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Fig. 7 Bridget Riley Red with Red 1, 2007 Oil on linen, 177.5 ¥ 255 cm Private collection

Fig. 8 Raphael (1483–1520) Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1507 (detail) Oil on poplar, 72.2 ¥ 55.7 cm The , (ng 168)

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 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 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,

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Marla Prather

‘Let the eye be agile’: The Past as Present in the Work of Bridget Riley

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

Fig. 14 may surprise us that an artist who would become one of the most committed abstractionists of the Bridget Riley last fifty years not only undertook an ancient academic practice, that of copying, but also turned to Copy after The Bridge at Courbevoie by , 1959 a masterpiece of meticulous realism. And her choice – a rare work by one of the greatest artists of Oil on canvas, 71.1 ¥ 91.4 cm Private collection, London 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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Robert Kudielka

Chronology

1931 Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?). She devotes Born in London. herself mainly to the life-drawing class of Sam Rabin, whom she still remembers with respect because he introduced her 1939–45 to the principles of pictorial abstraction: the autonomous Childhood in Cornwall. While her father is away in the armed construction of a body on a flat plane. Later she says: forces during the war Bridget Riley lives with her mother, ‘Life drawing was about the only thing I ever learned at art younger sister and aunt (a former student of Goldsmiths’ school.’ College, London) in a cottage not far from the coast near Padstow. Irregular primary education by non-qualified or 1952–5 retired teachers who from time to time assemble children in the Studies at the . A period of great locality for lessons in subjects in which they have knowledge frustration, partly because it is her first experience of the art or interest. The beginning of Riley’s interest in nature. scene in London, partly because she slowly sees herself confronted with the unavoidable basic question of the 1946–8 modern painter: ‘What should I paint, and how should I paint Education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Thanks to an it?’ Among her contemporaries are Frank Auerbach, Peter understanding headmistress she is allowed to organise her Blake, Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Joe Tilson. She own curriculum, and chooses only art lessons in addition to graduates with a BA degree. obligatory subjects. Her teacher, Colin Hayes, later tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, introduces her to the 1956–8 and encourages her to attend the life class Continuation of a long period of unhappiness. She nurses her at the local art school. The Van Gogh exhibition at the father after a serious car accident and suffers a breakdown. Gallery in 1947 is her first encounter with the work of a Works in a glassware shop, teaches children and eventually modern master. joins the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency where her job is principally to draw the subjects which form the basis of 1949–52 the photographer’s work. In the winter of 1958 she sees the Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, London. For her entrance ’s large exhibition, which examination she submits, among other works, a copy of makes a powerful impact.

66 Fig. 27 Bridget Riley in her west London studio, 1960s 67