Untitled #33

Before becoming an artist Robert Ryman was a musician. The desire to immerse himself in the jazz scene brought him to New York in the early 1950s, where he spent time in museums and was introduced, for the first time, to painting. In order to give himself a crash course in painting, to spend as much time as possible near it, to look at it and learn from observation, Ryman became a security guard at the museum of Modern Art, where he worked from 1953 to 1960. He was most fascinated by Mark Rothko, whose paintings Ryman liked, he has said, because "There was color, there was form, there was structure, the surface, the light-the nakedness of it." In other words, what interested him about Rothko was the paint and painting itself, without the need to represent something. For Ryman, the means of exploring the painting itself became the two most neutral elements he could identify: the square and white paint.

What is the effect of standing before a monochrome white painting? First of all, you notice that what seems to be monochromatic is not entirely so. There are bits of color that come through, telling you that there is great density of paint on this canvas. It also allows you to appreciate that there are myriad variations in the color white. So perhaps white is not as neutral as one might think. Though Ryman himself would dispute this: "I'm not really interested in white as a color…," he has said. Without a representation of some thing-a landscape, a still life, a portrait, a narrative-we are left with the paint itself. How was it applied? What are the material characteristics of the paint? What is the brushwork like and how does it interact with his chosen surface?