Bridget Riley in Paris

The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in the Palais de Tokyo, is one of my favorite museums. It has just opened a Bridget Riley retrospective, the first one in France, which will run through September 14. The point is to resituate our understanding of the artist, in terms of the movement with which she is usually associated, Op Art. Harry Bellet has a review (Bridget Riley, couleurs solaires et effets d'optique, June 14) in Le Monde (my translation):

Riley has her roots not in Vasarely but in Seurat. The sense of rhythm comes from the Italian futurists, and her move into abstraction follows the same process as Mondrian. The first room, where one is recommended to linger, makes this clear.

On the left, a copy of Seurat's Pont de Courbevoie, testifies to the young artist's desire understand the function, as much optical as pictural, of the theory of simultaneous contrasts, of the interaction of one color on its neighbor, of the virtual appearance of a third tone when two complementary colors are placed side by side. On the right, a series of drawings, rhythmically animated like a crowded gym: these are not men in movement but Tuscan vines. Nearby, some trees, in pencil, are so synthetic that almost become abstract.

For lots more information, see this PDF file.