For British artists it’s over Countless For years, Egypt has been a rich source of inspiration.
It is known that Agatha Christie’s visit to Upper Egypt shaped her novel, Death on the Nile (1937). Virginia Woolf was engaged in the study of the civilization of ancient Egypt, and references to the country were scattered throughout her essays and memoirs, as with her references to Cleopatra in her 1929 essay, Private room for an individual. Earlier, in 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of Egypt as an “ancient land” in the poem OzymandiasFamiliar to generations of British schoolchildren.
However, for British artist Bridget Riley, this inspiration led to radically different results. After her visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979-1980, Riley developed her own Egyptian color palette, influenced by the colors of Egypt’s landscapes from Cairo to Luxor.
Riley placed these colors in oscillating bands running the length of her paintings, and named them after the places she visited: Luxor (1982), The Winter Palace (1981), 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, where she painted quasi-Impressionist and figurative works based on the German Expressionist. Paul Klee and American Abstract Expressionism Jackson Pollock.
Later, in the sixties, Riley closely studied Georges SeuratFrench Neo-Impressionist. He is best known for his use of drawing technique Pointillismwhere paintings are composed of small dots of colour, Seurat helped guide Riley’s scientific approach to painting.
By approaching drawing as a form of visual investigation, Riley began to produce radically different works, known as Reference, or visual art. With its roots in Cubism, Futurism, and Dada, the term “practical art” was first coined by time Magazine in 1964. By directly engaging with the viewer’s perception, fine art’s use of geometric shapes and repeating patterns creates optical illusions of movement and depth.
Riley’s art has lost its colour, replaced by precise geometric shapes and lines, drifting, pulsating and shimmering before the viewer’s eyes.
In Movement in Squares (1961), Riley generates a strong sense of tension and movement through careful manipulation of geometry, unsettling the viewer’s sense of space. Likewise with autumn (1963), the distinction between a still image and perceived motion begins to blur through Riley’s use of black and white wavy lines.
“He was thrust into the public eye in 1965.”Responsive eyeExhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Riley’s works gained popularity despite critical disapproval, and began to appear in commercial contexts.
Egypt changed Riley. After her visit, Riley painted several works using… Same set of colorsInspired by the green Nile Delta region and the surrounding desert and the bright colors found in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Workers in Luxor.
Unlike many artists who traveled to Egypt in search of its antiquities or history, Reilly was fascinated by the country’s visual qualities. The sharp contrast between the lush green of the Nile Valley and the surrounding desert, combined with the intense Egyptian light, provided her with a new way of thinking about color.
Rather than depicting recognizable landscapes, Reilly reduces these experiences to clusters of interacting colors on the canvas. In works like Ka Wa Ra, her color generates movement, as adjacent figures appear to advance and recede before the viewer’s eyes. Egypt did not lead Riley away from fine art. Instead, I turned it around.
Riley’s Egyptian painting provides us with an enchanting perception of Egypt, reduced to a palette that is both earthy and vibrant, capturing the brilliance and intensity of Egyptian life.
At the same time, Riley’s work differs radically from the position previously taken by British artists on Egypt. Victorian painters brought back to Britain an idealized version of Egypt, focusing almost exclusively on the ancient Egyptian ruins of Upper Egypt.
Like Rayleigh, the Victorian painter Edward Lear visited Egypt in the winter of 1848–49, and made two successive visits to the Nile in the next twenty years. Lear’s paintings of ancient Egyptian temples around Luxor and Aswan contain almost no signs of life. Indeed, in A View from Luxor (1854), Lear reduced the number of Egyptians in his paintingOnly a few people remain around the centerpiece of the painting: the temple.
Rather than seeing modern society, Victorian painters viewed Egypt through the lens of antiquity, as was the case when British writers described a country on the cusp of falling under British colonial control.
As he pointed out Richard JonesRiley’s use of color is very similar to the Egyptian artist Engy Aflatounboth of which use a color palette that evokes Egypt’s rural landscapes, conjuring a warm, organic vision of Egypt.
While nineteenth-century British painters imposed their perception of Egypt on their paintings, Riley allowed Egypt to influence them, providing a new and elegant example of how foreign artists could interact with modern Egypt. Riley’s Egyptian painting remains a fascinating and expressive interpretation of the country that inspired it, and so many others since.
