At 39, Bridget Riley has had more than her share of misunderstanding. Few painters have been so ruthlessly plagiarized by commerce. As soon as her tightly organized, black-and-white abstractions began to wrench and prick the eyes of an international public in the mid-'60s, a horde of fabric designers and window dressers moved in. Riley, along with other painters like Vasarely and Soto, became synonymous with Op art; and Op itself became, in the hands of its exploiters, a chic gimmick that could market anything from underwear to wallpaper. By the summer of 1965, it seemed that every boutique in the West...
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