Why Bridget Riley’s bold ceiling painting at the British School in Rome is an exercise in ‘soft power’

At last week’s reception for the unveiling of Verve, Bridget Riley’s ceiling painting for the British School in Rome, the 92-year-old artist appeared frail but exuberant. The occasion was a landmark event – the reveal of her very first ceiling work, although she had created many monumental murals.

Previously, Riley had visited Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and had the privilege of being on the scaffold to see “those Mannerist colors” up close, she said. The arts journal. She had experienced the brilliance of “secondary colors” – acid greens, oranges, lilacs – whose impact is dazzling, disorienting and emotional. Prior to Michelangelo’s sweeping intervention, the chapel’s vaulted ceiling had been painted, as was tradition, in the intense blues of skies and heavens, and studded with golden stars.

Riley’s ‘blank canvas’ consisted of the elegant barrel vaults of the entrance hall ceiling of Edwin Lutyens of the British School in Rome, the largest fine arts and humanities research institute in outside Britain (established in 1901). The magnificent building was originally created as the British pavilion for the 1911 International Exhibition, with Corinthian-style columns and portico, then leased to the school from 1916. Since then the building has been developed and expanded to include new wings, a library, and purpose-built design studios. The institution first featured Riley’s works in 1996. Beginning in 2016, Riley endowed the school with the Bridget Riley Fellowship, providing a six-month residency for a young, mid-career artist to develop their work in Rome, with the gardens of the Villa Borghese. and the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Italy like their neighbors.

Lutyens’ ceiling is now boldly streaked with bands of radiant, “heaven-like” color that come from what Riley calls his “Egyptian palette.” This palette dates from the winter of 1979/80, when she stopped over in Egypt en route to Tokyo, while on the final leg of a British Council touring retrospective. There, the extraordinary continuity of colors – from the painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings to the workers’ tombs of Deir-el-Medina – marked it deeply, giving birth to an “Egyptian palette” of six colors: turquoise, blue, red, yellow , green, white and black, which for Riley took on spiritual significance. When his painting Reflection (1982), deploying this palette, was purchased by the British Government Art Collection and exhibited in the residence of the British Ambassador in Cairo, it could also be seen as serving the purpose of soft power.

Now, in 2023, Riley’s bold ceiling paint exudes a different kind of “soft power.” The two large arcs of color are not mirror images of each other, but reversed, so that the colors (except black) push gently and insistently against each other. Riley described the British School’s invitation to create a large-scale work for them as “the start of an exhilarating pursuit. Exhilarating but not without danger”. This danger is nowhere in evidence when one contemplates Riley’s beautiful play of “color acoustics”. “Looking up,” she says, “the color of the sky offers a glimpse of nature at its most hopeful and serene mood.”

The process of creating the ceiling, however, was not without danger – but not of the Michelangelo variety. In a famous poem, Michelangelo complained about the physical torture of painting the Sistine ceiling. A verse relates:

“My belly is crushed under my chin, my beard

pointing to the sky, my brain is crushed in a coffin,

my chest twists like a harpy’s. my brush,

On top of me all the time, paint drool

so my face makes a nice soil for excrement!”

Riley, of course, did not participate in the painting of the ceiling herself: her studio did the physical labor. But his design process is fraught with mental and technical risks and requires meticulous attention to perspective, optics and logistics.

The foyer itself is perhaps what British School of Rome director Abigail Brundin describes as its “most permeable space” to visitors, but it was not the intended site of Riley’s original commission. . She was to decorate a wall in the school canteen. It is the room in which the multidisciplinary community of scholars, archaeologists, artists and architects (of which I was fortunate enough to be a part, when I was a student) gather to meals to the sound of a bell. The promised mural took a year to develop: Riley had painted a life-size model, before concluding that there were too many difficulties with the piece. She contacted Mark Getty, the president of the school board, to express a change of heart. “My the heart stopped!” said Getty.

Riley asked for a few weeks to consider the matter at her home in Cornwall, South West England, then returned to Getty with the suggestion of the entrance hall ceiling. She needed small models of the space, then she needed life-size models of the “difficult” cornices. Getty occasionally visited Riley’s studio, where she admitted she had trouble imagining the design at the height of the vaults. Trying to visualize the effect, she painted stripes on paper and fixed them high on the roof of her stairwell.

The ceiling itself was painstakingly hand sanded and skimmed by a team of Italian specialist workers in preparation. Riley’s three-person studio team then painted the final work over three weeks, using laser beams from scanners (source of the school’s architecture chair, Bob Allies) to follow the lines and painting the highly pigmented color of German origin between them. It was physically demanding work, requiring physiotherapy sessions and cathartic conversations at communal dinners, invoking comparisons to Michelangelo’s experience some 500 years ago.

Riley was making the most of his time in Rome. The day after the opening, she had organized a visit to Raphaël The school of Athens (1509-11), in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican. You could feel that she was continually absorbing and abstracting the rhythms and cadences of the Italian Renaissance – and its colors. Before going to Rome, she had been enchanted by Donatello’s carved relief of The Ascension with Christ giving the keys to Saint Peter (1428-1430) in the Victoria and Albert Museum (part of the Museum of London’s Donatello exhibition, but also its permanent collection). And while marveling at the delicacy of the “crushed” relief in the white marble panel, reminiscent of an Egyptian bas-relief, but also closer to painting than sculpture, Riley had also observed the colors flowing through the marble to him. -even, where others had just understood whiteness.