Optical Illusions and Disillusions:
Emily Hall Tremaine and Bridget Riley

When the British artist Bridget Riley visited New York City in the late winter of 1965, she was discouraged by the critical reaction to her op art paintings. Two were included in the visually stunning exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art. But while the exhibition, featuring 99 artists, was a popular success with over 180,000 visitors streaming through the galleries, it was not a critical success. Far from it. One critic even claimed the art wasn’t even art but just an optical trick.

Emily Hall Tremaine disagreed. Aware that Riley was downhearted, Tremaine invited her to come see her stellar modern art collection. Over and above all the Picassos, Pollocks, and Rothkos displayed in the museum-quality setting of her Park Avenue apartment, Tremaine wanted to show Riley one painting—Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie-Woogie—the sublime canvas that summed up everything Tremaine believed about art.

Tremaine hoped that Riley would comprehend the advances Mondrian had achieved in geometric abstraction, specifically how in Victory Boogie-Woogie he had used the grid to point beyond itself with, as Tremaine put it, “no beginning and no end.” New directions in art, such as op, were not really new. There were always precursors that the next generation of artists tried to either destroy or uphold. Or better yet—exceed.

Having seen Victory Boogie-Woogie when it had been loaned by the Tremaines to a European museum, Riley told her that “it was the greatest influence” on her work. Riley was not the only artist that Tremaine invited to see Victory Boogie-Woogie, but she was probably the one most in need of encouragement. Tremaine liked to quote one of Mondrian’s most famous aphorisms, “If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.”

There was agreement that the show highlighted a fresh direction, but that was the only thing on which there was agreement. Even its name was contentious. In fact, the MoMA press release listed several possible synonyms such as optical, retinal, cool, hard-edge, color imagery, even a peculiar category titled “visual research.” Some art critics were not pleased. Thomas Hess complained in a review for Artnews that the show was a “mishmash” that lumped together very different styles.

Neither were all the artists in the show pleased, among them Josef Albers whose paintings Flying and Homage to the Square: Arrival were already in the Tremaine collection. Having taught at the Bauhaus in Germany before immigrating to America where he taught at the Black Mountain School and then at Yale, he disdained the word op, although Richard Anuszkiewicz, one of his former students, embraced it. Anuszkiewicz’s work was also in the exhibition.

To the artists who were seriously committed to the style, the name hardly mattered. Op art explored the nature of perception in the scientific age. It created visual sensations that were real states of being—energy states that existed separately from the painting itself. Riley wrote, “My work has developed on the basis of empirical analyses and syntheses, and I have always believed that perception is the medium through which states of being are directly experienced.”

By the time of The Responsive Eye, Riley had moved away from color and begun using black, white and gray, charting their placement precisely. To Seitz, the stimulating effects of movement and illumination resulted in pulsations of startling intensity. “The eyes seem to be bombarded with pure energy, as they are by Bridget Riley’s Current.” Seitz’s choice of the title The Responsive Eye was apt because it shifted the focus from what was happening on the canvas to the physiological reaction of the eye and the psychological reaction of the brain.

A month before The Responsive Eye opened, Tremaine gave a talk titled “A New York Collector Selects” to a group of collectors in which works not owned by the Tremaines were for sale. She mentioned that Seitz had chosen “the strongest and toughest, almost brutal examples” of op art. Given the dizzying quality of some paintings, she joked that her husband, Burton, was negotiating to get the Dramamine concession at the museum for the duration of the exhibition. Then she turned to the four artists whom she found the most interesting: Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley, Diter Rot [Dieter Roth], and Larry Poons.

Tremaine explained that it was fortunate to have three paintings by Riley to offer for sale. “There have been none of her paintings available in New York for a long time. I think Riley handles this work with intelligence and skill but I do not find them as beautiful as Poons. I think she is an Apollonian and Poons a Dionysian.” That distinction between the intellectual Apollonian and the emotional Dionysian was one Emily often made about artists.

While The Responsive Eye was going on, the Tremaines visited the Richard Feigen Gallery that represented Riley and purchased the painting Turn. In an interview for the Archives of American Art, Herbert Palmer recalled how the gallery came to represent her. “There was Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley and Vasarely. They were the big names in those days. And they went to pure, abstract, geometric forms, all of them. The best of them was Bridget Riley, and since that was the hottest new thing, I said to Dick, I think we ought to get her—and show her. And he said, well, we’ll try; she’s getting very hot.”

The Tremaines also purchased Balm, a very large 76 ¼" x 76 ¼" canvas that they eventually donated to the National Gallery of Art. Perceptually, Balm calls to mind the shape of a cylinder, vertiginous in its visual spin. Riley’s working method at that time was to make a precise drawing and then to have her assistants do the actual painting. Riley came in for sharp criticism at the time of The Responsive Eye. While it brought her to the attention of the international art world, she said, “I found myself being vulgarized, plagiarized, trivialized and put firmly out of court as an artist…frankly I was hurt.”

However, Riley appreciated Tremaine’s encouragement. After she returned to England, Riley stayed in touch with her leading to an affirmation of an unusual kind. Every Christmas, the Tremaines selected a work from their collection and had it printed as a Christmas card, much to the delight of art connoisseurs on their mailing list. In 1966, they chose Turn, sending a card to Riley with well wishes for the holidays. Surprised and pleased, Riley requested a few more cards, which Tremaine sent. “I remember when you both came to my ’65 N.Y. exhibition,” Riley wrote. “Incidentally, I shall be over in the U.S. for my exhibition in April and if you wish could check on the condition of Balm.”

In January 1970 Riley asked Tremaine to loan Turn for a yearlong traveling exhibition to be presented by the Arts Council of Great Britain in collaboration with Gallerie Beyeler Basel and the Rowen Gallery London.“Turn is the best example of a particular phase in the development of my work,” she wrote, “the exhibition would be impoverished without it.” Tremaine readily agreed to lend the painting.

After Tremaine’s death, her portion of the collection was auctioned at Christie’s. Turn was sold on December 15, 1988, for $14,000. That was a decent appreciation from the $900 the Tremaines had paid in 1965. However, it was nothing compared with the appreciation of some of the paintings by men. When Tremaine gave affirmation to a male artist it often lead to an uptick in sales, good critical reviews, and increasing value. However, when she gave affirmation to a female artist, no such uptick, or only a very modest one, occurred.

That failure was not due to anything Tremaine had done or left undone. It had to do with the art-collecting world that was concerned with long-term appreciation in value. Since the art of women did not appreciate as much as the art of men, it wasn’t considered as good an investment no matter its quality. Riley was not the only woman whom Tremaine affirmed; others were Perle Fine, Louise Nevelson, and Barbara Valenta. However, Riley was among the few who lived long enough and worked hard enough to finally receive recognition enough, although equality of success remains elusive.