A strict adherence to formalism and geometric abstraction led Jeffrey Steele, who has died aged 89, to pioneer op art. In the artist’s most famous works, through carefully planned, tightly controlled patterning, a sense of optical movement occurs on the canvas. His 1965 painting, Baroque Experiment: Fred Maddox, made for the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, features a twisting grid of black half moons, the negative space filled with white paint forming curved triangles that point into the centre of this hypnotising swirl.
The curator of the show, William Seitz, wrote of Steele and his co-exhibitors – who included Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley and Josef Albers – that “unlike most previous abstract painting, these works exist less as objects to be examined than as generators of perceptual responses”. Throughout the 1960s, Steele’s paintings, entirely monochrome, were typified by a similar repeated use of ovals, ellipses, triangles, squares, oblongs and other polygonal forms, be it a tower of seven white pyramids intersecting the canvas against a black painted background in Triangulation (1960) or the busier patterning of Perpetuum Mobile (1963).
A sense of order and rationalism pervaded his work for the ensuing 60 years, Steele refusing to be buffeted by the fashions of the art world. At the end of the 1960s, however, he had grown tired of op art, fearing it was moving to the realm of gimmickry, and in 1969 he co-founded the Systems Group. Steele was a voracious reader of philosophy and political theory, and by then a committed Marxist-Leninist, and his painting became underpinned by a belief in rationalism and an interest in constructivism.
Curvilinear Structure (Abakum) is typical of the artist’s desire to remove the accidental from the painting process. Eschewing emotion or intuition in making, Steele would carefully plan out a composition with almost mathematical precision. The work was never austere, its order countered by exuberant colour: the 1972 triptych features undulating ribbons of yellow, orange, green and blue paint, varying in thickness.
“I would love it if the whole category of the sublime and the genius would go away,” the artist said in a 2012 interview, railing against enlightenment ideas of emotion in art. “This is the sort of thing that terrible man Edmund Burke talked about – such a bourgeois class-ridden concept and just a form of mysticism that we need to get rid of.”
Jeffrey was born in Cardiff, to Enid (nee Washer), who worked at Woolworths, and Arthur Steele, a slate fireplace enameller. He went in 1942 to Howard Gardens high school, where a couple of teachers encouraged his talent in art and, as he later recalled, “helped me to break free of what I was beginning to recognise as the oppressive ideology of my family and church upbringing”.
He enrolled at Cardiff School of Art in 1948 on a scholarship, but his anti-authoritarianism got him into frequent trouble, and he switched to a painting course at Newport Art School, which he did not finish. When he refused national service, registering as a conscientious objector, he was forced out of the family home, and took lodgings with a friend in a run-down part of Cardiff.
Inspired by Stanley Spencer (and having previously hitchhiked to the British artist’s home in Berkshire by way of pilgrimage), in 1952, on an old bedsheet, complete with stain, he painted Christ Carrying the Cross, which showed Jesus leading a funeral parade through the streets of contemporary Cardiff. Its inclusion the following year in the Royal Academy summer exhibition caused a tabloid storm, with the lord mayor of Cardiff weighing in. Steele both relished the recognition and was terrified by it. “I receive a dozen or so letters from strange religious fanatics by every post, mostly abuse, also a few very nice ones,” he told the South Wales Echo. “I do not think I can stand it much longer.”
An easy money job monitoring broadcasting equipment allowed him time to study French, and in 1959 he was awarded a scholarship to study in Paris for three months. There he encountered the work of Vasarely, Max Bill and Albers and took up abstraction. He said he trip “taught me the value of a systematic approach to painting and I definitively resolved to proceed from there on by controlled and logical experimentation”.
This quickly won him admirers, and a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1961. He showed again at the ICA in 1968 as part of Cybernetic Serendipity, a group exhibition that examined the burgeoning relationship between art and information technology. In the same year he started teaching at Portsmouth College of Art. He was promoted to head of department at the school, but preferred to keep the title of senior lecturer, holding the post until he took early retirement in 1989.
In 1969 he co-organised Systeemi at Amos Andersonin Taidemuseo, Helsinki, which led to the formation of the five-strong Systems Group. Together they went on to have shows at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1971 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1972, as well as numerous others throughout Europe.
Steele’s brand of severe modernism fell out of fashion in the 1980s and 90s as the postmodernist high jinks of the Young British Artists movement came to dominate, but he continued to exhibit at least once a year and his work entered the collections of Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museum of Wales.
He did not resent the waning attention and, increasingly reclusive, devoted himself to reading and writing, believing them to be as important to painting as working a canvas. His house in Southsea, Hampshire, slowly filled with handwritten essays on epistemology; notebooks of observations on Russian and French literature, which he read in the original; and LPs – Scott Joplin and Bach being diverse favourites.
More recently his work was featured in historicising group shows including A Rational Aesthetic: the Systems Group and Associated Artists at Southampton City Art Gallery in 2008 and British Constructivism at Pallant House, Chichester, in 2017.
Two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by two children, Simon and Tamara, from his first marriage, in 1957, to Glenda Reynolds, and a daughter, Clara, from a subsequent relationship with Judy Clark.
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