"Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio” features 24 little-seen figurative and landscape works, plus 65 mostly geometric abstractions for which she is today well-known.
“HER ESTABLISHMENT in the Place Vendôme is a devil’s laboratory,” Jean Cocteau wrote in 1937, when Elsa Schiaparelli, ensconced in her Paris salon with a view of Napoleon’s priapic column, was the foremost couturier in Paris. “Women who go there fall into a trap, and come out masked, disguised, deformed, or reformed, according to Schiaparelli’s whim.” Her patrician brand of Surrealism which married outré maximalism with minatory elegance, “the richest laces” with “the most austere cassocks” was the dernier cri. Her so-called wooden-soldier silhouette, with its irreproachable shoulders and
“Vulgarity is gendered, of course.”1 T.J. ClarkWHEN I TEACH AMERICAN ART of the 1970s, there is one work that always stops the class cold: Lynda Benglis’s ad from the November 1974 issue of Artforum. College students who respond matter-of-factly to other controversial works from the period––Vito Acconci masturbating beneath the floorboards of the Sonnabend gallery or Chris Burden’s having himself shot with a .22-caliber rifle––are visibly (and, on occasion, audibly) taken aback by the image of Benglis, naked and greased with oil, extending a dildo from her vagina. In contrast to the photographs