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Transcript of NGBRtextpp1-78270x230mmv8 AJ/text/pp1-64/521/10/201016 ... · forces during the war Bridget Riley...
and she is happy for them to be seen. ‘I don’t want there to be anything mysterious about the way
that I work,’ she says. ‘I mean there is doubt and uncertainty, and the very act of enquiry means that
things go wrong and have to be changed and revised. But to me this is part of the pleasure of
working.’4
These are just three of the many surviving studies that Seurat used to gather the visual
information with which he built his final composition. One study selected by Riley, A River Bank (The
Seine at Asnières), about 1883 (plate 20), establishes the location, where he pins down the diagonal
division between water and river bank. Seurat makes special use of the striped tidal-measuring post,
which helps to carefully balance the compositional components of horizontal, diagonal and vertical.
In Study for ‘Bathers at Asnières’, 1883–4 (plate 19), he makes notations of some of the figures that
will eventually relate to this location. Lastly, in The Rainbow: Study for ‘Bathers at Asnières’, 1883
(plate 21), he begins to integrate the figures into the space. Riley understands this little study as
being one of several of this nature, in which he repeatedly painted the scene to keep the colour
sensation fresh in his mind. The studies show Seurat’s focus on the lines of the composition, the
connection between figure and field, and the relationship between colours. Seen in conjunction with
her recent paintings, Riley’s interest in Seurat, which she describes as a ‘shared preoccupation with
perception and a love of contrast in painting’, continues today.5 Seurat’s studies were all made
between 1883 and 1884, a generation before pure abstraction entered Western painting and yet, with
hindsight, their abstract properties, and consequent connection to Riley’s work, become clear.
Riley’s approach to her own paintings is similarly methodical. ‘When I start I don’t have an aim
or an image in mind for how the painting is going to look,’ she explained to the art historian Lynne
Cooke in 2005. ‘When I started to do studies at the beginning of the 1960s, few other artists made
preparatory works. Most people felt that they were not spontaneous or sufficiently informal: it was
thought that any form of preparedness was somehow a bit inartistic. But I felt that – I didn’t just feel,
14 Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work
Fig. 8Raphael (1483–1520)
Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1507 (detail)Oil on poplar, 72.2 ¥ 55.7 cm
The National Gallery, London (ng 168)
Fig. 7Bridget RileyRed with Red 1, 2007Oil on linen, 177.5 ¥ 255 cmPrivate collection
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Fig. 14Bridget RileyCopy after The Bridge at Courbevoie by Georges Seurat, 1959Oil on canvas, 71.1 ¥ 91.4 cmPrivate collection, London
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Artists cannot help, it seems, but project some of their own preoccupations
onto the art of the past, and this is more or less true of everybody, even
art historians. However, as a painter you see reflections of common
practical problems in the art of the past, and although the solutions
obviously cannot be the same, it is still reassuring to see that one’s own
problems are not simply delusional but real, by witness of the fact that
other painters have encountered them.
Bridget Riley1
In 1947, as Bridget Riley sought admission to London’s Goldsmiths’ College in the University of
London, where entry was highly competitive in the years after the war, someone suggested that she
copy a painting for her portfolio. She chose as her model Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self
Portrait?), 1433 (fig. 3), in the National Gallery’s collection. Although access to the original was
readily available, she painted the work (plate 3) from a postcard. It was not the elaborately complex
folds of the sitter’s extraordinary red head-dress that drew Riley to van Eyck’s portrait, but rather the
regular features of his ‘beautifully constructed head’, with its very distinct planes.2 In retrospect it
may surprise us that an artist who would become one of the most committed abstractionists of the
last fifty years not only undertook an ancient academic practice, that of copying, but also turned to
a masterpiece of meticulous realism. And her choice – a rare work by one of the greatest artists of
the first half of the fifteenth century and among the most celebrated paintings in a British public
collection – was hardly a timid one for a young student. It suggests even a concerted personal
declaration, to select what may be van Eyck’s portrait of himself. But rather than an act of immodesty,
it was Riley’s first lesson in what she has called ‘the old way of learning’. Copying is the greatest
possible tribute to the continuing relevance of the past, particularly for an artist who believes that
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Marla Prather
‘Let the eye be agile’:The Past as Present in theWork of Bridget Riley
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1931Born in London.
1939–45Childhood in Cornwall. While her father is away in the armed
forces during the war Bridget Riley lives with her mother,
younger sister and aunt (a former student of Goldsmiths’
College, London) in a cottage not far from the coast near
Padstow. Irregular primary education by non-qualified or
retired teachers who from time to time assemble children in the
locality for lessons in subjects in which they have knowledge
or interest. The beginning of Riley’s interest in nature.
1946–8Education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Thanks to an
understanding headmistress she is allowed to organise her
own curriculum, and chooses only art lessons in addition to
obligatory subjects. Her teacher, Colin Hayes, later tutor at
the Royal College of Art, London, introduces her to the
history of painting and encourages her to attend the life class
at the local art school. The Van Gogh exhibition at the Tate
Gallery in 1947 is her first encounter with the work of a
modern master.
1949–52Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, London. For her entrance
examination she submits, among other works, a copy of
Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?). She devotes
herself mainly to the life-drawing class of Sam Rabin, whom
she still remembers with respect because he introduced her
to the principles of pictorial abstraction: the autonomous
construction of a body on a flat plane. Later she says:
‘Life drawing was about the only thing I ever learned at art
school.’
1952–5Studies at the Royal College of Art. A period of great
frustration, partly because it is her first experience of the art
scene in London, partly because she slowly sees herself
confronted with the unavoidable basic question of the
modern painter: ‘What should I paint, and how should I paint
it?’ Among her contemporaries are Frank Auerbach, Peter
Blake, Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Joe Tilson. She
graduates with a BA degree.
1956–8Continuation of a long period of unhappiness. She nurses her
father after a serious car accident and suffers a breakdown.
Works in a glassware shop, teaches children and eventually
joins the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency where her
job is principally to draw the subjects which form the basis of
the photographer’s work. In the winter of 1958 she sees the
Whitechapel Gallery’s large Jackson Pollock exhibition, which
makes a powerful impact.
Robert Kudielka
Chronology
Fig. 27 Bridget Riley in her west London studio, 1960s
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