Robert
Ryman – artist
Born
May 30, 1930; died February 8, 2019
Robert
Ryman, who has died aged 88, never planned to be a painter. As it turned out,
he became one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, who offered
something quieter and more meditative than the wave of abstract expressionists
who preceded him. Where they lashed out with excitable shades of mercurial
largesse, Ryman pared things down to a more methodical, pragmatic approach, diligently
setting out his store on white or off-white different sized squares. While
working with such a wilfully limited palette implied a zen purity that saw
Ryman dubbed a minimalist, in truth, the use of white was only there to shed
light on other things going on. You just had to look, that was all, and he
preferred to be regarded as a realist.
Light
and space were everything to Ryman’s work, which could be regarded as an
extended life-long riff that added textures and phrases to its deliberately recognisable
framework as it went, pushing its self-imposed boundaries to the limit. In this
sense, Ryman’s paintings arguably related to his early ambitions as a wannabe
jazz saxophonist, before a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York exposed him to the work of Matisse and Mark Rothko. Working
alongside future contemporaries Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, the experience
shifted his perspective, and subsequently changed his life.
Robert Tracy Ryman was born in Nashville to his insurance
salesman father William and his mother Norah, who was a schoolteacher and
amateur pianist. Trapped in a town where country music reigned, Ryman listened
to what jazz he could find on the radio, and while still a teenager took up the
tenor saxophone.
While the prospect of him becoming a musician was anathema to
his parents, Ryman studied music at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and then
the George Peabody College for Teachers, before spending two years in the Army
Reserve Corps. Stationed in Alabama, he toured army bases as part of a military
band. Once discharged, like so many of his generation, he hit the road to New
York, where he lived in a tiny apartment opposite Bloomingdale’s owned by a
Russian cellist. Inbetween working as a messenger and in a mailroom, he studied
under jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. With New York’s underground scene a melting
pot of criss-crossing artforms, Ryman developed a fascination with the
paintings he saw in the museums he frequented.
Getting a job at MoMA in 1954, he worked alongside fellow
security guard Flavin and bookshop assistant LeWitt, and as he walked the rooms
began his auto-didact’s art education in earnest. A few months into the job,
Ryman bought some canvasboard and tubes of oil paint from his local art-store,
and set about experimenting to see what might happen.
Initially working in green before turning to white, Ryman
divided his time with playing jazz at Arthur’s nightclub in Greenwich Village,
and sold his first painting in 1958 after it was shown as part of a MoMA staff
exhibition. Around this time Ryman met a young art historian called Lucy R
Lippard, who would go on to become a critic, championing minimalism and
conceptual art. The pair married in 1960, but divorced six years later. In
1969, Ryman met painter Merrill Wagner, and they married.
By that time, Ryman’s work had been included in a 1964 group
show of eleven artists in New York, and he had his first one-man show
there in 1967, showing thirteen sheets of cold rolled steel, each just under a
metre and a half square, and painted with white enamel brush strokes stretching
in parallel from left to right. This not only set the tone of what followed,
but attracted the interest of European galleries, and Ryman showed in Munich a year later. His first solo show in a museum came in
1972 at the Guggenheim, and his first retrospective in Amsterdam two years
later. after Ryman’s works were seen in documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977) and 7
(1982), at the Venice Biennale three times in 1976, 1978 and 1980, and three
times again at the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995).
Ryman’s work developed throughout in physical
and practical ways as much as aesthetically.
Where in the 1960s he often painted on paper,
attaching each unframed piece to the wall with masking tape, by the time of a
1977 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1977 he was using hard surfaces, with clips, bolts and
screws adding a sculptural quality to his work. Ryman expanded his range to
work with materials including steel, plexiglass, newsprint and wallpaper. His
final works saw Ryman’s life-long method of underpainting his white
compositions abandoned entirely, again paring things down to something simpler.
One of the largest public collections of
Ryman's work was held in the now closed Hallen
für Neue Kunst contemporary art museum in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, with Ryman later revisiting it to reimagine the thirty paintings drawn
from almost half a century of work as a total experience.
Similarly, in 2017, Ryman donated twenty-one
paintings to the New York-based Dia
Art Foundation’s permanent collection. This features works dating
from the late 1950s up to 2003, and seen together presents an expansive and
ever-developing narrative of solidity and strength that goes some way to define
the all-embracing magnitude of Ryman’s uniquely determined vision. It was a
vision which, whatever the direction, always looked to the light.
Ryman is survived by his wife, Merrill Wagner, their sons, Will and Cordy, and by his son Ethan, from his earlier
marriage to Lucy
R Lippard.
The Herald, February 25th 2019
ends
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