Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 9, 2026 : Michael Kidner, a British artist /op art. (#2574)

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Artist of the Day, July 9, 2026 : Michael Kidner, a British artist /op art. (#2574)

Michael James Kidner RA (1917 – 2009) was a British op artist. Active from mid-1960s, Kidner was an early exponent of the genre. Through his interest in mathematics, he was part of the Constructivism movement and chaos and wave theories influence his work.

Kidner was born in Kettering, the son of an industrialist and was one of six children. He was educated at Bedales School, and from 1939 read History and Anthropology at Cambridge before studying Landscape Architecture at Ohio State University. He was staying with his older sister and her American husband in the US when war broke out in Europe. Unable to return home, he joined the Canadian army for five years. He was subsequently posted to England and after D-Day saw active service in France in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals.

After demobilisation in 1946, he enrolled at Goldsmiths University to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design but withdrew after three months. From 1947–50, Kidner taught at Pitlochry Prep School in Perthshire and it was here that he started to paint as a hobby. In 1949 he met and married his wife Marion Frederick, an American actress. From 1951 to 1952 he worked as a theatre designer in Bromley and Barnstaple whilst continuing to paint.

During a painting holiday in the south of France, Kidner 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 sporadically attended Lhote's atelier. After two years he returned to North Devon where his brother was working as a GP. He moved to St Ives for several months where he became acquainted with Trevor Bell, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, and Peter Lanyon.

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. Kidner later became influenced by Mark Rothko's color field paintings. These inspired his After Image paintings, sculptures and reliefs, executed between 1957 and 1962.

Kidner's first solo exhibition was held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1959 where he showed his After Image paintings. In 1965 his work was featured in the op art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with that of Bridget Riley.

In 1969, Kidner co–founded the Systems Group with Jeffrey Steele and others. Around this time, the notion of color as form urged Kidner on to do a columnar sculpture of a wave. At this stage he became interested in number theory as the key to "the nature of order" and "the structure of reality",

In his last decade, Kidner's work became more colorful and free. Titles such as Entangled Hyacinth Bulbs, Invasion of Iraq: Surprise Resistance, and Particle Evolution: The End of the Tunnel at CERN.

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