Jeffrey Steele (artist)

After he had gained a reputation as a practising artist in the early 1960s Steele was accepted by the college authorities with which he had previously tussled and he began lecturing in fine art in Cardiff, Barry and Newport.

Jeffrey Steele was born on 3 July 1931 in Cardiff, the son of a slate fireplace enameller, Arthur, and Enid (née Washer), who worked in a Woolworth's store.

Steele's painting Christ Carrying the Cross (1952-3, set in Adamsdown, Cardiff)[5] was shown at the Royal Academy in London in summer 1953 and caused controversy in his home town because of its satirical message.

Steele had been studying Cézanne, Cubism and the Abstract Expressionists but said later: "I mistrusted the deliberate bypassing of the thinking part of the mind which gestural painting entails and some love of the philosophical method of Descartes predisposed me towards a rational and austere form.

There he visited the show "Antagonismes" at the musée des Arts décoratifs, and saw the work of Auguste Herbin (1882–1960), Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse (1902–1988), the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005) and, especially influential for Steele, Victor Vasarely.

Each work is underlaid by its own set of mathematic relationships that, once chosen intuitively, determines the elements depicted to produce a unified, harmonious whole, which is independent of any outside object (as in figurative art) or the artist's emotions (as in Abstract Expressionism).

[8] The use in Steele's work of elements in balanced opposition, and the tilted axes arising from the diagonals, produce symmetrical wholes that are not static but dynamic, complex and full of apparent movement, especially rotational, the eye eventually returning to its starting point before beginning a new journey around the picture.

While modern in their pure abstraction, purged of references to the world outside the picture, Steele's works, in their systems of proportion, balance and measurement, in their use of geometric forms (particularly circles and polygons such as triangles and squares), and in their strong contrasts of light and dark (chiaroscuro) in their composition, are prefigured by much older art and architecture, and have a timeless quality.

[11] Steele's painting Baroque Experiment – Fred Maddox (1962/63) featured prominently in a Time magazine article on Op-art, "Pictures that Attack the Eye", in October 1964.

It was then shown in "The Responsive Eye", an exhibition of mainly Op-art in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February–April 1965, organised by William Seitz, which also included work by the British artists Michael Kidner (1917–2009) and Bridget Riley (1931–).

[12] Steele spent three weeks in the city, meeting critics and artists such as Josef Albers, Fritz Glarner (1899–1972), Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974), Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) and Andy Warhol (1928–87), visiting galleries and staying in the Chelsea Hotel.

[13] He has been identified with the Op-art movement because he has worked in black and white, especially in the 1960s, and his paintings feature clear, hard edges, sharp, even dazzling contrasts, figure-ground ambiguity and kinetic effects.

Furthermore, the group has also been associated with the political left and Russian Constructivism of the early Soviet era, and many of its members (including Steele) see a strong affinity between their art and Marxism.

But at a time when the Cold War was raging and Thatcherism was in the ascendancy the work of Steele and his contemporaries did not find general favour in UK art circles.

[19] At Portsmouth he led the seminar "Some Questions Concerning Fine Art and the Propagation of Ideas by Means of Images" which became known (affectionately and otherwise due to its Marxist content) as the "Ideology Course", from which there are extensive papers and one of the direct and indirect outcomes of this is the theoretical work of Gary Tedman[20] and Iona Singh.

[1] Steele was interviewed extensively by the researcher Cathy Courtney for the Artists' Lives section of the British Library's National Life Stories project.