For British artists over countless years, Egypt has been a rich source of inspiration.
Famously, Agatha Christie’s visit to Upper Egypt shaped her novel, Death on the Nile (1937). Virginia Woolf was engaged with Egypt’s ancient civilisations, with references to the country littered across her essays and diaries, as with her references to Cleopatra in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. Earlier, in 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of Egypt as an “antique land” in the poem Ozymandias, familiar to generations of British schoolchildren.
However, for the British artist Bridget Riley, this inspiration gave rise to radically different results. After visiting Egypt in the winter of 1979-80, Riley developed her Egyptian Palette, influenced by the colours of Egypt’s landscapes from Cairo to Luxor.
These colours Riley laid out in oscillating strips running the length of her canvases, named after the places she visited: Luxor (1982), The Winter Palace (1981), and ancient Egyptian gods and principles: Ra (1981), Ka (1980).
Born in London in 1931 and raised in rural England, Riley attended the British Royal College of Art in the capital, painting semi-impressionist and figurative work drawing on the German expressionist artist Paul Klee and American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.
Later, in the 1960s, Riley closely studied Georges Seurat, the French neo-impressionist. Famous for his use of the painting technique pointillism, where paintings are made up of small dots of colour, Seurat helped inform Riley’s scientific approach to painting.
Treating painting as a form of optical investigation, Riley began to produce radically different works, known as op, or optical art. With roots in cubism, futurism and dada, the term ‘op art’ was first coined by Time magazine in 1964. Engaging directly with the viewer’s perception, op art’s use of geometric forms and repeating patterns create optical illusions of movement and depth.
Riley’s art lost its colour, replaced by precise geometric shapes and lines, drifting, pulsing and shimmering before the viewer’s eyes.
In Movement in Squares (1961), Riley generates a powerful sense of tension and movement through a subtle manipulation of geometry, destabilising the viewer’s sense of space. Similarly, with Fall (1963), the distinction between the static image and perceived motion begins to dissolve through Riley’s use of undulating black and white lines.
Pushed into the public eye with the 1965 “Responsive Eye” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Riley’s work gained popularity despite disapproval from critics, and began to appear in commercial contexts.
Egypt changed Riley. After her visit, Riley painted several works using the same group of colours, inspired by the green, verdant Nile Delta, surrounding desert, and the vivid colours found in tombs of the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Workers in Luxor.
Unlike many artists who travelled to Egypt seeking its monuments or history, Riley was fascinated by the country’s visual qualities. The sharp contrast between the fertile green of the Nile Valley and the surrounding desert, combined with the intense Egyptian light, offered her a new way of thinking about colour.
Rather than depicting recognisable landscapes, Riley abstracted these experiences into bands of colour interacting on the canvas. In works such as Ka and Ra, her colour generates movement, as neighbouring hues appear to advance and recede before the viewer’s eyes. Egypt did not lead Riley away from Op Art. Instead, it transformed it.
Riley’s Egyptian Palette provides us with an enchanting perception of Egypt, reduced to a palette that is at once earthy and vibrant, capturing the brilliance and intensity of Egyptian life.
At the same time, Riley’s work differs radically from the position on Egypt previously taken by British artists. Victorian painters brought back to Britain an idealised version of Egypt, focusing almost exclusively on Upper Egypt’s Ancient Egyptian ruins.
Like Riley, the Victorian painter Edward Lear visited Egypt in the winter of 1848-49, making two subsequent visits back to the Nile in the next 20 years. Lear’s paintings of the Ancient Egyptian temples around Luxor and Aswan have almost no signs of life. In fact, in a View from Luxor (1854), Lear reduced the number of Egyptians in his painting, leaving only a handful of people around the painting’s focus: the temple.
Rather than seeing a modern society, Victorian painters viewed Egypt through the lens of antiquity, as was the case with British writers describing a country on the cusp of falling under British colonial control.
As indicated by Richard Johns, Riley’s use of colour more closely resembles the Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun, with both using a palette evocative of Egypt’s rural landscapes, evoking a warm, organic vision of Egypt.
While the British painters of the 1800s forced their perception of Egypt upon their paintings, Riley allowed Egypt to influence her, providing an elegant, fresh example of how foreign artists interact with modern Egypt. Riley’s Egyptian Palette remains a fascinating, telling interpretation of the country that inspired her, and so many others since.
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