Bridget Riley

Biography

Her copy of Georges Seurat’s “The Bridge at Courbevoie”, painted in 1959, still hangs in Bridget Riley’s studio. She made it from a reproduction in a book, enlarging the scale to understand how complementary colours work. The painting itself, owned by the Courtauld Gallery, she had seen in London. Riley called the copy a “tool”.

She was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, in south London. Her father, who came from Yorkshire, was a printer with his own business; in 1938 he moved the printing works and the family to Lincolnshire. When the war began he was called up, and Riley, with her mother and sister Sally, settled in a cottage in Cornwall, sharing it with an aunt. She had no systematic schooling in those years: she listened to talks and lectures given by retired teachers and educated amateurs. Then came Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1946–1948), Goldsmiths (1949–1952) and the Royal College of Art (1952–1955), from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree.

After college Riley worked in a glassware shop, taught drawing to children, and then became an illustrator at a large advertising agency, where she worked part-time until 1962. The Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in the winter of 1958 made an impression on her. Her early work was figurative and close to Impressionism; in 1958–1959 pointillist technique appeared in her work for the agency.

In 1959, at a summer school, she met the painter and teacher Maurice de Sausmarez. He pointed her towards Futurism, Divisionism, Paul Klee and Seurat. In the summer of 1960 they painted together in Italy and visited the Venice Biennale, where a large exhibition of Futurists was on show. There she painted “Pink Landscape”, a pointillist study of the countryside near Radicofani. The work of this period led to black-and-white pictures such as “Kiss” (1961): geometric patterns that make the eye dart about and create a sense of movement and colour. She kept up a professional friendship with de Sausmarez until his death in 1969. Riley taught at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Harrow (1957–1958), at the art schools of Loughborough (1959) and Hornsey, and at Croydon College of Art (1962–1964). In 1961, with her partner Peter Sedgley, she visited the Vaucluse plateau in the south of France and bought a derelict farm, later turned into a studio. In the spring of 1962 Victor Musgrave showed her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in London.

Three years later, in 1965, the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York brought her worldwide fame; her painting “Current” (1964) appeared on the cover of the catalogue. There was then no copyright protection for artists in the United States, and commercial industry eagerly reproduced her patterns. Riley was disillusioned by this, and a law was passed in 1967 after an initiative by New York artists. In 1968 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and won the International Prize for painting; no British contemporary painter and no woman had done so before. That same year, with Sedgley and the journalist Peter Townsend, she founded SPACE, an organisation that found large, affordable studios for artists. She took part in documenta IV (1968) and documenta VI (1977) in Kassel.

From 1961 to 1965 Riley worked with the contrast of black and white, occasionally introducing grey. She turned to colour in 1967, with her first stripe painting. After a trip to Egypt in 1980–1981, where she was struck by the bright colours of hieroglyphic decoration, she devised what she called her “Egyptian palette”: the “Ka” and “Ra” series (1980–1985). In 1983, for the first time in fifteen years, she returned to Venice to study again the painting on which European colourism rests. By the end of the 1980s the diagonal had returned to her vertical stripes, broken into a sequence of parallelograms. Since 1961 her paintings have been executed by assistants, while she plans each composition carefully in studies and collages and directs the work.

For the Royal Liverpool Hospital she made the wall painting “Bolt of Colour” in 1983. For St Mary’s Hospital in London she painted three murals, on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors (1987–2014; the last is 56 metres long). Riley has also made temporary murals for the Tate, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery. In 2017–2019 she completed a wall painting for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, the largest work she has undertaken: it covers six of the building’s eight walls.

She has written about artists from Poussin to Bruce Nauman and has curated exhibitions: Mondrian at the Tate (1996, with Sean Rainbird), Paul Klee at the Hayward Gallery (2002, with Robert Kudielka), and in 2010 a show at the National Gallery of large figure paintings of her choice. To my mind, these exhibitions show clearly whom she learned from.

In 1974 Riley was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her other honours include the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Goslarer Kaiserring of the city of Goslar (2009), the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen (2012) and the Sikkens Prize (2012, the first woman to receive it). In 1998 she became a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. In 1993 and 1995 Oxford and Cambridge awarded her honorary doctorates. In the 1980s, as a trustee of the National Gallery, she blocked Margaret Thatcher’s plan to hand the adjoining site to developers; the Sainsbury Wing was later built there.