Seminal Smash | Bridget Riley at the Morgan, NY
Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Study for Polarity, 1964, Pencil and gouache on paper, 18 3/8 × 15 3/4 in. (46.7 × 40 cm). Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Morgan Library & Museum/Bridget Riley.
On February 9th, 1965, The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in front of a record live TV audience of 73 million Americans, starting their set with All My Loving, and ending it with She Loves You. Beatlemania had crossed the Atlantic.
Two weeks later, and three Manhattan blocks away, in the rather more rarified air of the Museum of Modern Art, another young Brit made an important cultural impact. Curator William C Seitz chose Bridget Riley’s pulsating, monochrome abstract work Current to illustrate the catalogue of the show The Responsive Eye, which opened on February 23rd. In doing so, he pushed her into becoming the figurehead of a new artistic movement, which was dubbed – by both its many admirers and its many detractors - ‘op art’. The show was a smash, and a seminal smash at that, still commonly referenced today.
The ‘op’ of ‘op art’ stood for ‘optical’, and anyone with eyes could see what it was doing, whatever their art history background. It was moving, and so was the public’s taste. The opening of the show was one of art’s great democratising moments. And what a great title, by the way, Riley had given to her swirling, mind-blowing piece. The word ‘Current’ reflected both the rhythmic fluidity of the work, and the fact that it was very much of the now.
Riley was never invited into Ed Sullivan’s studio – Bridgetmania never quite happened - but she won a lot of American hearts, and she has always had a close relationship with New York. In 2015 she was given a solo exhibition of her post-1981 work at David Zwirner’s Manhattan gallery, and this month she is enjoying a show of 75 works, spanning seven decades, at the Morgan Library & Museum. Entitled Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artists Studio, it comprises works from her own collection: works she has kept hold of; works that mean a lot to her.
We get to see early figurative pieces (Girl Reading, 1958), experiments in pointillism (Blue Landscape, 1959), her early forays into monochrome abstraction (3 untitled studies, 1960), her prototype experiments with op art (Study for Polarity, 1964, drawn in a similar style to Current, above), her first abstract experiments using colour (Late Morning 1967-68), and later, multichromatic op art pieces, reflecting a growing sophistication of method (Red, Green and Blue Twisted Curves, 1979; Toward Lagoon, 1997).
If you happen to be in New York between now and October 8, this is a must-see show. If you can’t make it, you can get a good taste of what you’ll be missing, by following the Museum’s audio-visual guide to the exhibition, featuring recordings of Riley talking about her life in art. And it’s been quite a life: the Fab Four played their last proper gig in 1966; Riley unveiled her first-ever ceiling fresco – at the British School in Rome – in May 2023, aged 92.
Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio