Byzantium

In a vivid account of her childhood in Cornwall, Bridget Riley recalls the experiences that taught her to see. She remembers ‘watching the narrow dark streaks of ruffled water—violets, blue and many shades of grey.’ She tells of walking through the undulating landscape and observing ‘a constant interchange of horizon lines, cliff-tops and brows of hills … slivers of colour rhythmically weaving and layering, edge against edge.’ She describes the experience of moving through water, with its ‘oval, saucer-like reflections, dipping and flashing on the sea surface.’ As colours converged from every corner of land and sky, each ‘bespattered with the glitter of bright sunlight’, it felt as though she was ‘swimming through a diamond’ (‘The Pleasures of Sight’, 1984, in R. Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-2019, London, 2019, pp. 33-34).

For six decades, Riley has devoted herself to dissecting ‘the pleasures of sight’ (ibid., p. 33). Her practice represents one of art history’s most profound enquiries into the behaviour of colour, light and human perception. Riley’s process is one of meticulous rigour and precision, grounded in close observation, detailed preparatory drawing and relentless serial interrogation. The results, however, are emotive, poetic, enigmatic and profoundly visceral. Enacting the frictions and frissons of optical sensation, they force the viewer to look closely: at the canvas, at the world and at themselves. ‘My aim,’ she once explained, ‘is to make people feel alive’ (‘Personal Interview by Nikki Henriques’, 1988, in R. Kudielka, ibid., p. 31).

Riley’s practice is rooted in art history. She was inspired early on by a Van Gogh exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London in 1947, and submitted a copy of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433) for her entrance exam to Goldsmiths. She greatly admired the work of Piet Mondrian, and was entranced by Jackson Pollock’s 1958 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. Elsewhere, she drew heavily on the teachings of Futurism and Divisionism. One of her first major works was a reproduction of George Seurat’s Le Pont de Courbevoie (1886-1887), in which she interrogated his methods from the inside out. Her early series of black-and-white paintings brought these teachings to fruition, using geometric forms to isolate the flux of vision and perception. Exhibited to great acclaim in the landmark group show The Responsive Eye (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, these works positioned Riley on the global stage.

In 1967, Riley embraced colour—and, with it, the stripe. The monumental Byzantium (1969)—among her grandest canvases, and a rare example of a large-scale early coloured painting to come to market—captures this paradigm shift. Previously in the George Economou Collection, it belongs to the seminal group of works that took their cue from her first coloured painting Chant 2 (1967). Byzantium consists of alternating bands of blue and green bracketed by strips of red. Each of these units is separated by gleaming slivers of white that become progressively narrower towards the centre of the canvas. Riley arranges her stripes in long, sweeping diagonals: a rare format found in just four other paintings of this period, including Green and Magenta Diagonal (1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)—a close cousin of Byzantium—and Veld (1971, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). A study is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Alive with ‘powerful tension’, writes Robert Kudielka, ‘the whole field reverberates with disembodied energies striking a grand, ceremonial colour chord: purple, gold and white’ (‘Building Sensations: The Early Work of Bridget Riley’, in Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70s, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 1999, p. 31).

In 1968, the year before Byzantium, Riley had shown Chant 2 at the Venice Biennale. There, she became the first British contemporary painter—and the first woman—to win the International Prize for Painting. Her coloured stripe paintings would fuel her international recognition. Byzantium featured in her debut touring retrospective of 1970-1971, which concluded at the Hayward Gallery, London, The exhibition—which marked the gallery’s first full-scale survey of a contemporary painter—was a sensational success. ‘No painter, alive or dead, has ever made us more conscious of our eyes than Bridget Riley,’ wrote the critic Robert Melville at the time (‘An Art Without Accident’, New Statesman, 23 July 1971, p. 121). The work would go on to feature in a number of important shows, including a major presentation of her early work at the Serpentine Gallery in 1999 and her then-largest retrospective to date at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2008.

Riley’s move to colour unlocked some of her most important lines of enquiry. While the black-and-white paintings had explored what she described as ‘states of composure and disturbance’, the introduction of colour allowed her to ‘give visual sensation more rein’ (quoted in R. Kudielka, ed., Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art, London, 1995, p. 70). It was, she explained, a fundamentally ineffable phenomenon. ‘The basis of colour is instability,’ she wrote. ‘… One looks here and colour is there’ (ibid., p. 56). It is ‘simultaneously one thing and several things’, she elaborated elsewhere—‘you never see colour by itself’ (‘At the End of My Pencil’, London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 19, 8 October 2009). In Byzantium, the rhythmic vibration of the four hues yields an astonishing array of tonal and spatial effects. Dappled golden light and violet shadows seep through the gaps, undulating in a wild, rolling dance that changes speed and direction as the eye moves across the canvas.

In an essay published in Art International in 1971, the painter and critic Andrew Forge wrote eloquently of Byzantium’s chromatic effects. ‘I might speak of the glowing colour in one of the recent paintings,’ he explained. ‘I might have used the same word of the muted red centre of a Rothko, meaning that I could picture it as if glowing, or that that particular area acts out a “glowing” part in relation to the cool umber that frames it. But when, after a period of looking at Riley’s coloured stripes, my eyes can no longer keep up with the struggle to separate and locate the blues and greens within their bounding of red, and the whole colour charge of the picture seems to detach itself from the canvas and come free in my eye, then glowing takes on a different meaning. Glowing is my word, my verb, for what is actually happening in my eye’ (‘On Looking at Paintings by Bridget Riley’, Art International, vol. 15, no. 3, 20 March 1971, p. 16).

Riley’s initial body of coloured paintings had been largely dominated by stripes. The form, she explained, provided a clear, simple lens through which to observe the volatile interaction of different hues. During the 1970s, however, her attention would shift to another structure: the curve. The shape had been present in Riley’s practice since her 1961 painting Kiss, and would define her celebrated Cataract series of 1967. Between 1974 and 1981, however, Riley began to explore the curve in increasingly sophisticated ways, exploiting its fluid malleability. By twisting strands of colour around one another, she rendered their tonal relationships even more complex. ‘A stripe gives me the longest edge without volume—idea for colour interaction,’ explained Riley, ‘—but the curve changes thickness and, as a result, at each point colour reads differently against its neighbours’ (‘About Curves: Bridget Riley in Conversation with Paul Moorhouse’, in Bridget Riley: The Curve Paintings 1961-2014, exh. cat., De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2015, p. 48).

Streak 2 (1979), formerly held in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, is an extraordinary work from the height of this series, and among the last remaining in private hands. It is one of three of the same title—the first of which resides in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem—and is closely related to the pair of canvases entitled To a Summer’s Day (1980, Aberdeen Gallery and Museums Collection and Tate, London). These paintings followed on from Riley’s celebrated Songs of Orpheus and Orphean Elegies, created between 1978 and 1979, whose rippling surfaces explored the interaction between five colours. In her Streak paintings, Riley moved away from the dense, prismatic complexity of these works, reintroducing white in concert with red, blue and green. With their horizontal orientation, they exude a sense of open, expansive tranquility, their curves billowing into three dimensions like gently tumbling waves. Streak 2, in particular, boasts an exceptional exhibition history: the work featured in major retrospectives at Tate Britain, London in 2003 and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh in 2019, as well as gracing the catalogue covers for Riley’s shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2004 and the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, in 2005.

The curator Paul Moorhouse explains that Riley’s curve paintings represent ‘some of the most serene and emotionally radiant that she has ever painted’ (‘A Dialogue with Sensation: The Art of Bridget Riley’, in Bridget Riley, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2003, p. 21). Her works from the end of the 1970s, in particular—he writes—‘radiate a kind of pacific calm’, defined by ‘a flooding of the pictorial field with light and movement’ (‘The Ultimate Secret of Things: Perception and Sensation in Bridget Riley’s Art’, in Bridget Riley: Paintings and Drawings 1961–2004, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004, p. 20). Riley, for her part, views these paintings in lyrical, deeply sensual terms. Noting parallels with dance, she explains that ‘the vertical line around which the curve moves is, in fact, the way the human body moves’ (‘About Curves’, op. cit., pp. 47-53). As a structure, she elaborates, it is ‘wonderfully supple, fluid and strong. It can twist and bend, flow and sway, sometimes with the diagonal, sometimes against, so that the tempo is either accelerated or held back, delayed’ (quoted in R. Kudielka, ‘Supposed to be Abstract’, Parkett, No. 61, 2001, p. 26).

Streak 2 stems from an electrifying period in Riley’s practice. 1978 saw the beginning of a major two-year touring retrospective that travelled through America, Australia and Asia. With it travelled Riley herself, absorbing new ideas and influences in each new location. She attended—and re-attended—major retrospectives of work by Cezanne and Monet: artists who lay at the heart of her visual world. She visited the landscapes of Tahiti that had once inspired Gauguin, marvelled at the Great Barrier Reef, stood before Ayers Rock and imbibed the dazzling colours of Bali’s theatres and festivals. For all its serenity, Streak 2 seems to thrill with the force of these fresh stimuli, distilling the wonders of nature and art history into a vision of powerful, resonant clarity. It represents, in many ways, the grand culmination of the curve paintings: later that year, Riley would begin her landmark journey through Egypt, and the stripe would return once more.

Riley’s so-called ‘Egyptian palette’—inspired by the five colours that dominated the tombs of the Pharaohs—would occupy her for much of the 1980s. Over the following decades she would explore a number of other forms, including diagonal parallelograms, or ‘zigs’, and large curved planes inspired by Henri Matisse. The stripe, however, would make a striking comeback in 2009. Riley had identified early on that form and colour ‘destroy each other’, arguing that ‘colour energies need a virtually neutral vehicle if they are to develop uninhibitedly’ (in conversation with R. Kudielka, 1972, in R. Kudielka, op. cit., 2019, p. 146). The stripe, more than any other structure in her oeuvre, served this purpose. Beginning with the series Rose Rose, and extending into a rhapsodic suite of large-scale vertical and horizontal canvases between 2010 and 2017, it took centre stage once more, allowing Riley to explore a new set of chromatic relationships.

The palette in question is eloquently showcased in Aria (Azure) (2013-2014). It was a spectrum that Riley had toyed with back in the 1980s, consisting of her Egyptian colours—ochre, brick red, blue, turquoise and green—with added tones of red, pink and orange. Originally inspired by a trip to a Renoir exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1985, these warmer hues would dominate the stripe paintings of the 2010s, lending a new sense of depth and radiance to Riley’s art. Kudielka writes that the horizontal works from this series, in particular, ‘suggest an affinity with landscape’, reflecting her admiration for Monet and Seurat (Bridget Riley: The Complete Paintings. Volume 4 2009-2017, London, 2018, p. 1224). For Moorhouse, too, these ‘exhilarating and entrancing’ canvases are ‘movingly redolent of things seen and savoured—vast skies, the dying of the light, distant horizons and new dawns’ (Bridget Riley: Die Streifenbilder / The Stripe Paintings 1961-2012, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2013, pp. 46-47).

Aria (Azure), like many works in the series, references Riley’s love of music. While many of the artist’s titles are obliquely evocative—Byzantium conjures a gilded ancient world, Streak the flourish of the artist’s brush—her invocation of sonic phenomena is often deliberate. For Riley, music and painting are similarly abstract, each providing a ‘sensual experience’ through the organisation of limited formal and structural elements. In both, she writes, ‘the abstract formulation is both the key to an original experience and the actual realisation of it’ (in conversation with A. Farquharson, ‘Something to Look At’, 1995, in R. Kudielka, op. cit., 2019, p. 206). In Aria (Azure), chromatic relationships are echoed and countered like interwoven lines of polyphony; light flares and fades with a driving sense of pulse. Moorhouse writes that the dynamic of these works ‘is distinctly musical … Few artists have used colour so rhythmically, harnessing visual sensations to visceral responses’ (op. cit., 2013, p. 47).

Riley conceives her own role, too, in these terms. ‘I am, like the musician, a kind of “listener in,”’ she has explained, ‘—overhearing potential activities’ (in conversation with R. Kudielka, op. cit., 1972, p. 148). It is this, perhaps more than anything, that accounts for the rich subtleties of her practice. She attends to modulations of tone; she hears the flux of harmony and discord. She listens to the complexities of colour, and they—in turn—sing back.