Michael Kidner was a pioneer of op art in Britain.
Michael James Kidner was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire. From his school days at Bedales, Kidner had an interest in mathematics, though he decided to follow his father's advice and study History and Anthropology at Cambridge (1939-42), before a post-graduate in Landscape Architecture in Ohio (1943-45). Kidner was staying with his older sister and her American husband in the USA when war broke out in Europe. Unable to return home he joined the Canadian Army and served with them for five years. In service he was posted to England and, after D-Day, saw active duty in France as part of the Canadian Royal Corps of Signals.
Post demobilisation in 1946, he enrolled at Goldsmiths University to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design. However he left after only 3 months as he was disenchanted with the course. From 1947-50, Kidner taught at Pitlochry Prep school in Perthshire and it was here that he started to paint as a hobby. From 1951-52 he became a theatre designer in Bromley and Barnstaple whilst continuing to paint. During a painting holiday in the south of France he met André Lhote who introduced him to Cubism and encouraged him to move to Paris and become a full time painter. He travelled to Paris in 1953 where he attended Lhote’s Atelier sporadically. After 2 years he returned to North Devon where his brother was practising as a GP. Here Kidner painted abstract landscapes rather in the spirit of the St Ives School. Subsequently he moved to St Ives for several months where he became acquainted with Trevor Bell, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and others in the group.
Kidner turned to painting to explore his interests in mathematics, colour theory and optics. With the popularity of abstraction and Constructivism in this period, Kidner realised that art which was both rational and intuitive had an interested public. Older than many of his contemporaries but inspired by his subject, Kidner worked hard to establish himself in the British art scene of the ’60s. A particular interest of Kidner’s was chaos theory, that was being developed by figures such as Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who went on to discover fractals. Optical effects and systemic structures fascinated Kidner, and he made these somewhat overlapping fields the subject of his whole career; Kidner was one of its earliest and most consistent exponents in Europe.
On moving to London in 1957, Kidner was introduced to The New American Painting exhibition at the Tate Gallery where he saw the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Somewhat later Kidner was particularly influenced by Mark Rothko’s Colour field paintings. These inspired his After Image paintings, sculptures and reliefs, executed between 1957 and 62. Another defining experience was a course in 1959 run by Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron which alerted him to the Bauhaus derived ideas of colour. He found ideas for an objective use of colour that stimulated a new, radical approach to his painting.
Kidner’s first solo exhibition was held at St Hilda’s college, Oxford in 1959 where he showed his After Image paintings. However it was not until 1965 that he became recognised as a pioneer of Op Art following the publicity surrounding the exhibition called The Responsive Eye organised by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Both Kidner and Bridget Riley’s work were included.
The importance of Op Art in the canon of Western art history is well-established. Artworks which explored optical reception had been created since earlier in the century, though they were usually experiments and three-dimensional work. It was Kidner’s generation which made optics the focus of painting and Kidner himself who can be said to have produced the first Op Art paintings in colour.
Without losing this rigorous, intellectual approach, Kidner manages to make his work resonate emotionally. Throughout his life, he retained an interest in unpredictable world events that provoked unplanned elements within his work but he somehow managed to intimate an underlying order through his use of form and colour.
He survived to see a major show of his work from the 1960s, 'Dreams of the World Order' at the Royal Academy in September 2009. Solo exhibitions of Kidner's work include Serpentine Gallery; Grabowski Gallery; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Arnolfini Gallery and Royal West of England Academy, Bristol; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; Betty Parsons, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Poland; and exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki and Budapest. His papers and archive were gifted to the Tate in 2010. Kidner has work in numerous public collections, including Tate; V&A; Arts Council; Government Art Collection; Contemporary Arts Society; Henry Moore Sculpture Trust; New College, Oxford; Southampton City Art Gallery; Walker Gallery, Liverpool; Gulbenkian Foundation; Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal; Stuyvesant Foundation; Poznan Museum, Poland; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and National Gallery of Australia.
