![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="3888px" width="1980px"></svg>)
T he term Minimalism emerged as critics and curators grappled with an austere and seemingly impersonal sensibility that emerged in the 1960s. As ill-fitting as it is, and as dubious a task it is to categorise at all, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin all demand and reward contemplative looking at the makeup, methods, and implications of their work. They are not quick shots. One is tempted to say that they break down the elements of their art, but like Minimalism, this too is a deceptive linguistic expediency. It is more accurate to say that they isolate and magnify them.
One of Ryman’s favorite words was “enlightenment,” which he would sometimes pair with “delight.” This can apply to all of these artists, and it is a way into their sometimes intimidating aesthetics, suggesting not initiation into esoteric knowledge, but a state of receptivity to what was present all along. Ryman may be the most difficult of these artists, precisely because his work seems to present an absence of composition or form.
This is only the case if one expects a picture, or arrangement of color, value, and images. If instead we look for an accrual and manipulation of materials, whose inherent thickness may be thin but never negligible, the ridges and furrows of applied paint in dialogue with the surface, wall, and ambient light all open the viewing experience to a range of nuance that is often neglected. Ryman’s approach, that of prioritising application within a real spatial context, entails rich incident and is anything but blank.
One of Ryman’s favorite words was “enlightenment,” which he would sometimes pair with “delight.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryman was guileless in work and personality, given neither to elaborate theory nor fey demonstration, which is not to say his work is not a razor-sharp critical intervention in the history of painting. Unfinished Painting pushes the possibilities of paint to its greatest limits, and it decisive titling situates this canvas at the very apex of Ryman’s process-driven practice, at a period when Ryman was isolating the most basic components of painting. The wholeness of an ostensibly unfinished painting makes a case for the primacy of experience, so that it is a fulfilled and renewable gift to the viewer.
The smaller and more idiosyncratic Untitled (1963) follows through on the accumulation of material that is his mode of working, but not only do the thick strokes of oil paint contrast with the relatively small piece of linen canvas, but Ryman put in place a visual or optical flicker by painting over an initial campaign equally thick strokes in orange, turquoise, and various greens. As white partially buries colour, Ryman performs—theatrically, almost ostentatiously—a negation without negating that leaves its action fully traceable, thus sabotaging its finality and continuing to reveal its elements.
Brice Marden’s Hydra (1987) unfolds before the viewer in a different way. It is difficult not to see work from this era of Marden’s career without memory of the 60s and 70s, as if the impacted wax planes have been opened up and aerated, as if this crisscrossing calligraphy has always somehow been the skeleton of the implacable colors. These angular strokes also act as prelude to Marden’s final phase of overlapping webs. At the same time, it is tempting to fantasise about viewing these fresh, as if one knows only what one is seeing at the moment—the gesture hypostasised. Whether we like it or not, Willem De Kooning serves as the touchstone for the energetic and expressive brushstroke. This is not a travesty or obfuscation, as long as we realize that the gesture is not owned by De Kooning, and that it is anything but exhausted, but rather is as varied in its possibility as color, composition, and subject matter.
Given this, the movement and organicity in Hydra is not as abrupt a departure from De Kooning’s baroque figurative references as some other painters who regimented the gesture. Nevertheless, the movement, almost the narrative that Marden creates is certainly his own, in that his brushwork expands from its state of density, like an exhalation or excursion of water or vines. These intimations of natural, i.e., unforced processes occur in concert with the vertical format of the paper.
This is, however, painting, not process art, not a load of asphalt poured down a ravine, but, as Leonardo put it, “a marvelous artifice” by which the artist uses his tools and expertise to achieve an effect. Centuries on, these effects are not the crepuscular light in a landscape or a pulse in the throat of a sitter, but the equally palpable signs of life registered in the marks as they dance their way down a seemingly simple structure that complicates itself at every turn, and not only because of the touches of milky white.
Agnes Martin never wavered in her claim that her paintings take a stand for beauty and serenity in an inhospitable world. It should be clear that she was not simply reiterating visual formulae, as the most superficial glance might indicate. Far from indulging an obsession with grids or repetition for their own sake, Martin slowed down the gesture as a mode of encounter with the surface of painting. The grid for Martin was not a theoretical system without scale. It was more of a cumulative result of sustained touches; an embrace. The very term is only approximate, because here it designates something pliant and malleable.
Martin’s small untitled painting from 2001 contains no verticals and instead a horizontal blue-grey rhythm. On a canvas small enough to hold, Martin has thinned her acrylic paint to the appearance of watercolor and painted five thin dark bands punctuated, perhaps underlined, in graphite. Between these are more expansive fields, just this side of white, but denser than the miniscule slivers Martin has left unpainted between the pencil lines and the darker bands.
the entire execution emerges as both precise and relaxed—the grand assurance of someone at their full powers who has reinvented painting for her own needs.
As one notices that the graphite does not span the entire width of the canvas, but stops just short of the edge, the entire execution emerges as both precise and relaxed—the grand assurance of someone at their full powers who has reinvented painting for her own needs. This is what each of these artists has done, and it is the task of modernism in general, both to build upon and realign the parameters of one’s medium. As what was called minimalism splintered into individual paths, its legacy has turned out to be a method rather than a style, of intense concentration and openness, and its call for reciprocal attentiveness is a responsibility placed upon the viewer that approaches a kind of ethics.
