Vittorio C

olaizziR

obert Ryman

Robert Ryman

IntroductionThe 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 321List of Illustrated works 326Bibliography 332Index 338

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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

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.

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

5352Untitled #2, 1965 Phoenix, 1979 Untitled, 1965–6

107106 The Paradoxical Absolute, 1958 Untitled, c.1960

211210 Getting the Paint Across

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.

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 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.

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.

185184 Spectrum II, 1984 Spectrum VIII, 1984

303302 Period, 2002 Marshall, 1998

124Mayco, 1966

Untitled, Delta, c.1965–66

331330 Robert Ryman’s studio, New York, 1999. The artist in his studio, New York, 1999.

7574

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 first professional painting seems designed to throw viewers off the trail of while as a key to his work’s identity or meaning.

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, “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 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 decisions.50 After these beginnings, Ryman has spent his career dialectically

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

Fig. 17: States I–IV of Untitled, c.1956. Photographed by Ryman in various states and orientations.

Not Exactly Expressionist

Book specifications:Binding: cloth hardbackFormat: 290 × 250 mmExtent: 344 ppNumber of images: 250Wordcount: c.60,000ISBN: 978 0 7148 4934 8

Phaidon Press LimitedRegent’s WharfAll Saints StreetLondon, N1 9PA

Phaidon Press65 Bleecker Street8th FloorNew York, NY 10012

© 2017 Phaidon Press Limitedphaidon.com

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.

Vittorio C

olaizziR

obert Ryman

Robert Ryman