Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman Vittorio Colaizzi Introduction The Seeing of Painting 10

A One-Time Thing 33

Not Exactly Expressionist 67

Projecting a Different Experience 109

Crazy Paintings 135

A Picture of a Line 177

Getting the Paint Across 203

The Way it Acts 237

A Question of What 275

Chronology 321 List of Illustrated works 326 Bibliography 332 Index 338 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 Fig. 5: Cover album for Ornette Coleman’s and complexity in relation to big band and swing styles seemed guaranteed to resist Free Jazz. 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 Music was, I think, important to my 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 painting, the way I saw painting right 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 from the beginning, because, well, I was 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. involved in jazz, and of course jazz is 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 where you improvise and . . . what you York, rented a room, and contacted Tristano.8 Fig. 6: Jazz pianist, composer, and teacher play is really only a one-time thing. . . . of jazz improvisation Lennie Tristano (1919–1978), c.August 1947, New York. 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, You have a structure that you’re working and I spent all my time just practicing.”9 He did, however, take the time to explore on, that you’re working from, and it’s very 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 much like painting. . . . You play or you 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 1 paint, and something comes from it. dollar “mustering out” money from the army. Consequently Ryman took on a series

10 11 Untitled #2, 1965 52 Untitled, 1965–6 Phoenix, 1979  53

106 The Paradoxical Absolute, 1958 Untitled, c.1960 107 The most public avenue of this “envelopment” occurred in 1969 at the Anti-Illusion: The “realism” of the corrugated series makes its way up through its traditional Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, condition as, like most paintings, a locus of sequestered attention. They sit on the wall which was curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte (Fig. 45). This show included like paintings, they consist of paint on a surface, yet somehow they seemed, as Peter Richard Serra’s hardened spatters of once-molten lead, a claustrophobic corridor by Schjeldahl noted in his review of Anti-Illusion, “as little like paintings as, perhaps, Bruce Nauman, and a large quantity of melting ice by Rafael Ferrer. Although their it is possible to make.”35 Where Ashton saw only amateur provocation, Schjeldahl efforts hang together collegially, Ryman never polemically dismissed finished form, reserved judgment, but to both critics perhaps, Ryman’s works were possibly not recalling that he was simply “happy to get the attention.”31 His contribution to the painting. If such a paradigmatic display of nothing but painting in the literal sense show consisted of a multipart painting from his Enamelac-on-corrugated-paper series could be questioned as a valid example of the medium, it is because painting, in the (Fig. 46). Enamelac is an alcohol-based primer-sealer with a translucent, milky surface. minds of many viewers, is not just the act of painting. Ryman’s gigantic hatching For these works, Ryman painted three stacked rows of loosely vertical marks on sixty- lacked the requisite compositional intention that would suffice. This is the same reason Fig. 47: Brice Marden (b. 1938), inch-square panels, allowing his arm some play so that the strokes curve and pitch. Robert Pincus-Witten suggested that Ryman painted “theory” (see p. 45, n. 27). The D’après la Marquise de la Solana, 1969. They also overlap at their top and bottom extremities, causing a stuttering double band claim the work makes for itself, that it does suffice as painting, asks for and depends Oil and wax on canvas, three panels, that is two layers thick. Like the enamel of Standard, the thin Enamelac is shot through Fig. 49: Dan Flavin (1933–1996), The Nominal upon a recognition on the part of the viewer that the myriad choices that are present 77 5/8 × 117 3/8 in (197.2 × 298.1 cm) overall. with traces of the bristles that simultaneously reveal and conceal the ground. Where Three (to William of Ockham), 1963. (Enamelac, corrugated paper, sixty inches square, three rows of overlapping strokes), Panza Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim the paint is thicker it appears strangely cool, seeming to glow against the warm tone Daylight fluorescent light, 6 ft (183 cm) high, are made in the interest of displaying a repeated action, its sameness and difference, Museum, New York. of the support. Where it is thin, it catches the vertical ridges of the corrugations overall with variable, edition 2 / 3. Solomon and that the traces of this action, rather than a made image, can count as painting. R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. (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, It is telling that the Anti-Illusion catalog contains sequential photographs of its such as III, IV, and VII (all 1969), while yet another bears the name Station. 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 For the Anti-Illusion exhibition, Ryman provided a massive square of nine corrugated into place.36 (Fig. 48) This photo seems to indicate that the real activity of his work is panels that was shown once and then broken up into three works: a stacked diptych, its organization and modular repetition, and not its having been painted. Critic Emily a horizontal triptych, and a square of four, all known as the Whitney Revision Paintings. Wasserman gave a similar account in her review of the show, writing that Ryman “tacks Tucker and Monte evidently recognized how Ryman’s watery strokes—energetic but big sheets of cardboard to the museum wall and streaks them with white paint.”37 without pathos—participated in the same reprioritization of activity over idealized Daniel Buren, writing in 1999, chided curators of the era for presenting Ryman as an form. But, as Lippard noted, this also describes Ryman’s mode of working since the late orchestrator of procedures or systems, i.e., a conceptual artist rather than a painter. In a 1950s. It was not until the late 1960s that his work, in particular the grid structure, the subtle turn, he then argued that the very distance and unmanageability of Ryman’s drab brown and cream, the found-object quality of the cardboard, and the slackened work as painting is what cements his place in a pantheon of paradigm-changing artists.38 Fig. 48: Ryman hanging Untitled (1969), for the regimentation of the strokes converged with contemporary flavor. Anti-Illusion exhibition at the Whitney Museum For all of his celebrated innocence of theoretical tussles, Ryman’s comparison of his of American Art, New York. The irregularities of execution distinguish each panel, but not enough to keep art own work to that of Dan Flavin (Fig. 49) has the effect of shrewd self-positioning: Fig. 50: Robert Morris (b. 1931), Untitled critic Dore Ashton from finding them “annoyingly sketchy.” While admitting some (L-Beams), 1965–67. Gray fiberglass, 32 pleasure, she maintained that “it is hard not to find loose paint washes attractive.” three pieces, each 96 × 96 × 34 in A lot of my paintings . . . can not really be shown to anyone in the usual way of Given Ashton’s sensitive description in the same review of Brice Marden’s oil and (243.8 × 243.8 × 86.4 cm). dragging a painting out of the closet or storeroom and saying, here’s a painting. wax canvases, it is perhaps surprising that Ryman’s own brand of materiality left her Sonnabend Gallery, New York. My paintings wouldn’t work that way. You can’t drag a Flavin, for instance, out of cold, but his “analysis” of painting—to reuse Kertess’s term—cuts closer to the bone. the closet and say, here’s a Flavin. All you would see is a couple of tubes. It has to Although both of these nominally “Minimalist” painters refused to naturalize the be on the wall, in a situation. Then, it’s complete. So the wall becomes very much painted gesture as a conduit to an interior self, Ryman dared to appropriate the very a part of the work.39 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 Although not associated with anti-form, Flavin’s work also makes the claim that as well to the corrugated series: “I painted them in, well, an almost expressionistic the art experience emerges from relationships with the surrounding space, and approach, I guess.”34 Marden’s impacted layers, on the other hand, retain something does not consist only of a couple of tubes. Ryman in turn contends that he provides of the secretive craft of painting (Fig. 47). Both artists mark passing time, but at right the very environmental engagement that was supposedly achieved only with angles to one another; Marden’s entombed beneath the surface, and Ryman’s drawn painting’s abandonement. out across ten or twenty feet.

210 Getting the Paint Across 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.’

Mayco, 1966 – Robert Ryman 124 Untitled, Delta, c.1965–66 

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 330 Robert Ryman’s studio, New York, 1999. The artist in his studio, New York, 1999. 331 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 for such direct painting. In some cases, this “something from everything” was a Several works from the 1950s were painted without a definite orientation, and for a warning of what not to do, since Ryman found the work of French abstractionist 2004 retrospective at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura City, Pierre Soulages “somewhat stiff and uninteresting” and was equally indifferent Japan, Ryman stipulated that a painting from about 1956 (p. 94) should be regularly toward Jean Fautrier.38 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 field of abstract painting’s formal and poetic options Ryman is silent about such geometric abstractionists as Fritz Glarner, Ilya Bolotwsky, the picture-space, where Ryman’s paintings hope to meet us, we are still subject to or Ad Reinhardt, offering only when asked that Reinhardt was primarily concerned gravity.46 The horizontal tracking and vertical edges on the left and right of the Winsor with relationships of color.39 He only recognized Piet Mondrian as a fellow “realist” and Delta series of 1965–66 acknowledge this, and none of these paintings would much later,40 having been initially unmoved by the disconnection between facture be rotated with such abandon. In different instances, the opposite moves are used for and overall design (despite the clear traces of the brush in Mondrian’s surfaces). the same effect so that nothing serves as an absolute signifier of the non-pictorial. to theoretical “nothingness,” he has instead greatly and While geometric austerity left him cold, Ryman also disapproved of many gestural painters, making a distinction between fresh and confident application and work Some of the early studies do slip into a speedy lyricism that is then visibly dialed that looked “struggled” and “fussed with.” The painting he preferred seemed Fig. 18: Franz Kline (1910–1962), Chief, 1950. back, as if he were negotiating contradictory stylistic impulses. In about 1956 Ryman Oil on canvas, 58 3/8 × 73 1/2 in (148.3 × 186.7 cm). photographed an untitled painting in various states and orientations (Fig. 17). His surprisingly expanded its sensuousness and formal scope. as if it were just put right down, just no fooling around with it. It was right The Museum of Modern Art, New York decision-making process is revealed to be one of taming and stabilization of the there. . . . Some of the best paintings always seem just like anyone could do initial marks. Directional spatters are partially retracted by dark linear brushwork it. They’re so easy looking . . . but that isn’t so easy to get. It’s always the paintings and in some cases eliminated. Another portentous decision is the covering of a that aren’t so good that have this struggled look, fussed with, or painted out dark area at one corner with a lighter, almost white value, and although the final and over.41 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. 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 During these early years of painting, the fluid lines and irregular quadrilaterals, Abstract Expressionist, and while it is anything but inept, there is something awkward varying in size and color, became a vocabulary that could be tested and mutated. to the ragged blocks of color (p. 90). They all seem gruffly insistent on themselves, A rounded and tapered form, sometimes bisected, appears sporadically from the Written by Vittorio Colaizzi, this beautifully designed lacking the handsome buoyancy of by-then well-established modes of gestural first painting until about 1957 (p. 95). Despite Ryman’s staunch stylistic independence abstraction. If we believe Lippard’s assessment of this “natural” painter, then the from his most revered Rothko and Matisse, this shape resembles a similarly crossed- avoidance, almost the dismissal of contemporaneous pictorial dynamics suggests through oval nestled among grander curves in Franz Kline’s Chief (1950) (Fig. 18), a compulsion to establish the reality of the painting’s surface. There is ample variety a somewhat atypical painting that MoMA acquired in 1952. Ostensibly discussing within the plane, but the elements’ adherence to the edge seizes that plane as a single paint handling, he told writer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “Sometimes you thing, as in an untitled from 1956 (p. 91). This tendency to emphasize edges would can just pick up a little thing from looking at something and hardly realize where monograph is a thorough exploration of Ryman’s aesthetic 48 continue into the artist’s maturity. Reflecting on the parameters of his work in 1986, you saw that or how it came to you.” If he did crib the egg-like enclosure from Kline, Ryman specified, “I never paint a line or shape within the paint plane because that its impermeability is a significant difference; while Kline’s forms part of a rhythmic would be . . . strange.”42 The ellipses in the original denote another tentative pause, network, Ryman’s are isolated, sometimes tethered to an edge by black line work, but suggesting that this was not a strategy, but the result of intuitive response to what he always part of an additive, frontal parade of shapes. development from the artist’s early musical influences, 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 The disconnected and flat-footed elements that line up, stack, jostle one another, picture. Ryman leaned on the edges as a way to make clear that he was putting things or alternately maintain a cold distance suggest an intimation on Ryman’s part of on the plane, not in it, thus remaining firmly tied to the material realm.43 a nagging arbitrariness in the making of abstract paintings, as if he asked himself, “Why this form and not another?” and found no satisfactory answer. Unsurprisingly, his encounters as a museum guard with seminal works by Although begun in 1955, Untitled (Orange Painting) (pp. 92, 93) bears the hallmarks of he has reported feelings of anxiety during these years, most notably in his account of its 1959 completion date—that is to say, it is much more uniform than other paintings a visit to the legendary hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, the Cedar Bar: “It was Book specifications: of the mid-1950s. It is possible, but it seems unlikely, that Ryman arrived at a quasi- so depressing because I didn’t know very many people in New York. I felt also that, monochrome in 1955 only to continue his hybrid gestural geometries. It is more likely well, I wasn’t much of a painter. I couldn’t really talk to painters because I felt I wasn’t that this was one of many canvases that he, as a young working painter, revisited worthy.”49 Evidently, Ryman viscerally felt that which Yve-Alain Bois and others Rothko, Matisse and other modern painters, his breakthrough in the space of a few years.44 In any case, it is an instructive touchstone in Ryman’s have theorized: abstraction’s endless possibilities threaten to collapse into repetitive Fig. 17: States I–IV of Untitled, c.1956. mature approach that privileges texture over incident, and his designation of it as his and handsome refinements unless the painter can discern or devise a structure Binding: cloth hardback Photographed by Ryman in various states first professional painting seems designed to throw viewers off the trail of while as against which to push, a critical and/or historical force, a paradigm that drives one’s and orientations. a key to his work’s identity or meaning. decisions.50 After these beginnings, Ryman has spent his career dialectically “monochromes” of the 1960s on through to late works of an Format: 290 × 250 mm astonishing subtlety, and painterly invention all against the 74 Not Exactly Expressionist 75 Extent: 344 pp background of evolving critical debates regarding the nature Number of images: 250 of modernism and post-Minimalism. Wordcount: c.60,000 ISBN: 978 0 7148 4934 8 A momentous publication for admirers of Ryman’s work, critics, curators, collectors, artists, dealers, students and all those Phaidon Press Limited interested in contemporary art. Regent’s Wharf All Saints Street London, N1 9PA

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Robert Ryman Vittorio Colaizzi