Bridget Riley

Baesler Collection, Hannover
Galerie M, Bochum
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1983

“Tonal progression was first introduced as a theme on its own in Black to White Discs (1962), Riley’s largest canvas to date. The painting accommodates a centrally placed diamond of evenly spaced identical discs which advance and recede according to a successive modulation of tone. Although the fullest sequence from the palest grey on the left to the black is longer and slower than its reverse on the right, the suggestion of symmetry is so strong that the eye tends to cling to the vertical centre of the diamond until one discovers that the true tonal centre of the image, the line of absolutely black discs, is just a little to the right. Such veiled subliminal moves play an important part in the fabric of Riley’s painting right through to the present day.” (Robert Kudielka in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, 1999, p. 26)

Gently mesmerising the viewer into the visceral complexities of its apparently simple composition, Study for Black to White Discs represents one of the first examples of Bridget Riley’s now legendary series of Black and White Paintings. This body of work made her one of the biggest stars in the London art scene during the 1960s, a decade which would culminate, in 1968, with her becoming the first living British painter to win the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. Executed in 1961, a year before the large scale painting of the same name, Study for Black to White Discs shows the origins and indeed provided the fundamental basis upon which Riley’s entire oeuvre was founded. Way before Minimalism had found its voice, Riley restricted herself to the most simplified means of colour and form to find the purest abstract language based on optical effects. Founded in the rhythmic compositional dynamics of the Futurist Giacomo Balla, the subtlety of line of Piet Mondrian and the optical Pointilism of Georges Seurat, Bridget Riley managed to find a universal abstract language which seemed to provide an extremely profound key to the way we see. As Robert Melville has said, “No painter, dead or alive has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.” (Robert Melville, New Statesman, 1971)

The appearance of the Futurists at the Venice Biennale in 1960 had made a huge impact on Riley. In particular, she responded directly to Giacomo Balla’s work (see Fig. 1) and the idea that sensations of movement and light were most effectively conveyed, not by illustration but by equivalent pictorial means, in this case through the interpenetration of repeated lines. These ideas chimed with her earlier interest in the chromatic rhythms contained within Van Gogh’s expressionism and Seurat’s Pointillism and became the pivotal moment for Riley’s artistic development. 1961 became a year of prodigious activity for Riley and her new-found clarity of aim found her making rich discoveries at every turn. Several major works were completed that year and included in her first one man show at Gallery One in London in 1962, including Black to White Discs.    

Study for Black to White Discs sets up a fizzing visual field in which the graduation of tone, an integral compositional element of most of her subsequent works, appears for the very first time. Here it is used as a means of modulating a regular progression of circles with a sense of space and time. The key to this strategy lies in the notion that grey, as an intermediate step between black and white, can be used to introduce stages in the transition between these two opposites. In Study for Black to White Discs, as the eye meanders across the field of dots, the visual rhythm is established through tonal gradation. This functions as the basis for a kind of ‘visual time’ in a similar way to the number of beats in a passage of music being responsible for its tempo. In 1967, Riley explained this as follows: “Grey is midway between black and white and clearly this relation is encompassed in three stages; white, mid-grey and black. But you can make a progression of five beats, seven beats, twenty-four and so on and so on and all the time you are in fact changing the tempo.” In 1978, she went on to say “I wanted something which operated on more levels, was capable of more development, had a more grey’d quality, like the indeterminate nature of reality.” (Both quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Bridget Riley, 2003, p. 17)

This quest for the ultimate metaphor for nature has anchored a lifetime of painting, using the simplest of painterly means. Adopting a quiet, intelligent approach to her art which allows it to be viewed on several levels. The initially direct optical sensation quickly turns to an inquisitiveness into the nature of its construction and meaning behind the science. It is perhaps for this reason that her inspiration grows ever farther in the new century and artists such as Damien Hirst are adapting her ideas about the relationships between art and science to new Conceptual levels. Indeed one can see a direct compositional correlation between his signature ‘Spot’ paintings and Study for Black to White Discs. After years of relative quiet, it is apt that recent outstanding retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Dia Center for the Arts, New York and then at Tate Britain, London over the last five years have restored Riley’s reputation as one of the most important abstract painters alive.