, May 1), whose stark black-and-white patterns have made viewers physically sick. She generally lets craftsmen execute her designs, has a standoffishness and coolth matched by her countryman, Steele. "These pictures are not necessarily meant to be looked at," says Steele. Another Englishman is Cambridge-educated Michael Kidner (below), at 46 one of the oldest of the flicker boys. Years ago he bashed away at abstract expressionism, but, says he, "never convinced myself that the gesture I was making had much significance." Then he learned that he could make people see colors that, in fact, he did not paint. "I use optics," says he, "as a means to an end that is bigger—in short, a good painting. Optics is a tool, as perspective once was."
American Impersonality. The Americans, such as Julian Stanczak, 35, who roomed with Anuszkiewicz while studying under Albers at Yale, try not to imitate nature. "I use visual activities," says Stanczak, "to run parallel to it" (right). There is even a U.S. group, impersonally called Anonima. Composed of three young men, Francis Hewitt (below), Edwin Mieczkowski (next page) and Ernst Benkert, who met at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Oberlin College in 1958 and '59, they believe that the rule and the compass are proper artist's tools. Like other op artists, they dislike artistic preciousness, the expression of the prima donna personality on canvas, and psychic plumbing into the meaning of art. They also hold, says Hewitt, that "if people find our art dull, that doesn't really bother us that much. The quality and depth of the experience depend on the willingness to perceive and persistence to overcome certain levels of frustration. We don't want to make our paintings popular."