Hello. I’m Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. I’m pleased to welcome you to Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio.

The British artist Bridget Riley is one of the most celebrated abstract painters of her generation. She first came to international prominence in the 1960s with innovative black-and-white works that produce pronounced optical effects. Over six decades, she has continued to make the act of looking her central artistic concern. Her drawings, or studies, as she refers to them, are at the heart of her studio process, which is intuitive rather than scientific. In this exhibition—the first in over fifty years to focus exclusively on her drawings—you will see the evolution of Riley’s distinctive vision, beginning with figurative and landscape works from her student years. All of the works in the gallery have been kept by the artist, a fact which underscores their personal and professional significance. We are very grateful to Riley for sharing them with us on this occasion.

On this tour, you will hear excerpts from interviews Bridget Riley has given over the years. A prolific writer and frequent subject of interviews, she is an extremely engaging narrator of her own career. The clips will be introduced by Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum.

As you move through the gallery, look for the audio symbols to discover these clips. Thank you for joining us at the Morgan. We hope you enjoy your visit.

Rachel Federman: Hi, I'm Rachel Federman, associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, and co-curator of the exhibition: Bridget Riley Drawings: from the Artist's Studio. In this interview from 2019, Riley reminisces about her decision to attend art school.

Bridget Riley Drawings: from the Artist's Studio. In this interview from 2019, Riley reminisces about her decision to attend art school: Bridget Riley: Before I started to draw, though, I started to look. I actually didn't think about being an artist at all. Well, I didn't think about art either. I thought, to find a context in which somehow I could exercise something in me, which I didn't know what it was, but it was about looking. And where to do that, it just seemed, that, the only place I could go was to an art school.

Rachel Federman: In this conversation from 2019, Riley talks about her discovery of the Post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat, whose pointillist paintings laid the foundation for her use of color.

Bridget Riley: I was struggling with, um, this unwieldy thing called color . And, um, I was applying it in little dabs, and these little dabs were not organized in any way. They had no internal logic, they had no raison d'être. And the National Gallery had, for years, um, Seurat's great painting The Bathers, which you could see as you came up the stairs on the right hand side through the window. And the light and, and the beauty of the color, was, uh, was something I couldn't pass by.

Rachel Federman: During World War II, with her father in the service, Riley left London with her mother, sister, and aunt, seeking safety in the coastal countryside. The idyllic landscape of Cornwall became the backdrop to a nightmare when, in 1942, Riley’s father was reported missing in action. For two years the family had no news of his whereabouts. Although it was a frightening period for the young Riley, she credits this time in the country, as well as the period in the 1950s when she made this drawing, with establishing her sensibility as an artist. Here Riley remembers her childhood home in Cornwall.

Bridget Riley: We had a very small cottage, four rooms, and, um, we were, I didn't go to school, not for, not for quite a long time, which was very, very heavenly . So there was in fact, uh, nothing to do, but look and enjoy and appreciate and move around and walk in this extraordinary beautiful landscape.

Rachel Federman: In this recent interview, Riley discusses her transition in 1960 from figurative to abstract painting:

Bridget Riley: I had been a figurative painter, and it was through looking and using my sight, powers of observation and observing, responding like the impressionists and the post-impressionists had to what we saw, and relating that to what went on to canvas. That in fact, switching it round then enabled me to put [on] things onto canvas, which one could look at.

Rachel Federman: In the spring of 1965, Riley’s work appeared in “The Responsive Eye,” a controversial exhibition of optical, or what came to be known as “Op art,” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her painting Current, comprising undulating waves similar to those seen here, appeared on the catalogue cover. The exhibition brought extraordinary attention to Riley’s work, but also challenges, as she saw her work co-opted without her permission for fashion and advertising. During this period, Riley spoke hesitatingly to an interviewer about the pressures of success:

Bridget Riley: You know, there is a philosophy since the 19th century of failure, which protects an artist. There's a moral equation between failure and value, um, and we've got geared to this. Well, now we've got this problem of success and there's no actual philosophy to, to cope with; we've got to evolve one. And there's a, um, I think this is going to be what ... one of the problems.

Rachel Federman: The path to Riley’s abstract paintings begins with the exploration of basic pictorial elements. In this 2019 interview, she describes her use of line, the most fundamental element of drawing:

Bridget Riley: Pictorial elements are the agents to which you can put these things through their paces. You need something to do something with . You can't, you can't explore, uh, without an agent. My line, I think, actually, uh, is my agent or was for a very, very long time. It can be a drawn line, as it was. With drawn lines, I've worked on making Movement in Squares and drawn lines through some of those big paintings- many of the big paintings. The curve is a curved line. It's, ... it's a line which has been, uh, bent in what I think is rather like the twists of a body. It takes different angles, different positions.

Rachel Federman: While Riley’s use of graph paper and architects’ tools gave early critics the impression of a scientific approach, she always emphasized her intuition. In this interview from the 1960s, Riley explains her intuitive process:

Bridget Riley: There's a line(s)- one line, one line, which gives me then, uh, leeway with the, ... with the other component parts of an element. And I put it, I serialize it, I put it through its paces, I examine what one can do. But having examined it, there are certain things that I'll reject and certain ones I'll accept, and the basis for that is intuitive. Why I reject something, I, in fact am not very clear.

Rachel Federman: In this recent interview, Riley recalls her shift in the mid-1960s from black-and-white to color:

Bridget Riley: Well, I was heading towards it, uh, because I had reached a certain understanding of color and certain ability to, to deal with it in, um, through my copies of, my copy of Seurat, and I, I'd come to understand something very important about color through that, uh, the induction of color, that is, color can induce, uh, something it's not. So it's an immense, unstable, essentially unstable, um, but, because of that, a huge, exciting field... to work with.

Rachel Federman: Of all the elements Riley uses in her work, the circle poses the biggest challenge. This drawing from 1970 is connected to a series of paintings Riley waited forty years to make. In this clip, she discusses a related series of disc paintings, called Measure for Measure.

Bridget Riley: That problem of the integral nature of a circle, uh, the fact you can't really break it. Measure for Measure paintings, the viewer, you, me, when I'm working, um, I explore possible glances that you may have. You may pick up this diagonal, that diagonal, another one. As you see one, another one comes up to replace it. So like our own looking, it moves.

Rachel Federman: In this clip from the 1970s, Riley explains the dynamics of repetition, rhythm, and pace in undulating works such as this one:

Bridget Riley: Repetition acts as a sort of amplifier for visual events, which seen singly, would hardly be visible. But to make these basic forms release the full visual energy within them, they have to breathe, as it were, to open and close, or to tighten up and then relax. A rhythm that's alive has to do with changing pace, and feeling how the visual speed can expand and contract; sometimes go slower, and sometimes go faster. The whole thing must live.

Rachel Federman: In this interview clip from 2020, Riley discusses a certain paradox in works like this one, which is composed of vertical bands of color: On one hand, it appears to present itself immediately and completely to a viewer; on the other hand, it requires time to be fully apprehended.

Bridget Riley: I know that my paintings declare absolutely everything. Nothing is hidden whatsoever. At the same time, by looking at it, you find things to look at and you see colors, and so things open out. So I am fortunate to have both.

Rachel Federman: The example set by Sam Rabin, Riley’s primary instructor at London’s Goldsmiths College, ignited in her a passion for arts education that persists to this day. Few people realize that Riley was herself a teacher, instructing schoolchildren in art in the mid-1950s, and older students into the 1960s. In 2021, Riley reflected on the way that young people, especially children, interact with her work:

Bridget Riley: They can see that it's about how I think. And that is widespread, and they like that, and they like that they're included in this, and I'm very thrilled that they feel included.