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3-2007 'How It Works': Stroke, Music, and in 's Early Vittorio Colaizzi Old Dominion University, [email protected]

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Repository Citation Colaizzi, Vittorio, "'How It Works': Stroke, Music, and Minimalism in Robert Ryman's Early Paintings" (2007). Art Faculty Publications. 1. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/art_pubs/1 Original Publication Citation Colaizzi, V. (2007). 'How it works': Stroke, music, and Minimalism in Robert Ryman's early paintings. , 21(1), 28-49. doi:10.1086/518293

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). “How It Works” Stroke, Music, and Minimalism in Robert Ryman’s Early Paintings

Vittorio Colaizzi Robert Ryman’s predominantly white stream developments in modern art. Th is paintings have been fervently admired reputation is partially accurate, given the by scholars, critics, and artists since his artist’s plainspoken reticence and gentle emergence in the mid-1960s. Although mockery of . Th e increasing these works are a source of consterna- abandonment of belief in a mainstream, tion to the general public, anything however, allows us to see how Ryman’s more than a cursory glance at Ryman’s contributions are inextricably linked with exploration of substances, supports, and the broader critical issues of his era. Th is techniques should quell the idea that he linkage is of a particular nature, one that makes “blank pictures.” Careful study of is attached to the artist’s own approach to his oeuvre reveals considerable variety: he painting. He had been a serious student has used oil, enamel, latex, alcohol-based of jazz in the early when, inspired primer/sealer, and many other paints to by what he saw on his day job as a guard cover canvas, paper, steel, fi berglass, and at the (MoMA) cardboard with marks that vary from in , he abandoned music in sluggish comma shapes to light swaths favor of painting. Without formal train- or stuttering horizontal bricks. Recent ing, Ryman came to the medium as an shows, such as the mini-retrospectives at outsider, free to experiment. Musical Th omas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich in performance as much as modern paint- 2002 and the Dallas Museum of Art in ing conditioned the methodology he 2005–6 as well as a 2004 exhibition at developed. Ryman’s use of white is not the Peter Blum Gallery in New York of an indicator of transcendent spirituality works on paper produced from 1957 to or postmodern exhaustion. Rather, it 1964, remind viewers of the diversity and is a way to foreground the substantive insistent materiality of an artist who has and performative qualities of painting, sometimes been mistaken for the quint- in which each stroke is a record of its essential modernist ascetic. application. Th e painting-performance Unlike similarly “reductive” artists, is not the emotionally laden gesture Robert Ryman, , ca. 1962–63. Oil, gesso, and graph- such as or the early Frank of the action painter but more a staid ite pencil on unstretched sized Stella, whose work has a clearer place in recitation.1 Th e relationship to time linen canvas, 10 ¼ x 9 ¾ in. the history of stylistic innovation, Ryman implicit in Ryman’s strokes is also present Private collection. Photo, Bill Jacobson / Robert Ryman (fi g. 1) is often regarded as a maverick in the artwork itself, which should be Archive, New York, RR62.121 with a tangential relationship to main- considered as a fully three-dimensional

29 American Art Volume 21, Number 1 © 2007

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). minimal painter, noting that his “endless material pursuits are close to [sculptor Carl] Andre’s in sensibility.” By denying that Ryman is a “minimal painter” and yet linking him with Andre, Godfrey left the painter’s connection to minimalism tantalizingly unresolved. Yet ascertaining Ryman’s precise relationship to what art historian James Meyer terms the “minimal fi eld” is necessary to establish his position in the art world of the last fi fty years.2 Th e comparison to Andre, who is known for arranging identical pieces of wood, brick, or metal, is apt, because Ryman’s affi nities with minimal- ism lie not in reduction or emptiness but in his frank and nonallusive handling of his medium. Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930. As a teenager, he became interested in jazz, particularly bebop, which featured smaller ensembles and greater complexity than the com- mercially successful big bands. Because of racial segregation and the dominance of country music in his hometown, he had little opportunity to hear live jazz but would visit record stores and search the radio dial late at night. After attending 1 Robert Ryman, 2002. Photo, object and not just the ground for an college for two years, fi rst at Tennessee Glenn Halvorson / Pace- “abstract” image. Th is object is responsive Polytechnic Institute, then at George Wildenstein, New York to changes in lighting and vantage point, Peabody College for Teachers, Ryman reminding the viewer of the continu- joined the army in 1950 to avoid the ously unfolding present of his or her draft and Korea. His profi ciency with the perceptions. saxophone allowed him to spend his tour In his earliest mature works of the late of duty traveling with the army band 1950s, Ryman often piled pigment onto throughout the South, playing marches small, ragged pieces of canvas, paper, or and dances. After his tour, the young cardboard. Th ese paintings were featured musician was greatly relieved, however, to in the 2004 exhibition A Minimal leave behind this regimented and popular Future? Art as Object, 1958–1968 at music, taking a bus to New York with the Museum of , Los only his $250 “mustering out” money in Angeles. While his white paintings would hand. Th ere he sought out pianist and seem perfectly in keeping with a popular teacher Lennie Tristano (1919–1978) idea of minimalism, the insistently tactile and occasionally joined jam sessions in nature of his work puts Ryman at odds Greenwich Village clubs. Th e last in a with this usually uninfl ected movement, series of “fl unkie” jobs he took to pay for which was also largely sculptural. In his his room and lessons was a position as review of A Minimal Future, critic Mark a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, Godfrey called the artist “anything but” a where he worked from 1953 to 1960.3

30 Spring 2007

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). At MoMA, Ryman was unmoved revealed in space and time. From as early by the relative austerity of Kasimir as 1957 Ryman has deployed the stroke Malevich, , and Ad in a nonpictorial space that incorporates Reinhardt, preferring more painterly the unidirectionality of time: the viewer artists such as Henri Matisse and Franz can almost re-create the order and pace Kline. Matisse’s brushwork epitomized in which the strokes were applied. Th is the verve and confi dence that Ryman is because Ryman scrupulously preserves enjoyed, and he has enthusiastically this application, never smearing, scrap- called Kline “one of the best.”4 Th ese ing, or adjusting. Th e artist articulated preferences for the work of a colorist and his position in a 1971 interview, explain- an expressionist might be surprising to ing, “Th e way I work the painting is those who consider Ryman primarily as a either fi nished or it’s destroyed. It’s a painter of white squares, but they make one-time thing. It has to be very direct; it sense if his practice is seen instead to be has to be immediate, to the point. Th ere grounded in the self-evident display of can’t be any overpainting. When I do a the act of painting. A full treatment of painting, it’s a one-time thing.”7 the painters Ryman studied at MoMA With these parameters, Ryman attains is outside the scope of this essay, but it a temporal transparency and avoids the should be noted that his favorite, Mark lingering illusionism that so troubled Rothko, was useful for more subtle and critics and artists writing about abstract complex reasons than might be imagined. painting in the 1950s and 1960s. He Rothko’s and Ryman’s mature works arrived at a solution in which minimal- seem to share a compositional emptiness, istic rigor was applied to that which but Ryman has recalled that he was not minimalism found intractable: painting, as interested in “the style” of Rothko’s art and painterly painting at that. Painterly as in “the basic approach he was using.”5 facture had become problematic because He specifi es this “approach” as the quality of its associations with the pervasive of Rothko’s paintings as assertive objects and mediocre “Tenth Street touch,” as in a physical setting. Th is interpretation, gestural abstraction was called in the late somewhat at odds with Rothko’s own 1950s. Th e rhetoric of personal commit- intentions, helped to initiate Ryman’s ment and self-discovery, while compel- long-standing abhorrence of pictorial ling in relation to the work of Willem space—the illusion of depth that even de Kooning (fi g. 2) a decade earlier, no abstraction can possess—in favor of the longer rang true for viewers who felt they more literal space of paint and surface. were witnessing an increasingly academic style. Ryman’s strokes function diff erently from those of the preceding generation The “One-Time” Method of gestural painters. Instead of acting as autobiographical ciphers in a shallow, Th e sensuality of Ryman’s painting is turbulent space, his deliberate strokes not a contentious point. It has been secure his painting in the real space of celebrated by critics who otherwise time-bound looking, because each main- disagree on the artist’s signifi cance.6 tains a distinct identity. However, the basic unit of Ryman’s In a lecture delivered in 1991, Ryman production—the painted stroke—has yet claimed the term “realism” for his enter- to be fully discussed in terms of its origin prise. “With realism there is no picture. and function. To again take up Godfrey’s Th e aesthetic is an outward aesthetic assessment: “Endless” his “material pur- instead of an inward aesthetic,” he de- suits” may be, but their salient quality clared. Its space “is real, the surface is real is not material per se but material as and there is an interaction between the

31 American Art

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). A painting by Ryman “works” by virtue of its spatial fl exibility, as opposed to the still and instantaneous mode of customary pictorial viewing. Th e paintings claim space not only as whole objects but also as conglomerations of applied paint. Whatever the support, the most consistent way in which Ryman’s painting asserts its status as an object and not a picture is through the “one-time” criterion. He further described this criterion in 1992: “I didn’t want to work the paint too much. . . . So there could be no covering of mistakes—it goes on and that’s the way it is. I like that feeling, and I like that approach.”9 Th e eccentricity of this technique can be understood by compar- ing it with the procedures and results of other highly materialistic painters. For all their diff erences, many abstract expres- sionists relied on the gesture as a sign of liberation from previous notions of fi nish. But even the most gestural, high-impasto paintings allow for a point at which the material seems to disappear and an image is read. Th is occurs all the more readily in reproduction. Ryman avoids this 2 , Gotham painting and the wall plane.”8 Th e surface moment by refusing to eff ace previously News, 1955. Oil, 69 x 79 in. of Ryman’s “realist” painting is not to be applied strokes. No ideated image takes Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buff alo, New York, Gift of isolated as the container of fi ctional space precedence over the applied paint itself. Seymour H. Knox Jr. © 2007 but is instead continuous with experiential Ryman’s stroke never describes forms or Th e Willem de Kooning space. Standing in his studio in 2002 fi lls in areas but exists as one of many Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York before a small painting on stretched canvas, discrete units. Ryman held up two hands in a gesture A small untitled painting from indicating a head-on view and said, “Th is 1962–63 (frontispiece) demonstrates this isn’t the image.” Rotating his hands forty- quality. A rough square of linen canvas fi ve degrees to approximate an oblique was stapled to a wall or drawing board view, he explained, “Th is is.” By implica- and coated with glue sizing. Th e shrinking tion, the “image” is a continuum around and tightening of the canvas under the the painting and is never fi xed. Th is goal sizing accounts for the scalloped edge, is hampered when the paintings are overly an eff ect Ryman enjoys. Th is detail is an crowded, as they were in the home of a col- example of his attention to the painting lector Ryman once visited. In this collector’s as an object in which the support itself hallway he saw “two small paintings of is integral; the stiff patch of cloth is not mine . . . maybe a foot apart, along with a negligible ground for an image but a . . . pictures in frames, and it was totally part of the experience of the painting. misunderstood as to what they were.” Th e Th e penciled grid establishes actuality artist refl ected, “It’s odd that they seemingly by contrast; its lines weave and buckle, like the painting but yet they don’t under- rejecting the stable idealism of geometry. stand what it is. Or how it works.” Onto this cloth, Ryman fi rst brushed a

32 Spring 2007

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). cloudy fi lm of white. Not a true priming Separation, Not Reduction coat, this layer declares itself because it fails to cover the brown linen completely Ryman’s early development was not a in the pristine blankness that precedes a gradual rejection of color and incident picture. Next, the painter scattered strokes in favor of uniform white paint. Instead, of turquoise and light ocher, followed white appeared alongside black and other by the fi nal cluster of thick white marks. colors in paintings with large portions of Each stroke is clearly the result of one exposed ground. His discrete stroke dis- action of the brush, but the “one-time” tinguished itself from more indiscriminate rule does not preclude obscuring previous coats of paint in the mid- to late 1950s. strokes with new, equally decisive ones. Th e work evolved as a clarifi cation of these Ryman’s frequent masking of color with individual strokes, and not as a process white should not be confused with a de of purifi cation through the abandonment Kooningesque drama of pentimenti in of color. Ryman’s fi rst paintings, like which the image is discovered through those of any student, display little stylistic revisions and partially previous cohesion, ranging in color from muted states. Ryman did not paint out but over. brown to lurid violet and green, and in Everything that was once there is still mark from rigid and thick to sweeping 3 Robert Ryman, Untitled, there. He made this obvious by letting the and curvilinear. By the end of 1955 and ca. mid-1950s. Oil on stretched colors dry before adding white, so that continuing into 1956, after a number and primed canvas, 18 x 18 in. each stroke remained a decisively enunci- of more or less gestural abstractions Private collection. Photo, Bill Jacobson / Robert Ryman ated component and did not blend with in which loosely painted squares and Archive, New York, RR55.009 the colors underneath. ovals are circumscribed and linked by an energetic black line, the paintings seem to develop a deliberate clumsiness. Untitled (fi g. 3) is predominantly dull green and includes small patches of blue, red, and ocher, which together read as a nearly arbi- trary collection of marks and shapes. Th is arbitrariness is in pointed contrast to the grand and confi dent works that had drawn Ryman’s attention at MoMA. It indicates a shift away from a traditional lateral com- position, in which elements are arranged in a given space. Energy is redirected toward the canvas, and putting on paint super- sedes any depicted drama of shapes. As mentioned above, Ryman would sometimes emphasize and reemphasize a shape by circumscribing it with black lines. In an untitled painting of 1957 made with casein and pencil on a tiny piece of canvas (fi g. 4), jagged lines describe a white quad- rangle several times before chalky white paint fi lls in the zone, partially obscuring its outlines. A horizontally elongated C has been inscribed in the top central portion of the shape, its upper extremity running off the plane. Th e lines defi ning the square, the white paint fi lling it in, and fi nally the

33 American Art

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). One of the earliest examples of the decisive stroke is Untitled (fi g. 5). Shapes on the left (in black) and on the top (in orange—this may be two orange strokes rather than one orange shape)—are partially buried by multiple pieces of white. Again, this layering is quite clear, distinguishing Ryman’s approach from the wrecking-and-rebuilding technique of ges- tural abstraction. He has retraced in white the once-orange “58” on the right side. In other areas, such as the upper and lower right, he avoids the smothering buildup that appears elsewhere, placing only a few marks on the sized cotton. Such an aerated technique, such visual penetration to the canvas, allows for a greater overall range of texture and a feeling of lightness. In contrast, a vertical stroke about a foot to the left of the date is much thicker. Th is fl attened smear, whose load has oozed out to the left, is a veritable event on the surface. Here factural incident is, simply put, enough, whereas for de Kooning and other abstract expression- ists such ephemera were not enough. For them, incidental eff ects had to be justifi ed by contributing color, directional motion, or structural elements. Ryman instead found interest in “mere” application. His painting must have appeared naïve 4 Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1957. C line tell the story of a painter physically because of its intoxication with the basic Casein and graphite pencil on savoring the central form through two dif- building blocks that other artists put to primed cotton canvas, 9 ⅝ x 8 ½ in. Private collection. Photo, ferent mark-making techniques—line and more elaborate use. Bill Jacobson / Robert Ryman brushstroke—before departing from this Th ese details illuminate the vantage Archive, New York, RR57/0083 form in a speedy fl ourish. Th e inclusion of point from which Ryman practices his art. this painting in Ryman’s 1993 retrospec- He avoids privileging a fi nished image to tive at the Tate Gallery in London and which individual acts are subservient by MoMA must have been irresistible, but it focusing on the acts themselves, imposing is somewhat misleading. It seems to prefi g- a condition of irrevocability. Irrevocability ure his mature work, but only if that work is already an inherent quality of music, es- is conceived as consisting of white squares. pecially the jazz improvisation that brought Th e apparent whiteness of Ryman’s art Ryman to New York in the fi rst place. A came about through a diff erent trajec- musical phrase, once proposed, cannot be tory—deriving from the cumulative eff ect withdrawn. Ryman infuses painting with of isolated strokes, rather than the white the same high stakes. His technique not square as an ideal shape to be conceived only parallels music in general but shares and executed. When he made this paint- the principles of kinesthetic and multisen- ing, Ryman was experimenting widely sorial attention to detail that characterized with marks, placement, and colors. the teaching of Lennie Tristano.

34 Spring 2007

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 5 Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1958. Oil and gesso on stretched cotton canvas, 43 x 43 in. Col- lection of the artist © Robert Ryman. Photo, Ben Blackwell / PaceWildenstein, New York

Musical Affi nities art of liberation from given structures, whether formal or social. A number of Music was, I think, important to my paint- Ryman’s seniors and contemporaries, ing, the way I saw painting right from the including Larry Poons and Larry Rivers, beginning, because . . . jazz is where you have also been fans and even practitioners improvise; . . . what you play is really only of jazz. Th e following observations on a one-time thing; you don’t hear it again, Ryman join the large body of literature on unless it’s recorded, . . . and it’s very much music and painting, but are distinguished like painting, in a sense. . . . You play or you by their articulation of the locus in which paint, and something comes from it. his paintings and music (particularly jazz) intersect.10 As has been discussed, Comparisons between music and Ryman’s method maintains the time- painting, especially abstract painting, have bound clarity of music. It attempts neither a long history. From Whistler’s sympho- to relate to a social climate nor to produce nies and nocturnes to ’s visual parallels for an aural experience. Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) to Even with his laborious and exacting recent reexplorations of synesthesia, music revisions, Mondrian fi lled in forms and has served as a model both for a nonref- colors that, together, create an optical erential, internally justifi ed art and for an energy that mimics the jazz he admired.

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Th e cause-and-eff ect performative nature and his students and collaborators, includ- of Ryman’s method is similar to that of ing saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne , but Ryman carefully Marsh, were criticized for their apparent avoids the spatial ambiguity that, while lack of emotion. For example, bebop enriching Pollock’s work, would weaken pioneer complained, his own. Pollock was known to play jazz “Th ey never sweated on the stand, Lee records obsessively at high volume, and Konitz, Lennie Tristano, and those guys. the energy and spontaneity of this music Th is music, jazz, is guts. . . . Th ey sorta have served as an interpretative guide for softened it up a bit.”12 his work.11 Ryman’s “music,” if it may be Konitz, whom Ryman admires im- called this, is more sedate and contempla- mensely, defended this “softening” of jazz tive, perhaps in keeping with the tenden- by arguing that “it’s possible to get the cies of his onetime teacher. maximum intensity in your playing and Tristano (fi g. 6) is less well known than still relax.” He demonstrated his position such canonical fi gures as Charlie Parker or by invoking swing-era saxophonist Lester Miles Davis, a fact bemoaned with some Young, who, according to Konitz, “never indignation by admirers of his reserved, sounded frantic, nor did he sound as if it delicate, but highly innovative music. were an eff ort to play. He sounded as if he In 1949 he and his ensemble recorded were sitting back and putting everything two short, completely improvised pieces, right into the groove where it’s supposed “Intuition” and “Digression,” which to be. It was very pretty and at the same lacked the melody, chords, or key signa- time, it was very intense.”13 ture that normally govern jazz, predating Ryman has expressed this same belief in Ornette Coleman’s “” by ten emotional content without histrionics— 6 Lennie Tristano at piano years. Most of Tristano’s ensemble work whether fast and loud playing or spat- with ensemble, including did not consist of total improvisation, but tered and colorful . His Warne Marsh, left, on sax- because it could be reminiscent of modern intention is to provide an experience of ophone and Peter Ind on bass. Photo, Bob Parent / atonal music, the popular press dubbed “enlightenment and delight.” Th e belief courtesy of Dale Parent him the “Schoenberg of jazz.” Tristano that such an experience is possible with such limited means is reminiscent of the economy of Tristano’s playing. Indeed, bassist Peter Ind has written that it is pos- sible to invest just one note with feeling.14 Both Tristano and Ryman assert that meaningful content can be found within unadorned technical details. To this end, Tristano based his teaching on theoreti- cal knowledge and physical control. He required his students to play all manner of scales and to identify an exhaustive variety of harmonic intervals by ear. Like all of Tristano’s students, Ryman was exposed to this emphasis on rudi- ments, and he seems to have transposed this principle to his fi rst attempt at paint- ing. He began by acquainting himself with the tools and methods of the art: “I was just seeing how the paint worked, and how the brushes worked. I was just using the paint, putting it on a canvas board,

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). putting it on thinly with turpentine, and the brush and pull it and what was going thicker to see what that was like, and to happen when I did.”17 Th e painting trying to make something happen without was deemed successful only after he had any specifi c idea what I was painting.”15 coordinated the viscosity of the paint with Instead of controlling the paint and the fl exibility of the brush and the resistant brushes for the sake of an image, Ryman weave of the canvas. Th is need for unerr- experienced their properties. Th inning ing execution, combined with the articula- the paint and applying it thickly are two tion of physical variables, also characterizes options in the vocabulary of paint, and his Standard polyptych (fi g. 8). Of the Ryman started with a systematic introduc- nearly fi fty sheets of steel that Ryman pre- tion to this language. Th ese self-guided pared, he rejected all but twelve: exercises are much like a musician practic- ing scales or attending to such matters as Well, I did them three at a time and I had posture, tone, and breathing. them next to the wall, and I cleaned them One of Tristano’s important exercises and they were coated with lacquer. . . . was derived from playing scales. Instead of [W]hen I began to paint them, I had to playing the entire scale, the student would have the paint ready, and the brush, and break it into small groups of notes, from the consistency of the paint. . . . And when two to seven, played in quick succession. I painted them, it had to be done quickly, Former wind student Timmy Cappello and it was just a one-time stroke across, described this exercise: “You would and again and again, and sometimes, . . . play one note, and then you’d play two if there was a certain twitch or something, notes tongued very fast, just straight up the stroke might miss a little bit as to how and down the scales. Dudop, dudodop, it went across, or maybe it’d be too much of dudop, dudodop. He was very concerned a drip or something would happen where it that a saxophone player’s or wind player’s just didn’t come out so well. . . . so it was tongue and fi ngers be really well coordi- really just a matter of how it looked to me nated.”16 Although Cappello probably and how I felt with the others. sang “dudop, dudodop” to his interviewer, in print these syllables become onomato- Th e painter’s standards for judgment poetic equivalents of Ryman’s discrete were as subjective as those of a traditional strokes, particularly in his small linen fl aps abstractionist, but while de Kooning of the early 1960s (see frontispiece). Each or Kline judged confi gurations, Ryman stroke is a decisive articulation of several assesses performances. Th us he replied factors—the body of the paint, the texture circumspectly when interviewer Paul of the ground, and the give or stiff ness of Cummings asked him in 1972 about the the brush, all eminently clear—placed and apparent preconceptualization of his work: then left, as if they were notes from an “Yes, that’s to begin with, but then the instrument. painting. . . .” Th e ellipsis appears in the Th e coordination between breath, transcript, indicating that Ryman trailed tongue, and fi ngers that Cappello de- off in thought. Cummings continued his scribed is mirrored by Ryman’s simultane- inquiry, pressing the artist: “So there’s ous attention to a number of variables in still actually a lot once you’ve Mayco (fi g. 7). In this painting, a twelve- started the picture. Th ere’s a certain inch-wide brush was pulled across a large amount of chance involved in it.” Ryman linen canvas. Ryman recalled the concerted replied: physical control this project required: “I had a few failures at the beginning. Finally, Well, it’s not chance. I mean, I’m very aware I got the consistency right and I knew of what the paint is going to do. I know what I was doing and how hard to push how the paint is going to react on the surface

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 7 Robert Ryman, Mayco, 1966. Oil paint on sized linen canvas, 75 ½ x 75 ½ in. Daros Col- lection, © Robert Ryman. Photo, Th omas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich, Switzerland

because I know it. I’ve done it. It’s more the event that must leave a satisfactory result chance of . . . It’s diffi cult to explain. It has in order to survive. to be a very direct feeling and a very sure ap- Another important parallel between proach. Th ere can’t be any doodling. I mean Ryman and Tristano can be seen in their it has got to come out right away; and if it shared use of the term “feeling.” Despite doesn’t, you can always tell when it’s been his reputed lack of “guts,” Tristano insisted, fussed with.18 “Th e jazz musician’s function is to feel.” Th is “feeling” was of a particular nature, Cummings asked if the painting is either a however. Tristano expressed his disap- systematically produced image or the result proval of more exuberant players such as of a procedure incorporating accident, but saxophonist John Coltrane with the phrase Ryman practices a third path, in which a “all emotion, no feeling,” adding, “For my given procedure is subjected to evaluation. purposes . . . emotion is a specifi c thing; In other words, he does not use either of happiness, sadness, etc. But when I listen the theoretical justifi cations (system or ac- to the old Count Basie band with Pres cident) that Cummings suggested, because [Lester Young], it is impossible to extract both of those options are pictorial. Th e the particular emotion. But on the feeling substance of Ryman’s work is instead an level it is deep and profoundly intense.”19

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). critics such as and his chief protégé, Michael Fried. Fried’s famous construction “eyesight alone” stands in opposition to the greater bodily engagement of minimalist works, a quality Fried derided as “theatrical.”21 It must be stressed that Ryman did not practice his anti-optical painting in direct engage- ment with these art-critical battles, which played out in the 1960s. He developed this work in the late 1950s when he sought to express, as succinctly as possible, the feeling of actuality he derived from the paintings that inspired him at MoMA. Th is kind of feeling can be ascertained by attending to details, intuiting the object’s tactility, and conducting an imagi- nary rehearsal of the painting process. In a statement written for an exhibition of new paintings in 2004, Ryman continued to downplay pure vision in favor of feeling by explaining, “At the beginning I have to somewhat blindly fi nd my way. . . . Th en it becomes more clear how [the paintings] are working, how they feel. How the paint- ings look can be deceiving, but the way they feel is more important.”22 Viewers 8 Robert Ryman, Standard, 1967. Based on Tristano’s explanation, may be “deceived” if they do not look in a Swann’s Down enamel on cold- “feeling” can be described as an attention manner that integrates bodily and temporal rolled steel. One of twelve panels, each 48 x 48 in. Panza Collec- to the internal relations in music instead implications. Th is unfolding of detail and tion, Solomon R. Guggenheim of a reference to a state of mind. Ryman possibility—as opposed to the singular Museum, New York uses the term in a similar manner, with vantage point of pictorial viewing—is how the further implication of a bodily ap- the painting “works,” and in the above prehension of painting. In denying any statement Ryman equates how the paint- representational or metaphorical aspect to ings “work” with how they “feel.” his work, he has explained that each paint- Just as Ryman refuses to isolate vision, ing is based on “the way it’s done and the Tristano incorporated bodily experience way it feels.”20 into the production of sounds. Physical in- Ryman’s equation of “the way it’s ternalization of knowledge and integration done” and “the way it feels” suggests that of the senses were key to his pedagogy. “feeling” denotes a mode of perception Musicologist Eunmi Shim has discussed that is tied to vision but not exclusive to this goal: “To his students he [Tristano] it. Th e choppy rhythm of oil paint in the often stressed the connection between Winsor Series (fi g. 9) feels diff erent from senses, such as hearing, feeling, and seeing, the swaths of matte enamel in the Standard and made an eff ort to enable them to ex- polyptych (1967), which in turn feel dif- perience the musical process as a whole by ferent from the dull, watery sealer on cor- doing so.”23 To instill this multisensorial rugated cardboard in VII (fi g. 10). Ryman approach, Tristano recommended practice proposes a mode of viewing distinct from away from the instrument, “visualizing” the “opticality” theorized by modernist playing while rehearsing the tunes in one’s

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 9 Robert Ryman, Winsor 34, mind. In addition, he would require his to allow for direct expression of musical 1966. Oil on linen, 63 x 63 in. students to sing along with records of ideas, without the intervening negotia- © Robert Ryman. Photo, Mary Zlot/PaceWildenstein, New York accomplished players. Often he would tion of an instrument. And again Ryman slow the records to half speed to facilitate continued this enterprise by eliminating scrutiny of the melody. Th ese exercises shapes as a second-tier eff ect of the paint- were intended to dismantle the barriers ing activity, in favor of uniting mark and between conception and execution, and eff ect with his one-time stroke.

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Shim speculates that Tristano’s visualiza- for years, while others consider Tristano’s tion technique could be partially attribut- studio to have been cultish and attribute able to the fact that he was blind, having to him a “messianic” ambition toward lost his sight at an early age. Ryman’s eye- “mind-control.”26 While Ryman is more sight seems to be weak, and while his work diplomatic, he indicated his reluctance to is predicated on subtleties perceived visu- submit to such a group dynamic in dis- ally, these subtleties result from bodily ac- cussing his eventual choice of painting over tivity. Critic and historian Lucy R. Lippard, music: “[P]ainting was something I could to whom Ryman was married in the 1960s, do alone, do myself, and music demanded recalls that when he acquired eyeglasses he other people involved. . . . It just suited my commented, “Oh, is that what I’ve been personality, I think.” doing?”24 Th is almost off hand recognition Despite Ryman’s eventual abandon- of that which is thought to be central ment of music, the correspondences to painting—the visual—suggests that between his and Tristano’s aesthetic Ryman’s eff orts had been directed not philosophies indicate that this early expe- toward resolved images but toward the rience aff ected his conception of painting experience of applying paint. as a self-justifying activity rather than as a Ryman was no “Tristanoite,” as the set of technical problems to be overcome pianist’s adherents were called, and he left on the way to an image. Having entered his studies after only a year.25 Th e future painting from without, Ryman was painter found his teacher to be “very cold able to avoid the persistent illusionism and kind of rigid” and unable to “teach in of abstraction at the precise moment 10 Robert Ryman, VII, 1969. that way of opening someone up to their when other painters were working so Enamelac on corrugated own personality.” Tristano’s students were hard to expunge it. Because he worked cardboard, seven panels, each 60 x 60 in. Stedelijk divided on this issue. Some found the from diff erent assumptions, he remained Museum, Amsterdam musician very helpful and stayed with him disconnected from the stylistic decadence

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). of abstract as well as from is an example of his disinterest in—even its critique by other painters of his gen- innocence of—the expressivity Stella was eration. Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, overtly undermining. for example, famously rebuked abstract Ryman’s Winsor Series of 1965–66 expressionism’s excesses by presenting the bears superfi cial similarity to Stella’s work, stroke as drained of color, individuality, since the paintings appear to consist of and/or communicative power. Instead of rows of stripes, but stylistic emulation is ostensibly “expressing themselves,” they unlikely given the relatively large span of were skeptical about the existence of an time between them. Ryman did not paint interior realm, not to mention its acces- the Winsors until several years after he had sibility through the culturally conditioned seen and admired the Black Paintings. act of painting. While Ryman rejected the Immediately after he saw them, he con- metaphorical trappings of gestural paint- tinued on his course, in which discrete ing, he celebrated its tactile immediacy. curving strokes populate expanses both If his paint application is understood as large and small. It was fi ve years before he engendered by a performative impulse, regimented these units into “stripes.” In his repeated brushstrokes appear as fact, they cannot be considered stripes at propositions of materials and activities all, because a stripe is an optical abstrac- that possess their own positive qualities tion existing in the realm of pictorial rather than as negations of painting’s ac- design. Th is distinction is clarifi ed by cepted meaning.27 looking closely at both painters’ work. Diff erences in their manner of execution reveal profound diff erences in conception. Minimal Overlap Ryman’s method was as follows. At the top left-hand corner of a large linen canvas, a Stella’s early work is no simple act of brush about one and a half inches wide, negation, but his Black Paintings of loaded with white oil paint, was pulled 1958–60 clearly succeed at his ambition horizontally about twelve inches, just until to avoid making “a record of . . . sen- the paint began to thin and the weave of sitivity, a record of fl ux.”28 Ryman saw the cloth poked through. Th e paint may these paintings in the exhibition Sixteen have been mixed with a solvent to allow Americans at MoMA when he worked at for easier brushing, but it was more thick the museum as a guard, and appreciated than thin. Th ere are no drips, and the their importance. “Many of the painters ridges created by the bristles have been that I talked to didn’t even like them at retained in the dried paint. After this fi rst all [and] thought they were ridiculous,” stroke, another was applied with a reloaded he commented. “I thought they were very brush, continuing the horizontal row. Th is interesting paintings.” Th e exaggerated process was repeated down the surface of thickness of their stretchers along with the the canvas. insular pictorial scheme these stretchers By contrast, Stella rendered his stripes projected were read in succeeding years as in varying directions with multiple coats the fi nal transformation from the painting of paint. Th ey are not, as onetime studio as window—in which the thickness of the mate called them, “the paths stretcher was merely an expedient support of [the] brush on canvas”—a description to be ignored—to the painting as self- more appropriate to Ryman’s Winsors.29 suffi cient object, relieved of illusion and Th is diff erence is demonstrated in Hollis seemingly exhausted of formal possibility. Frampton’s famous photographs of Stella However, the Black Paintings were devas- working on the Black Paintings. One tating only to tenets Ryman did not hold. photo (fi g. 11) shows Stella with his brush His easy enjoyment of Stella’s early work placed horizontally on a vertical stripe and

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). consistent with the width of that stripe, as favor of the arrangement of materials in if he were maintaining the same one-to- real space. Andre’s fertile misreading of one relationship between tool and mark Stella—which gave him license to pursue that Ryman was to practice. But in another his horizontal arrangements of wood, photo, he has placed the brush vertically, bricks, and metal—again perfectly, if well within the lateral borders of the same unintentionally, encapsulates Ryman’s vertical stripe. Th is vertical placement of method: “Frank Stella is a Constructivist. the brush inside the zone that is to become He makes paintings by combining identi- the stripe indicates that it was something cal, discrete units. Th ose units are not to be fi lled in, essentially an elongated stripes, but brushstrokes.” It has been shape. In addition, all of the photographs shown that while Stella did indeed paint show Stella commencing this fi lling-in at stripes, Ryman’s “identical, discrete units” an arbitrary point in the interior, while are the brushstrokes themselves. Th e wrig- Ryman always started on one side and gling clump of strokes on a scrap of canvas continued to the other. A Black Painting in his 1962–63 Untitled (see frontispiece) was to be a fl at optical image, while the is similar in concept to much of Andre’s horizontal bands of the Winsors refl ected work, particularly his early untitled “dog the width and capacity of the brush as well turd” sculptures of 1962. Although as the sequence of painterly activity. Th is Frampton photographed them before they distinction is not drawn here to establish were destroyed, Andre has rarely allowed Ryman as more “advanced,” but to point their reproduction.30 Th ese sculptures out the opposing realms in which the began as disc-shaped extrusions of concrete two painters worked. Stella sought an that were cut into elongated wedges and instantaneous image, while Ryman’s stroke displayed upright on pieces of burlap. establishes a constant link to the time in Th e “units” of both Ryman and Andre— which his paintings were made. whether paint or concrete—are deployed As aesthetic positions hardened in so that their space-claiming identity is the 1960s, Stella repudiated the literalist more important than any predetermined reading of his work as pointing inexorably arrangement to which they are subjected. toward an evacuation of the pictorial in Th e pieces are not composed but simply, gruffl y presented. Th e canonically minimalist order of Ryman’s strokes is more apparent in the Winsors and other post-1965 works, but this order is a more succinct manifesta- tion of the discreteness with which he had already been treating his strokes since 1958. Nevertheless, there is no need to establish precedent between Andre and Ryman; each worked independently, with distinct sources. Ryman’s horizontal polyptychs such as Standard and the corrugated III, IV, V, and VII may also remind the viewer of Andre’s metal plates. By the time polyptychs had become a signifi cant part 11 Hollis Frampton, #3 (paint- ing Getty Tomb) from Th e Secret of Ryman’s vocabulary in the late 1960s, World of Frank Stella, 1958–62. seriality had been established in the work Photograph, 10 x 8 in. Albright- of many artists. Th is repetition of panels Knox Art Gallery, Buff alo, New York, Gift of Marion Faller may have been an assimilation of period

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). style, but it was also an elaboration of approaches his medium demonstrates Ryman’s original approach. Multipanel that painting is too complex to be either works provided him with a means to “buried” or triumphantly “resurrected.” expand the repetition inherent in his Ryman would disagree with those technique from 1958 onward as well as critics who praise him even while they to claim more concretely the exhibition deny that he is a painter. But the very space as a real place in which the painting conceivability of such assertions demon- “works.” If each of Ryman’s paintings strates his distance from painting as it exists as a fi eld of possibilities in terms is usually understood—that is, as image of hanging and viewing, polyptychs making, even when that image is empty. complicate this fi eld. One of his earliest Reductive painters such as , Brice polyptychs was exhibited in December Marden, and Robert Mangold have less 2002 at the in in common with him than those mini- in a group show entitled malists who explicitly identifi ed them- Paintings from the 1960s, which also selves as sculptors. It has been shown included work by Donald Judd and Andy how Ryman and Andre share an artistic Warhol. Projection (fi g. 12) from 1964 vocabulary of discrete elements. In addi- consists of sixty-eight stretcherless pieces tion, Ryman shares with Robert Morris of linen, each roughly fi ve-and-a-half a deemphasis on the a priori design of inches square, on which are scattered pro- a work in favor of the vicissitudes of portionally large, curving strokes of dark execution and the changing relationship and saturated colors with a fi nal layer of of an object to the viewer and the space white. Th ese ragged cloths are arranged it occupies. haphazardly on the wall. Ryman recalls Ryman can be linked to Morris fi nding the work only recently, having through his direct technique, which consigned it to storage shortly after it maintains a close connection between the was made because it was “too crazy.”31 manipulation of material and the fi nished While this “craziness” is apparent in rela- work. No mentally existing image super- tion to the austere Winsors that followed, sedes individual making-acts or neces- Projection is an important example of sitates their eff acement, as in the glazed the impulse to place rhythmic activity and scrubbed fl esh of a Titian Venus or in real space, fi rst through the strokes, the measured, cut, and assembled facets and then through multiple surfaces. Th e of a Judd. Morris’s minimalism, like that regimentation of the relative chaos of of Judd, grew partially from his inter- Ryman’s multidirectional “crazy” paint- pretation of the limits of painting. He ings into the orderly rows of 1965–66 seems to have believed in the 1960s and parallels the rejection of this short-lived ’70s that painting was no longer capable idea of an amorphous polyptych in favor of fulfi lling the modernist imperative of of sequenced panels placed on the same self-clarifi cation. According to Morris, horizontal line. the only way out of illusionism was acknowledgment of the “structure,” the literal support. But the ingrained optical- A Sculptor’s Critique ity Morris saw in painting would always contradict the emphasis on the object. Ryman has been praised for his commit- Th is tension made painting intractable.32 ment to an art that has been embattled By eschewing color and hence dimin- throughout his career. While this ishing opticality, Ryman seems to answer theoretical strife has been reassessed with Morris’s critique of painting by making nostalgia and mild embarrassment, the inroads into the very procedural realm distinct perspective from which Ryman the sculptor saw as inaccessible to this

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). antiquated art. Th e unretouched stroke precious object, which is nevertheless corresponds to Morris’s demonstration of charged with perceptual fl ux, as he indi- the object’s coming-into-being in his late cated when complaining of some viewers’ 1960s Anti Form sculptures, in which lack of understanding of “how it works.” industrial felt interacted with walls, fl oor, Interestingly, both Ryman and Morris and gravity, deriving its form from the had earlier participated in durational per- activities of slicing and draping (fi g. 13). formances: Morris in theater and Of course, Ryman’s work cannot be and Ryman in jazz. 12 Robert Ryman, Projection, claimed to be formless in Morris’s Morris has made exceptions in his ca. 1964. Oil on sized linen, sense.33 Yet it does assume a diff erent po- assessment of painting by praising those sixty-eight panels, each ca. 5 ⅜ sition than most paintings in the chain of artists whose work demonstrates a visible x 5 ⅜ in. Private collection. Photo, Robert Ryman Archive, events that leads to its existence. Ryman relation with its mode of being made. New York, R64.020 makes a permanent and admittedly He credited Jackson Pollock and Morris

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 13 Robert Morris, Untitled (Version Louis with a clear display of process, see how they’re done,” but he added III in 19 Parts), 1969. Felt, commenting: “Th e forms and the order that the process is “not a message I’m 103 x 101 x 31 in. © 2007 of their work were not a priori to the trying to promote necessarily.” Th e term Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo, Sonnabend means.”34 Pollock’s stick, according to “promote” is crucial here, with its con- Gallery, New York, RM-00288 Morris, is “unlike the brush”; it is “in notation of products or ideas designed far greater sympathy with the matter for easy dissemination. Few artists because it acknowledges the inherent wish to be subordinated to an already tendencies and properties of that matter.” known category, and process art quickly Louis, he claimed, achieved an even became such a category in the late 1960s. greater correspondence with the matter Moreover, Ryman’s denial is much more because he poured it from containers. than a matter of strategy. He does not Although Ryman’s use of the brush is set up events to be perpetuated through an imposition of an inherited, culturally documentation and anecdote like Rafael conditioned order onto paint, his visible Ferrer, who allowed a large quantity of results are also based on an engagement ice to melt during the 1969 exhibition with his tools and materials and have Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the not been conceptualized as a particular Whitney Museum of American Art. image, even if they are often carried out Instead, Ryman takes care to produce according to a predetermined system. objects whose process, while complete, Ryman has been reluctant, however, is continuously available. Th is nuanced to identify his work as process-oriented. stance accounts for the ambiguity in his In 2002 he acknowledged, “I keep statements. [the paintings] kind of open, kind of While he remains fi rmly within paint- naked in a sense, where you can really ing, Ryman opens up the shallow but previously unexplored space between paint, surface, and wall, thereby depart- ing from the illusory space and static, idealized form that had been thought to be endemic to painting. He occupies a unique position in the “minimal fi eld” because he built his work on the conspic- uous brushstroke—the aspect of abstract expressionist painting that was sup- pressed by other artists connected with minimalism. Th is position explodes the notion of fl atness and literalizes painting, not only as an object but as a process that, because of its clear discernability, seems to continue even as we look.

Postscript

In Ryman’s December 2004 exhibition at PaceWildenstein in New York, he relinquished the unretouched stroke that has been the cornerstone of this essay. Th e painter acknowledges this departure in his catalogue essay: “Usually, I never ‘work’ paint as I prefer to put paint

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 14 Robert Ryman, Series #24 down and leave it as it is and in doing some areas and a more solid white in (White), 2004. Oil on canvas, so, generally like to use heavy paint.”35 others (fi g. 14). Th ese surfaces have sug- 16 x 16 in. © Robert Ryman. Photo, PaceWildenstein, In the recent paintings, four diff erent gested a nineteenth-century sublime to New York whites are thinned with turpentine some viewers, reminiscent of J. M. W. and scrubbed over a ground of black Turner or Albert Pinkham Ryder. Th is gesso that wraps around the sides of association may seem surprising given the stretchers. Th e varying levels of the previous decades’ persistent literal- buildup result in a hazy blue-gray in ism, but, strictly speaking, Ryman has

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This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). never been able to eliminate entirely the his vocabulary. Th ese are not the possibility that spectators will read his grand and comfortable paintings of a paintings pictorially. Rather, he sets up complacent master but the searching cues to discourage such a reading. Th e experiments of a painter eager to “pull “one-time” stroke must be understood as out all the stops,” as the artist described such a cue, indeed the central one. It is a his ambitions a year before he embarked function of the desire to make a painting on this series. Th roughout his career, that avoids illusionistic depth and exists Ryman denied himself the “working” of in a continuous realm with the viewer. In paint. Th e question he asks with the new his 2004 show, this roadblock was lifted. paintings is, Must the repeated brushing After fifty years of deploying the of thinned paint necessarily introduce singular stroke and experimenting in a spatial depth, or can it, given the estab- number of other ways (mostly with lished language of fi ve decades of paint- materials), Ryman has radically changed ing, indicate the same temporal clarity?

Notes 1 Pepe Karmel has documented the emer- 4 Ryman, interview by the author, Sep- 7 Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with gence of the understanding of Jackson tember 17 and 18, 2002. Unless oth- Robert Ryman,” Artforum 9, no. 9 (May Pollock’s working method as a per- erwise noted, statements by the artist 1971): 53. formance, in large part owing to the come from this interview. photographs of , while 8 Ryman, “On Painting,” lecture tran- providing a less mythologized, more 5 Th e two separate statements from which script, in Christel Sauer and Urs detailed account of the artist’s decisions. the substance of this sentence is assem- Rausmüller, Robert Ryman (Paris: Espace Karmel, “Pollock at Work: Th e Films bled follow: “[I]t wasn’t the color that d’Art Contemporain; Schaff hausen: and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” I was concerned with but the basic Hallen für neue Kunst, 1991), 59. in and Karmel, Jackson approach he was using.” “Interview with Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Robert Storr on October 17, 1986,” in 9 Ryman, from interviews by Lynn Art, 1998), 87–137. Rosemary Schwarzwälder et al., Abstract Zelevansky, July 1 and 7, 1992; see the Painting of America and Europe (Vienna: catalogue notes compiled by Catherine 2 For the quotes, see Mark Godfrey, Galerie nächst St. Stephan; Klagenfurt: Kinley and Zelevansky in Storr, Robert “Dimensions Variable,” Frieze 84 (June– Ritter Verlag, 1988), 215. “When I fi rst Ryman, 120. July–August 2004): 120; and James saw Rothko, it changed my thinking Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics about painting. . . . Not so much the 10 See, for example, Harry Cooper, “Mon- in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale Univ. color, or even the style of the painting drian, Hegel, Boogie,” October 84 . . . but the way it projected off of the (Spring 1998): 119–42; Krin Gabbard, Press, 2000). wall. . . . Actually my painting was very ed., Representing Jazz and Jazz among diff erent, my approach was diff erent. the Discourses, both (Durham, N.C.: 3 A key biographical source on the But that didn’t matter. It was just the Duke Univ. Press, 1995); and Mona artist is Robert Storr, Robert Ryman presence of his paintings, and the way Hadler, “Jazz and the Visual ,” (London: Tate Gallery; New York: they worked with the light.” “Robert Arts Magazine 57, no. 10 (June 1983): Museum of Modern Art, 1993); some Ryman: Interview by Jeff rey Weiss, 8 91–101. additional details may be found in May 1997,” in Weiss, John Gage, Carol Vittorio Colaizzi, “Robert Ryman, Mancusi-Ungaro, et al., 11 “[Pollock] would get into grooves of Painting as Actuality: 1953–1969,” (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery listening to his jazz records—not just (PhD diss., Virginia Commonwealth of Art; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, for days—day and night, day and University, 2005). Amy Baker 1998), 369. night for three days running until you Sandback, project director for the thought you would climb the roof!” unpublished Robert Ryman Catalogue 6 Yve-Alain Bois notes Ryman’s system- , interview by Francine Raisonné and Archive, has gener- atic “testing” of painting’s components du Plessix and Cleve Gray, “Who Was ously made photographs and other in a way that demonstrates the limits Jackson Pollock?” Art in America 55, information available to schol- of Greenbergian , while no. 3 (May–June 1967): 51. See also ars. Catalogue raisonné numbers for Robert Storr stresses Ryman’s intuitive Andrew Kagan, “Improvisations: Notes Ryman’s early works, many of which approach. See Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in on Jackson Pollock and the Black Con- are named Untitled, are from this Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: tribution to American High Culture,” project; see the exhibition catalogue MIT Press, 1990), 215–26; and Storr, Arts Magazine 53, no. 7 (March 1979): Robert Ryman (Zurich: Thomas “Simple Gifts,” in Robert Ryman, 9–10, 96–99; and Chad Mandeles, “Jackson Ammann Fine Art AG, 2002). and passim. Pollock and Jazz: Structural Parallels,”

48 Spring 2007

This content downloaded from 128.082.252.150 on August 15, 2017 11:27:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Arts Magazine 56, no. 2 (October as quoted in Saff ord Chamberlain, of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 1981): 139–41. An Unsung Cat: Th e Life and Music of 69–86. Warne Marsh (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow 12 “Schoenberg of Jazz,” Time, August Press; Newark, N.J.: Institute of Jazz 28 Frank Stella, interview by Caro- 27, 1951, 82–84. Dizzy Gillespie Studies, Rutgers Univ. Libraries, 2000), line Jones, in “Frank Stella, Execu- with Al Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop 52; and Alan Surpin, “Lennie Tristano: tive Artist,” chap. 3 of Machine in the (1979), 359, quoted in Eunmi Feeling Is Basic . . . ,” Down Beat 36, Studio: Constructing the Postwar Ameri- Shim, “Lennie Tristano (1919– no. 1 (October 16, 1969): 30. can Artist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago 1978): His Life, Music, and Teach- ing” (PhD diss., University of Illinois 20 Tuchman, “An Interview with Robert Press, 1996), 120. at Urbana-Champaign, 1999), 19. Ryman,” 53. 29 Carl Andre, “Preface to Stripe Painting,” 13 Lee Konitz, quoted in Nat Hentoff , 21 See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: in Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller “Lee Konitz Moving into ‘Valuable Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Univ. of (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Property’ Class,” Down Beat 21, no. 16 Chicago Press, 1998). 1959), 76. (August 11, 1954): 8. 22 Ryman, untitled essay in Robert Ryman 30 For the quote, see Andre, “On Paint- 14 For “enlightenment and delight,” see (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2004), 7. ing and Consecutive Matters,” in Andre Ryman’s “On Painting” in Sauer and and Hollis Frampton, Twelve Dialogues, Rausmüller, Robert Ryman, 67. Peter 23 Shim, “Lennie Tristano,” 422–23. 1962–63 (New York: New York Univ. Ind, Jazz Visions: Refl ections on Lennie Press, 1980), 37. On the “dog turd” Tristano and His Legacy (London: 24 Lucy R. Lippard, telephone interview sculptures, see Meyer, Minimalism, 193. Equinox, 2005), 18. by the author, June 19, 2003.

15 Ryman, interview by Robert Storr, June 25 Music critic Francis Davis described 31 Ryman, faxed letter to the author, April 1992, in Storr, “Simple Gifts,” 12. “Tristanoites” as former students who 24, 2003. suff ered from “Tristanoitis, a chronic 16 Shim, “Lennie Tristano,” 354, 355. ailment whose symptoms include bur- 32 See Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: rowing introspection, a seeming prefer- Notes and Nonsequiturs,” Artforum 5, 17 Tuchman, “An Interview with Robert ence for practice over performance, and no. 10 (Summer 1967): 25. Ryman,” 49. a disinclination to mix with musicians outside the fold.” Davis, “Tristanoitis: 33 Nor in the sense of Rosalind Krauss 18 Paul Cummings, “Tape Recorded Inter- Th e Legacy of Lennie Tristano,” Village and Yve-Alain Bois who, following view with Robert Ryman at His Studio Voice 36, no. 23 (June 4, 1991): 51. the writings of Georges Bataille, pro- in New York City, Date: October posed “formless” as a term for the defl a- 13, 1972,” Oral History Collections, 26 Chamberlain attributes these terms to tion of humanist ideologies. Formless: A , Smithsonian an “informant [who] wished to remain User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books; Institution, typescript, 29. anonymous” who was a jazz fan in the 1950s and later became a psychoanalyst. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 19 Th e Tristano quotes are from Bill Coss, An Unsung Cat, 54 and 66 n. 31. “Lennie Tristano Speaks Out,” Down 34 Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 Beat 29, no. 30 (December 6, 1962): 27 For an interpretation of his strokes (April 1968): 34, 35. 21; Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties as negations of painting’s accepted (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 243, meaning, see Douglas Crimp, “Th e End 35 Ryman, untitled essay (2004), 6.

49 American Art

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