The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bridget Riley · tempera on hardboard, a nearly square panel, in black and white only · a chequerboard of black and white units in horizontal rows, the columns narrowing from the left toward a vertical line set right of centre, where the units become slivers, then widening again over a short run to the right edge · painted 1961 · the unit scored is the one panel, as it stands
Mode
Optical abstraction; the grid of geometric painting made to fail before the eye, with the perceptual effect as the whole subject
Mythos
Evoked only: the abyss and the fall, the game board, the perspectival pavement buckled; order and its breach, kept a pattern of seeing
Phase
Painted 1961; the first of the painter’s black and white paintings in which the effect is the whole work, before Fall and Current
Presentation
Tempera on a nearly square hardboard panel, painted by hand; black and white only, flat and matte; no colour, no line, no figure
Register
Cool, almost clinical; a mild vertigo, sustained and renewed on every look
Scale
One panel, two values, one unit and one direction of change, across the width only
Governing Proposition
A nearly square panel holds nothing but black and white units in rows, a chequerboard. From the left edge the columns narrow, step by step, toward a vertical line set to the right of centre, where the squares become slivers; then over a short run they widen again to the right edge. The panel is flat and perfectly still. The eye makes it fold: the surface seems to fall away along that line and come back. The wager of the painting is that the grid, the most stable of modern forms, can be made to undo itself in the viewer, and that this event, with nothing else, can be the whole of a work.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Bridget Riley painted Movement in Squares in 1961, in tempera on hardboard. The panel is nearly square and holds two values only, black and white: no colour, no line, no figure. The unit scored is the one panel as it stands. The painter’s other black and white paintings of the early and middle 1960s, Kiss, Fall, Current and the rest, her copy after Seurat, and Op Art as a movement are context, and are not scored.
The panel is a chequerboard of black and white units in horizontal rows. Each row repeats the column widths of the row above, in alternate phase, so that black sits under white and white under black all the way down. The progression runs across the width and not down the height. From the left edge the columns narrow, step by step, toward a vertical line set to the right of centre, where the units become slivers; then over a short run they widen again to the right edge. The surface seems to fold or fall away along that line. The number of rows and columns, and whether the narrowing runs by equal differences or by a constant ratio, are not stated here.
The subtractive test hardly finds a purchase. There is one element, the unit, and one operation, its narrowing; every column is a step in the progression, and to remove one is to break the rate, which is the whole content. The two values cannot be reduced, and colour would turn a perceptual event into a pattern of hues. The short widening after the fold is required: without it the surface would recede to an edge, and with it the eye finds a crease and a return. The necessity is a rule’s, generated rather than searched for. The parts are required as the terms of a series are, and a slightly different rate would make a slightly different painting of equal claim; that is what holds the work short of the top of its axis.
Movement II
The work lives at the line right of centre. There the squares have become slivers, black and white crowding so close that the black seems to shimmer, and the eye, crossing them, feels the surface give way. Then, over a few columns, the widths open again and the eye is returned. The crease is not drawn: no line marks it. It is a place in the rate, the point at which the narrowing stops and turns, and the eye makes of that turn a fold in space.
The painting knows one thing, that a regular structure can be made to undo itself in the eye, and it knows it only through this form. The alternation of black and white gives the greatest contrast and so the strongest after-effect. The progressive narrowing turns a flat grid into a recession. The fold set off centre makes the surface seem to turn rather than simply to sink. The near square lets no direction dominate but the one the progression imposes. Change the values to colour, regularise the widths or centre the crease, and the knowledge is gone. Only one thing holds the form short of the limit: it is a system, and part of what it knows the same system would know at another size or rate.
The elevation is real, of one kind, and physical: a lurch, a sense of the surface giving way, a mild vertigo near the dreadful side of the sublime, in miniature. It is sustained, since the effect does not exhaust at first sight and returns each time the eye crosses the crease. But it is felt as an optical event before a body, not as a space the body enters. There is no grandeur and no transport, and the register is cool, almost clinical. It rises to one height and stays there. Beside a canvas of storm and stars, or a field of colour that holds the viewer in a room, it is a lesser elevation, honest and constant.
Movement III
Take the two most distant elements, a full square at the left edge and a sliver at the crease. One law holds them: the same unit under the same progression, the sliver only the square at another place in the rate. Every element is that law, with no exception, no second mark and no accident. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is about as small as painting allows: two values, one shape, one direction of change. What lifts the figure is the range within it. The calm, full grid at the left and the surface giving way at the crease are rest and collapse under one law, a wider span than the means suggest.
What comes into the open is that seeing is not a reception but an act, and an unstable one. A still panel of two values is made by the eye into depth, a fold and a movement, and the viewer catches perception doing what it was not asked to do. The painting puts its event in the viewer rather than on the panel. It discloses also the limits of control: the body’s balance is unsettled by a flat surface. This holds and can be stated. But it is a truth about the apparatus of seeing, not an articulated human or social condition; it discloses how we see, not what a life is, and much of what it gives is a sensation, which ranks below a meaning.
Little of the archetypal is here, and that little is evoked. The fold reads as an abyss, the ground opening, the old image of falling. The chequerboard summons the board of a game and the tiled pavement on which Renaissance painting set its figures in perspective, here buckled. None of these is built; each is a reading the eye brings to an abstract structure, and the painting refuses narrative and figure by design. The deepest pattern it makes visible is order and its breach, the regular grid collapsing into a crease. It stays a pattern of seeing rather than a myth.
Movement IV
The inheritance is geometric abstraction: Mondrian, Albers’ studies of interaction, and Vasarely’s black and white optical works of the 1950s; and, in the painter’s own formation, Seurat, whose divided colour she had copied. The departure is real. She took the grid, the most stable of modern forms, and made it fail before the eye; she made the viewer’s perception, not the panel’s composition, the subject; and she did it with the barest means. The stake was high for an unknown painter of about thirty, set against British painting of the late 1950s, which was gestural and figurative, and with a manner that could be taken for design or trick, as it soon was. What holds the swerve short of its gate is the precedent: Vasarely had made black and white optical structures for a decade, and the turn sharpens and recentres an existing line rather than breaking from nothing.
The making is load-bearing. The effect depends wholly on exactness: the panel is painted by hand, the progression calculated and drawn, the edges kept clean enough that the eye reads a fold rather than a wobble. The blacks are flat and matte so that no brushmark interrupts the illusion, and the slivers at the crease, where an error would show most, hold. The command is complete within a narrow instrument: one mark, one operation, no colour, no modelling, no drawing beyond the ruled edge, and an execution the painter would later hand to assistants for works of this kind. It stands below a canvas that commands colour, light, interval and surface together.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its form, its necessity, its law and its survival stand high; but what it discloses is a fact about the eye, its archetypes are evoked and none built, and its swerve and its reach are shared with a precedent and a movement. Against White Center (8.0) it is level on disclosure, form and survival, higher on necessity and lower elsewhere, most of all on the sublime. Above Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (7.6), the nearest posted work of perceptual effect, it stands higher on nine axes and lower on the sublime, the archetypal and the encompassed. Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.4), the grid made to move by another means, stands above it on every axis, and Black Square (8.3) and Vir Heroicus Sublimis (8.4) carry a swerve and a pressure on tradition this panel does not claim. Boléro (7.9), one process carried to its end in another art, stands a tenth above it, and Music for 18 Musicians (8.3), pattern and perception in time, higher still.
Movement V
This panel is the first of the painter’s black and white paintings in which the perceptual effect is the whole of the work and the viewer’s eye its medium, and the line runs directly from it to Fall and Current. Riley’s black and white works stood at the centre of the Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye in 1965, the exhibition that named Op Art internationally. Within a few years the manner had entered fashion and design, which the painter resisted, and later painters of perception and pattern take it as a source. Much of that reach belongs to the series and to the movement rather than to this one panel, and Vasarely shares it; the movement was brief as a movement.
The panel is whole, and no loss is known. Tempera on hardboard is a stable support, and its matte surface would show any scuffing or retouching in the blacks, a general risk only. Its image is widely reproduced as the emblem of the painter’s beginning and of optical painting, and the painter’s standing has risen since rather than fallen. The panel is understood to be held in a collection that lends and tours its works rather than hanging them in one place; that is not verified here, and presence is charged a little for it. The manner was a fashion of the mid 1960s, and the image has outlived the fashion. In sixty-five years of return the effect has renewed on every look, while the questions it raises, painting or experiment, art on the panel or in the eye, stay partly open; but once the mechanism is seen its meaning does not grow.
The orders it holds are perception itself, the body in the balance it unsettles, consciousness in a viewer made aware of seeing, and space in the illusion of a fold, integrated as one event seen four ways. The person, the family, labour, the state, history, nature and the sacred are absent, and the figure describes the form, which chooses its smallness. At the left the grid lies calm and full; at the right of centre it gives way; and the panel, which has never moved, is still falling away along the line the eye finds in it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test hardly finds a purchase. The panel has one element, the black and white unit, and one operation, its narrowing across the width. Every column is a step in that progression, and to remove one is to break the rate, which is the whole content. The two values cannot be reduced, and colour would turn a perceptual event into a pattern of hues. The short widening after the fold is required: without it the surface would simply recede to an edge; with it the eye finds a crease and a return. What holds the axis below the top is the kind of necessity: a rule’s, generated rather than searched for, so that a slightly different rate would make a slightly different painting of equal claim.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What comes into the open can be stated and holds: seeing is not a reception but an act, and an unstable one. A flat panel of two values, perfectly still, is made by the eye into depth, a fold and a movement, and the viewer catches perception doing what it was not asked to do. The event is put in the viewer rather than on the panel, a real disclosure through image, and one about the limits of control too, the body’s balance unsettled by a surface. What holds it well short of the gate is its kind: a truth about the apparatus of seeing, not an articulated human or social condition. Much of what it gives is a sensation, a vertigo, which ranks below a meaning.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is real, of one kind, and physical: a lurch, a sense of the surface giving way along the fold, a mild vertigo close to the dreadful side of the sublime in miniature. It is sustained rather than single, since the effect does not exhaust at first sight and returns each time the eye crosses the crease. But its height is limited by its kind and its scale. The falling away is felt as an optical event before a body, not as a space the body enters. There is no grandeur and no transport, and the register is cool, almost clinical. It rises to one height and stays there: honest and constant, and lower than a field of colour that holds a viewer in a room.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Little of the archetypal is here, and what there is comes evoked. The fold reads as an abyss, the ground opening, the old image of falling; the chequerboard summons the board of a game and the tiled pavement on which Renaissance painting set its figures in perspective, here buckled. None of these is built: each is a reading the eye brings to an abstract structure. The painting refuses narrative and figure by design, and a pure perceptual structure has no particular to carry archetypal weight. The most that can be said is that the regular grid collapsing into a crease makes a deep pattern visible, order and its breach. It stays a pattern of seeing rather than a myth.
Score: 6.5 / 10
The inheritance is geometric abstraction: Mondrian, Albers’ studies of interaction, Vasarely’s black and white optical works of the 1950s, and, in the painter’s own formation, Seurat, whose divided colour she had copied. The departure is real. She takes the grid, the most stable of modern forms, and makes it fail before the eye; she makes the viewer’s perception, not the panel’s composition, the subject; and she does it with the barest means, black, white and a progression. The stake was high: an unknown painter of about thirty, against British painting of the late 1950s, gestural and figurative, in a manner that could be taken for design or trick, as it soon was. Vasarely’s decade of precedent makes the turn a sharpening, not a break from nothing.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely, almost to the limit of the axis. The painting knows one thing, that a regular structure can be made to undo itself in the eye, and knows it only through this form: the alternation of black and white, which gives the greatest contrast and so the strongest after-effect; the progressive narrowing, which turns a flat grid into a recession; the fold set off centre, which makes the surface seem to turn rather than sink; the near square, which lets no direction dominate but the one the progression imposes. Change the values to colour, regularise the widths or centre the crease, and the knowledge is gone. Held a step below the top because the form is a system, and part of what it knows the system would know at another size or rate.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-five years of return, as the founding panel of a long and closely studied career and as a standard instance in the writing on optical painting and on perception. The work yields on return in one way. The effect renews every time, and attention moves from the fold to the edges, to the slight return of the widths, to the black that seems to shimmer where the slivers crowd. Questions stay partly open: whether it is a painting or an experiment, whether the art is on the panel or in the eye, how its rule bears on the painter’s later colour. But the semantic return is shallow. Once the mechanism is seen the painting makes no new meaning; its depth is perceptual and repeatable rather than inexhaustible.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is abstract painting in Britain and Europe in the early 1960s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the perceptual effect becomes the whole of the work and the viewer’s eye its medium, with the strictest economy of means, and this panel is the first of the painter’s black and white paintings to do it fully; the line runs directly to Fall and Current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Riley’s black and white works stood at the centre of the Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye in 1965, which named Op Art internationally; the manner entered fashion and design within a few years, against the painter’s resistance; later painters of perception and pattern take it as a source. The discount: the reach belongs largely to the series and the movement, Vasarely sharing it, and the movement was brief.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-five years. Form: whole, one panel, with no loss known. Presence: wide as an image, reproduced as the emblem of the painter’s beginning and of optical painting, and the painter’s standing has risen rather than fallen since; fame is presence, not proof. The panel is understood to belong to a collection that lends and tours its works rather than hanging them in one place; that is not verified here, and it is charged a little. Fabric: tempera on hardboard, a stable support, with a matte surface whose blacks would show any scuffing or retouching, a general risk only. Against it, a surface fixed to its moment: the manner was a fashion of the mid 1960s, and it has outlived the fashion.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged as command of painting in two values, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing, since the effect depends wholly on exactness. The panel is painted by hand, the progression calculated and drawn, the edges kept clean enough that the eye reads a fold rather than a wobble. The blacks are flat and matte so that no brushmark interrupts the illusion, and the slivers at the crease, where error would show most, hold. What holds the axis below the high band is the range of command shown: one mark, one operation, no colour, no modelling, no drawing beyond the ruled edge, and an execution the painter would later hand to assistants for works of this kind. A narrow instrument, commanded completely within its range.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a full square at the left edge and a sliver at the crease. They obey one law, the same unit under the same progression, the sliver only the square at another place in the rate. Every element is that law; there is no exception, no second mark, no accident. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory here is about as small as painting allows: two values, one shape, one direction of change. Within it the range runs from rest to collapse, from a calm grid at the left to a surface giving way along the fold, which is wider than the means suggest and lifts the figure above a merely consistent pattern.
Score: 8.3 / 10
A perceptual structure holds few orders. This one holds perception itself, the eye’s construction of depth; the body, in the balance it unsettles; consciousness, in a viewer made aware of seeing; and space, in the illusion of a surface that folds. The four are integrated, one event seen four ways. The old perspectival pavement, and order with its failure, are present only by evocation. Absent are the person, the family, labour, the state, history, nature and the sacred. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below its own floor, is that absence, which the form chooses: the figure describes the form, and the form chooses its smallness.
Score: 5.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Living Form at 8.6 and The Inevitable at 8.5. A single panel whole after sixty-five years, its image the emblem of optical painting and of its painter’s beginning; a form that knows its one thing only through two values, a progressive narrowing and a fold set off centre; and a rule from which no column can be removed without breaking the rate that is the work.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 5.8: perception, the body, consciousness and space held as one event; the person, labour, the state, history, nature and the sacred absent. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 6.5: the abyss, the game board and the buckled pavement evoked, none built. Then The Sublime at 7.5: a real, sustained vertigo, cool and small beside a field of colour. Then The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 7.6: a stated truth about the apparatus of seeing rather than a human condition, and a return that renews the effect without deepening its meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 6.5, below 7.5. The Megethos Floor is unmet: The Encompassed at 5.8 falls short of its own floor of 6.0 by two tenths. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap and the Coherence Floor. The twelve sum to 93.5, an average of 7.79 that displays 7.8. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, two tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the panel well as an image and in its place in the painter’s history and the history of optical painting, thinly on its surface, its condition and its exhibition record after 1962, so that where a judgment turns on those it is held more loosely. The work scored is the single panel, Movement in Squares, tempera on hardboard, 1961, black and white only, as it stands. The painter’s other black and white paintings of the 1960s, including Kiss, Fall and Current, her copy after Seurat and Op Art as a movement are context and are not scored. No words are quoted: the titles are given, and no statement of the painter’s is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the panel’s dimensions, the collection that holds it and the terms on which it is lent and shown, the number of rows and columns, the rate of narrowing and whether the progression is arithmetic or geometric, the condition of the surface, and its exhibition record after 1962.