Colors Shimmer as Bridget Riley Confronts Old Masters: Review

Bridget Riley’s “Arrest 3” (1965) isn’t recommended viewing for anyone who suffers from motion sickness. When you look at it, the flat surface of the picture seems to heave and ripple before your eyes. After a while, the whole world may start to shift like the deck of a ship at sea.

This is a celebrated example of that fashionable idiom of the 1960s, Op Art. It might not seem to have much in common with works by Mantegna and Raphael. Yet a succinct and intriguing exhibition at the National Gallery in London, “Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Works,” aims to show just how it has.