parallelograms. Like his earlier tabletop piece, the tiles could be arranged to create larger tessellating patterns and shapes, only now it could be hung like a painting. Connections was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1969 – 70 as part of Play Orbit, an exhibition of artworks that visitors could interact or ‘play’ with in the manner of toys and games. Meanwhile Vasarely had started selling boxed kits of rearrangeable tiles for people to create their own Op Art. The tiles were pieces of his ‘plastic alphabet’ and consisted of coloured squares on which a smaller geometric shape was superimposed in a different colour. The pieces were magnetic and came with a frame which could be hung on a wall, although the similarity with Bevan’s work did not end there. Vasarely’s kits moved away from traditional art markets, where one-of-a-kind originals were the luxury of a privileged few, towards massproduced affordable art available to all. Bevan shared this desire to democratise art and his next project achieved it in an entirely original and unexpected way. For it was around this time that John Constable, Art Director at Fontana Books, was looking for a cover concept for the Fontana Modern Masters, and on seeing Bevan’s rearrangeable tiles Constable commissioned him to create the cover art. The covers of the first ten books were based on isometric cubes and coloured in vibrant patterns of orange, yellow and emerald green, with vertical stripes
in a fourth colour that amplified the optical flickering effect. The books were published in 1970 – 71 with a statement on the back revealing they were tiles for a larger painting: ‘The cover of this book is one of a set of ten, comprising the covers of the first ten titles of the Modern Masters series. The set combines to form the whole painting, and can be arranged in an unlimited number of different patterns.’ This incentive for people to collect all ten books and make their own Op Art was taken up by booksellers who mounted spectacular cascading window displays, and the cover concept was repeated for a second set of Modern Masters in 1971 – 73. The books sold extremely well and Bevan recalls seeing people with them on the London Underground. ‘My democratic urge was well satisfied,’ he said, ‘because everyone could have an inexpensive piece of my work’. During this time Bevan also collaborated with the composer Brian Dennis on a production at London’s Cockpit Theatre of Z’Noc, an experimental piece in which the musicians take their cues from coloured lights projected onto three large mobiles. This led Bevan to experiment with light as a medium for other types of kinetic art and in 1973 he produced the first of his lightboxes. These used polarised light and opticallyactive materials such as Cellophane and Sellotape to create a mesmerising cycle of changing colours and shifting shapes.
For Bevan the lightboxes were a breakthrough. The problem of incorporating time in his paintings – which he had first explored with rearrangeable tiles – was, he felt, finally solved. He had created a ‘canvas’ for ‘kinetic paintings’ that selected colours ‘in time as well as space’. A kinetic painting, Pyramid, was used to produce the covers for a third set of Fontana Modern Masters in 1973 – 74. The lightboxes were exhibited in London, Europe and North America, with pieces such as Turning World and Crescendo winning plaudits from the art historian Ernst Gombrich. Bevan found a backer for the lightboxes and oversaw the production of editioned multiples. These sold well, and as Bevan recalls, ‘they became a sort of cottage industry. But there were a lot of technical difficulties. I was solving problems and wasn’t actually being very creative any more’. Eventually he began to feel his kinetic work had run its course and in 1977 he accepted an offer of a two-year teaching post at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. This proved to be a turning point and by the time he returned to London he had abandoned kinetic art in favour of figurative painting. Oliver Bevan’s retrospective was at the Médiathèque d’Uzès in France. A limited edition signed print of Bevan’s Cascade of Fontana Modern Masters covers is available from wire-frame.net/fineart.html.
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RWA magazine
Autumn 2012
27