Robert Ryman

Introduction
The Seeing of Painting10

A One-Time Thing33

Not Exactly Expressionist67

Projecting a Different Experience109

Crazy Paintings135

A Picture of a Line 177

Getting the Paint Across  203

The Way it Acts237

A Question of What275

Chronology321
List of Illustrated works 326
Bibliography332
Index338

Music was, I think, important to my
painting, the way I saw painting right
from the beginning, because, well, I was
involved in jazz, and of course jazz is
where you improvise and . . . what you
play is really only a one-time thing. . . .
You have a structure that you’re working
on, that you’re working from, and it’s very
much like painting. . . . You play or you
paint, and something comes from it.1
10
Fig. 5: Cover album for Ornette Coleman’s
Free Jazz.
Fig. 6: Jazz pianist, composer, and teacher
of jazz improvisation Lennie Tristano
(1919–1978), c.August 1947, New York.
Modernist painters have often upheld music as a model for their own ambitions
to create an art whose value is based primarily on internal relationships. In the
twentieth century, jazz not only inspired painters such as Piet Mondrian, Stuart
Davis, and Jackson Pollock, but it provided an interpretive framework that made
their output more comprehensible. This mechanism ran in both directions: Ornette
Coleman used a painting by Pollock on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz (Fig. 5).
Robert Ryman’s affinities with jazz penetrate beyond this general level to his specific
experience with his teacher, Lennie Tristano (Fig. 6). His characteristic stroke,
which makes visible the time of its making, for example in an untitled oil on canvas
of 1965 (p. 47) and in the five-panel Back Talk of about 1964 (pp. 48–49), instigates a
tactile seeing that echoes Tristano’s innovative teaching methods of linking auditory
and kinesthetic experience.
In the mid- to late 1940s, bebop was the most recent development in jazz. Closely
identified with saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker (Fig. 7), bebop’s increased speed
and complexity in relation to big band and swing styles seemed guaranteed to resist
assimilation by white-dominated commercial interests.2 Ryman was attracted by
this quality of strangeness and difficulty, recalling bebop as “something you never
heard. It was different, it wasn’t predictable.”3 His birthplace of Nashville, Tennessee,
was not an ideal town for a teenage jazz fan. The dominance of country music, as
well as ongoing racial segregation, made it a challenge to hear this new and exciting
music. Ryman recalled that “there were places [to hear jazz] but very few and very
kind of underground. . . . Everything was segregated, and, of course, some of the best
musicians were black.”4 The young enthusiast nevertheless made efforts to listen,
attending concerts when he could, “spend[ing] hours . . . fishing around on the dial
on the radio” for distant stations, and seeking out choice 78 rpm records. A trip to the
record store was “a big thing” and an occasion for “trying to find out what they had
or what they could get.”5
When it was time for college, Ryman went first to Tennessee Polytechnic Institute,
primarily “to get away from home,”6 and then, drawn by its music program, to George
Peabody College for Teachers for a second year. In 1950, in response to the outbreak
of the Korean War, he entered the Army Reserve with the intention to join a reserve
band.7 After basic training he spent his two years traveling around the southern
United States with an army band, playing dances, parades, and officers’ clubs.
Entertainment and ceremony were boring and constrictive, but Ryman was grateful
to be involved in music at all. When his tour was up in 1952, he took a bus to New
York, rented a room, and contacted Tristano.8
Upon his arrival in New York, Ryman devoted almost all of his energy to music. He
describes himself at the time as “pretty much of a recluse. . . . I didn’t know anyone,
and I spent all my time just practicing.”9 He did, however, take the time to explore
New York’s tourist spots, including Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the
Museum of Modern Art where an encounter with a painting by Mark Rothko turned
out to be pivotal (see p. 111). Eight dollars a week rent, five dollars for music lessons,
and canned beans and hamburgers eventually depleted his two hundred and forty
dollar “mustering out” money from the army. Consequently Ryman took on a series
11
 Untitled #2, 1965
52 Untitled, 1965–6 Phoenix, 1979   53
106 The Paradoxical Absolute, 1958 Untitled, c.1960 107

Fig. 47: Brice Marden (b. 1938),
D’après la Marquise de la Solana, 1969.
Oil and wax on canvas, three panels,
77 5/8 × 117 3/8 in (197.2 × 298.1 cm) overall.
Panza Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York.
Fig. 48: Ryman hanging Untitled (1969), for the
Anti-Illusion exhibition at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York.
210
The most public avenue of this “envelopment” occurred in 1969 at the Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York,
which was curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte (Fig. 45). This show included
Richard Serra’s hardened spatters of once-molten lead, a claustrophobic corridor by
Bruce Nauman, and a large quantity of melting ice by Rafael Ferrer. Although their
efforts hang together collegially, Ryman never polemically dismissed finished form,
recalling that he was simply “happy to get the attention.”31 His contribution to the
show consisted of a multipart painting from his Enamelac-on-corrugated-paper series
(Fig. 46). Enamelac is an alcohol-based primer-sealer with a translucent, milky surface.
For these works, Ryman painted three stacked rows of loosely vertical marks on sixty-
inch-square panels, allowing his arm some play so that the strokes curve and pitch.
They also overlap at their top and bottom extremities, causing a stuttering double band
that is two layers thick. Like the enamel of Standard, the thin Enamelac is shot through
with traces of the bristles that simultaneously reveal and conceal the ground. Where
the paint is thicker it appears strangely cool, seeming to glow against the warm tone
of the support. Where it is thin, it catches the vertical ridges of the corrugations
(another sly compositional choice). Most of the panels of the Enamelac-on-corrugated
series are arranged horizontally and titled according to the number of constituents,
such as III, IV, and VII (all 1969), while yet another bears the name Station.
For the Anti-Illusion exhibition, Ryman provided a massive square of nine corrugated
panels that was shown once and then broken up into three works: a stacked diptych,
a horizontal triptych, and a square of four, all known as the Whitney Revision Paintings.
Tucker and Monte evidently recognized how Ryman’s watery strokes—energetic but
without pathos—participated in the same reprioritization of activity over idealized
form. But, as Lippard noted, this also describes Ryman’s mode of working since the late
1950s. It was not until the late 1960s that his work, in particular the grid structure, the
drab brown and cream, the found-object quality of the cardboard, and the slackened
regimentation of the strokes converged with contemporary flavor.
The irregularities of execution distinguish each panel, but not enough to keep art
critic Dore Ashton from finding them “annoyingly sketchy.” While admitting some
pleasure, she maintained that “it is hard not to find loose paint washes attractive.”32
Given Ashton’s sensitive description in the same review of Brice Marden’s oil and
wax canvases, it is perhaps surprising that Ryman’s own brand of materiality left her
cold, but his “analysis” of painting—to reuse Kertess’s term—cuts closer to the bone.
Although both of these nominally “Minimalist” painters refused to naturalize the
painted gesture as a conduit to an interior self, Ryman dared to appropriate the very
language of introspection, slinging liquid paint around, just, one may imagine him
thinking, “to see what that was like.”33 His comment on Standard could apply just
as well to the corrugated series: “I painted them in, well, an almost expressionistic
approach, I guess.”34 Marden’s impacted layers, on the other hand, retain something
of the secretive craft of painting (Fig. 47). Both artists mark passing time, but at right
angles to one another; Marden’s entombed beneath the surface, and Ryman’s drawn
out across ten or twenty feet.
Getting the Paint Across
Fig. 49: Dan Flavin (1933–1996), The Nominal
Three (to William of Ockham), 1963.
Daylight fluorescent light, 6 ft (183 cm) high,
overall with variable, edition 2 / 3. Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Fig. 50: Robert Morris (b. 1931), Untitled
(L-Beams), 1965–67. Gray fiberglass,
three pieces, each 96 × 96 × 34 in
(243.8 × 243.8 × 86.4 cm).
Sonnabend Gallery, New York.
The “realism” of the corrugated series makes its way up through its traditional
condition as, like most paintings, a locus of sequestered attention. They sit on the wall
like paintings, they consist of paint on a surface, yet somehow they seemed, as Peter
Schjeldahl noted in his review of Anti-Illusion, “as little like paintings as, perhaps,
it is possible to make.”35 Where Ashton saw only amateur provocation, Schjeldahl
reserved judgment, but to both critics perhaps, Ryman’s works were possibly not
painting. If such a paradigmatic display of nothing but painting in the literal sense
could be questioned as a valid example of the medium, it is because painting, in the
minds of many viewers, is not just the act of painting. Ryman’s gigantic hatching
lacked the requisite compositional intention that would suffice. This is the same reason
Robert Pincus-Witten suggested that Ryman painted “theory” (see p. 45, n. 27). The
claim the work makes for itself, that it does suffice as painting, asks for and depends
upon a recognition on the part of the viewer that the myriad choices that are present
(Enamelac, corrugated paper, sixty inches square, three rows of overlapping strokes),
are made in the interest of displaying a repeated action, its sameness and difference,
and that the traces of this action, rather than a made image, can count as painting.
It is telling that the Anti-Illusion catalog contains sequential photographs of its
numerous participants draping, folding, pouring, and hammering their materials, while
in the midst of all this Ryman is shown from behind lifting one of his cardboard sheets
into place.36 (Fig. 48) This photo seems to indicate that the real activity of his work is
its organization and modular repetition, and not its having been painted. Critic Emily
Wasserman gave a similar account in her review of the show, writing that Ryman “tacks
big sheets of cardboard to the museum wall and streaks them with white paint.”37
Daniel Buren, writing in 1999, chided curators of the era for presenting Ryman as an
orchestrator of procedures or systems, i.e., a conceptual artist rather than a painter. In a
subtle turn, he then argued that the very distance and unmanageability of Ryman’s
work as painting is what cements his place in a pantheon of paradigm-changing artists.38
For all of his celebrated innocence of theoretical tussles, Ryman’s comparison of his
own work to that of Dan Flavin (Fig. 49) has the effect of shrewd self-positioning:
A lot of my paintings . . . can not really be shown to anyone in the usual way of
dragging a painting out of the closet or storeroom and saying, here’s a painting.
My paintings wouldn’t work that way. You can’t drag a Flavin, for instance, out of
the closet and say, here’s a Flavin. All you would see is a couple of tubes. It has to
be on the wall, in a situation. Then, it’s complete. So the wall becomes very much
a part of the work.39
Although not associated with anti-form, Flavin’s work also makes the claim that
the art experience emerges from relationships with the surrounding space, and
does not consist only of a couple of tubes. Ryman in turn contends that he provides
the very environmental engagement that was supposedly achieved only with
painting’s abandonement.
211
184 Spectrum II, 1984 Spectrum VIII, 1984 185
302 Marshall, 1998 Period, 2002 303
The only comprehensive
monograph on Robert Ryman,
—a pioneer of abstract,
minimalist and conceptual art.
‘How the paintings look can be
deceiving, but the way they feel is
more important.’
– Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman has, over six decades, continuously and
methodically experimented with the different possibilities
inherent in a painting by selectively concentrating on
its various traditional components, including the shape,
proportion and surface of the support, as well as the
application of a variety of media including oil, acrylic,
and other synthetic pigments laid down with a similarly
wide range of applicators.
This book—the most expansive and comprehensive monograph
covering Robert Ryman’s career to date— places his famous
square “white” paintings in the context of lesser-known,
sometimes brightly colored works, thereby demonstrating
that contrary to the widespread idea that Ryman has reduced
the field of abstract painting’s formal and poetic options
to theoretical “nothingness,” he has instead greatly and
surprisingly expanded its sensuousness and formal scope.
Written by Vittorio Colaizzi, this beautifully designed
monograph is a thorough exploration of Ryman’s aesthetic
development from the artist’s early musical influences,
his encounters as a museum guard with seminal works by
Rothko, Matisse and other modern painters, his breakthrough
“monochromes” of the 1960s on through to late works of an
astonishing subtlety, and painterly invention all against the
background of evolving critical debates regarding the nature
of modernism and post-Minimalism.
A momentous publication for admirers of Ryman’s work, critics,
curators, collectors, artists, dealers, students and all those
interested in contemporary art.
Mayco, 1966
124 Untitled, Delta, c.1965–66 
330 Robert Ryman’s studio, New York, 1999.
for such direct painting. In some cases, this “something from everything” was a
warning of what not to do, since Ryman found the work of French abstractionist
Pierre Soulages “somewhat stiff and uninteresting” and was equally indifferent
toward Jean Fautrier.38
Ryman is silent about such geometric abstractionists as Fritz Glarner, Ilya Bolotwsky,
or Ad Reinhardt, offering only when asked that Reinhardt was primarily concerned
with relationships of color.39 He only recognized Piet Mondrian as a fellow “realist”
much later,40 having been initially unmoved by the disconnection between facture
and overall design (despite the clear traces of the brush in Mondrian’s surfaces).
While geometric austerity left him cold, Ryman also disapproved of many gestural
painters, making a distinction between fresh and confident application and work
that looked “struggled” and “fussed with.” The painting he preferred seemed
as if it were just put right down, just no fooling around with it. It was right
there. . . . Some of the best paintings always seem just like anyone could do
it. They’re so easy looking . . . but that isn’t so easy to get. It’s always the paintings
that aren’t so good that have this struggled look, fussed with, or painted out
and over.41
Despite the remarkable fluency of his early ink drawings, it took a little time before
Ryman achieved this quality in his paintings. The work of the mid-1950s is passably
Abstract Expressionist, and while it is anything but inept, there is something awkward
to the ragged blocks of color (p. 90). They all seem gruffly insistent on themselves,
lacking the handsome buoyancy of by-then well-established modes of gestural
abstraction. If we believe Lippard’s assessment of this “natural” painter, then the
avoidance, almost the dismissal of contemporaneous pictorial dynamics suggests
a compulsion to establish the reality of the painting’s surface. There is ample variety
within the plane, but the elements’ adherence to the edge seizes that plane as a single
thing, as in an untitled from 1956 (p. 91). This tendency to emphasize edges would
continue into the artist’s maturity. Reflecting on the parameters of his work in 1986,
Ryman specified, “I never paint a line or shape within the paint plane because that
would be . . . strange.”42 The ellipses in the original denote another tentative pause,
suggesting that this was not a strategy, but the result of intuitive response to what he
felt as the needs of each painting. Elements held to the edge are more firmly anchored
in and conditioned by the material world than if they floated fancifully within the
picture. Ryman leaned on the edges as a way to make clear that he was putting things
on the plane, not in it, thus remaining firmly tied to the material realm.43
Although begun in 1955, Untitled (Orange Painting) (pp. 92, 93) bears the hallmarks of
its 1959 completion date—that is to say, it is much more uniform than other paintings
of the mid-1950s. It is possible, but it seems unlikely, that Ryman arrived at a quasi-
monochrome in 1955 only to continue his hybrid gestural geometries. It is more likely
that this was one of many canvases that he, as a young working painter, revisited
in the space of a few years.44 In any case, it is an instructive touchstone in Ryman’s
mature approach that privileges texture over incident, and his designation of it as his
Fig. 17: States I–IV of Untitled, c.1956.
Photographed by Ryman in various states first professional painting seems designed to throw viewers off the trail of while as
and orientations. a key to his work’s identity or meaning.
74 Not Exactly Expressionist
The artist in his studio, New York, 1999.
Fig. 18: Franz Kline (1910–1962), Chief, 1950.
Oil on canvas, 58 3/8 × 73 1/2 in (148.3 × 186.7 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
331
Several works from the 1950s were painted without a definite orientation, and for a
2004 retrospective at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura City,
Japan, Ryman stipulated that a painting from about 1956 (p. 94) should be regularly
rotated.45 The refusal to assign a top and bottom avoids the suggestion of a gravity-
bound, familiar but fictional space inside the plane, a mimetic space. But outside
the picture-space, where Ryman’s paintings hope to meet us, we are still subject to
gravity.46 The horizontal tracking and vertical edges on the left and right of the Winsor
and Delta series of 1965–66 acknowledge this, and none of these paintings would
be rotated with such abandon. In different instances, the opposite moves are used for
the same effect so that nothing serves as an absolute signifier of the non-pictorial.
Some of the early studies do slip into a speedy lyricism that is then visibly dialed
back, as if he were negotiating contradictory stylistic impulses. In about 1956 Ryman
photographed an untitled painting in various states and orientations (Fig. 17). His
decision-making process is revealed to be one of taming and stabilization of the
initial marks. Directional spatters are partially retracted by dark linear brushwork
and in some cases eliminated. Another portentous decision is the covering of a
dark area at one corner with a lighter, almost white value, and although the final
image also includes a transparent brownish-gray wash, Ryman’s tendency to, as
he later put it, “get it down to a few crucial elements”47 appears to have taken root.
During these early years of painting, the fluid lines and irregular quadrilaterals,
varying in size and color, became a vocabulary that could be tested and mutated.
A rounded and tapered form, sometimes bisected, appears sporadically from the
first painting until about 1957 (p. 95). Despite Ryman’s staunch stylistic independence
from his most revered Rothko and Matisse, this shape resembles a similarly crossed-
through oval nestled among grander curves in Franz Kline’s Chief (1950) (Fig. 18),
a somewhat atypical painting that MoMA acquired in 1952. Ostensibly discussing
paint handling, he told writer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “Sometimes you
can just pick up a little thing from looking at something and hardly realize where
you saw that or how it came to you.”48 If he did crib the egg-like enclosure from Kline,
its impermeability is a significant difference; while Kline’s forms part of a rhythmic
network, Ryman’s are isolated, sometimes tethered to an edge by black line work, but
always part of an additive, frontal parade of shapes.
The disconnected and flat-footed elements that line up, stack, jostle one another,
or alternately maintain a cold distance suggest an intimation on Ryman’s part of
a nagging arbitrariness in the making of abstract paintings, as if he asked himself,
Book specifications:
“Why this form and not another?” and found no satisfactory answer. Unsurprisingly,
he has reported feelings of anxiety during these years, most notably in his account of
a visit to the legendary hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, the Cedar Bar: “It was
so depressing because I didn’t know very many people in New York. I felt also that,
well, I wasn’t much of a painter. I couldn’t really talk to painters because I felt I wasn’t
Binding: cloth hardback
worthy.”49 Evidently, Ryman viscerally felt that which Yve-Alain Bois and others
have theorized: abstraction’s endless possibilities threaten to collapse into repetitive
and handsome refinements unless the painter can discern or devise a structure
against which to push, a critical and/or historical force, a paradigm that drives one’s
Format: 290 × 250 mm
decisions.50 After these beginnings, Ryman has spent his career dialectically
75 Extent: 344 pp
Number of images: 250
Wordcount: c.60,000
ISBN: 978 0 7148 4934 8
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