After decades of Op Art, Bridget Riley still makes one’s head spin, without harmful side-effects. She did it in retrospective at Dia, and she does it again twenty years later in drawings from her collection at the Morgan Library, through October 8.
How, then, does Op Art make one’s head spin even now? It takes stepping back and taking pains. Riley says as much at the Morgan: “holding myself at a certain distance enables me to be more engaged, not less.” And, she adds, stepping back puts her in the place of the viewer, for the viewer, too, is part of the work. After all, where in the world is that sensation or illusion, if not in one’s spinning head? 
So it is, at least, on the surface, and few artists are half as concerned for surfaces—and how they give rise to the sensation of light and mass. Born in 1931, she had a duly academic education at Goldsmiths, where she “drew day and night,” with little regard for the latest thing. She sketched The Raising of Lazarus, not after any particular Renaissance painting I can name, but fascinated by the dark solidity of bodies and a tomb. She drew heads, with serious skill and attention, and a house in the style of Pointillism and Georges Seurat. Even there, color is subordinate to light and mass. It would be years after her turn to abstraction before color again entered her art.
She had to step back, too, because engagement for her demanded a patient objectivity. Her drawings rarely have the impact of her paintings, and few have exhibited before. The Morgan’s selection comes entirely from her, and that, too, makes sense, because painting for her could came about painstakingly, step by step, and the first step took place in her studio. Often she annotates a drawing, with read like to-do lists. She had to discover the hard way what comes next. Like Seurat but without his care for middle-class society or his shimmer, she had to discover how light can emerge from line.
Ever the student and the observer, she had to train herself to look. The show charts her progress from stripes to parallelograms to curves, much like Riley’s retrospectives in 2001 and 2003—and I invite you to read my review then for a fuller account. Yet it tapers off as early as 1985 and pretty much cuts off with the new century. It is more about her coming to be. One can number the discoveries that went into her art in little more than decade, staring in 1964. Who knew that Pop Art’s illusion could take so many steps?
She set realism aside at last in 1961, with fields of black akin to fields of color for Ellsworth Kelly. They seem to take on mass as they reach out toward one another as if to touch, in The Kiss. Soon enough come curves, nested circles, and smaller repeated elements. She wants to see how unseen shapes can emerge from the grid. Sometimes she works on lined paper, as if to rein in the free play of unpredictable curves. It will take another thirty years before compositions became that irregular once and for all.
Color appears in 1967, although even then she backs off for a bit. She cares more for how slight variations in spacing and direction can set static shapes in motion and into the light. Could that be what defines Op Art after all, not undulating color? The Beatles back then were going psychedelic, and the parallel is unmistakable. Still, this is not your mind on drugs. This is your mind on abstract art.
The first dizzying vision appears in 1974, and her trip without tripping is complete. Riley takes up collage around 2000, but then she was not the first artist approaching seventy to needs resources other than her hand and a brush. Think of Matisse cutouts. This may be her first show of drawings, curated by Rachel Federman of the Morgan, Cynthia Burlingham of the Hammer Museum, and Jay A. Clark of the Art Institute of Chicago. Not that she has lacked for exhibitions, and not much is new. Still, one can learn when to step back.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.