T he British artist Bridget Riley, widely acknowledged as one of the most important living painters, is ‘in total agreement' with founding master of Abstraction, Piet Mondrian.
This is how she elegantly summed up her long-held admiration for the Dutch painter, in an insightful new discussion with Sotheby's Executive Vice President and Chairman, Oliver Barker.
Riley’s fascination with Mondrian began when she was still a student in London, when she was ‘amazed’ by a reproduction of the artist’s pivotal Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942). One of the most important works in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, this painting is distinctive in Mondrian’s oeuvre, for its abundance of colored squares referencing Manhattan’s criss-crossing streets and the blues music which Mondrian loved. Riley’s own work, similarly, foregrounds the interplay between abstraction and sensory experience, with the geometric composition and color precision that Mondrian innovated.
During a trip to New York in 1965 – when her work was included in the influential exhibition ‘The Responsive Eye’ at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a solo show at Richard Feigen gallery – Riley visited the home of art collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine. There, she observed Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), Mondrian’s final painting. Emily Hall Tremaine later recounted that Riley declared the painting to be, ‘the greatest influence on her work’.
Riley draws inspiration for her work from artists ranging from Titian, Seurat and Umberto Boccioni to Matisse and Victor Vasarely. But Mondrian's profound influence has dominated, throughout her career. She has written several essays about the artist, including ‘Mondrian: The Universal and The Particular’ for The Burlington Magazine in 1996. Most significantly, in 1997, Riley curated (with Sean Rainbird) ‘Mondrian, Nature to Abstraction’ at the Tate in London.
The exhibition collected masterpieces on loan from the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which was temporarily closed for renovation. And under Riley’s curation, it profoundly demonstrated her beguiled perspective on Mondrian’s ingenuity, with a particular emphasis on his artistic evolution. As The Art Newspaper’s review noted in 1997, the exhibition featured, ‘an extraordinary series of trees [that] map the artist’s development over two decades, from the observation of nature to the brink of abstraction.’
‘What I asked of Mondrian’, she tells Oliver Barker in their conversation. ‘[Was] how did he come to paint it? Through what stages had his practice developed and evolved to paint something like that?’
It is one of several insights in this riveting conversation not only into a key influence upon the very framework of Riley’s practice over the years, but also her continuing enthrallment to an artist, whose resounding impact continues to reverberate across the art world, and down the decades.
