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

27

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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