PHOTO ESSAY
That '60s Show
The National Gallery embraces the flower power decade
By Liz Hodgson
 Chromatic Accelerator by Claude Tousignant. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada. |
Claude Tousignant (1932-)
Chromatic Accelerator
1968
Acrylic on canvas
Often, the political message conveyed by ’60s art was implicit. Consider Claude Tousignant’s Chromatic Accelerator: like the spyrographic abstract acrylics of Frank Stella or the less polished “target”-style renderings of Jasper Johns, this psychedelic masterpiece takes the focus away from the artist, making it seem as though anybody could have created it – a very socialist notion. The piece, according to Leclerc, is part of a larger abstract movement, called “Op Art.” It was all about hard-edged lines and shapes that appear in a sequence, thus producing the illusion of movement. This type of painting, says Leclerc, was not primarily about pleasing the eye, but rather about creating an experience. “The kind of art that is something that you feel rather than think about,” she says. Many Op Art pieces were meant to imitate the hallucinatory effects of LSD, Leclerc explains. The rise of this particular type of art coincided with an intense period of institutional research into the effects of the drug.
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