Robert Ryman

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in January 1979

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Robert Ryman: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings, January 1979, cat. no. 7, illustrated
Cambridge, Hayden Gallery, Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Giacometti to Johns: The Albert and Vera List Family Collection, March - April 1985
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Classic Modernism: Six Generations, Mondrion, Albers, Newman, Kelly, Ryman, Halley, November - December 1990
Providence, David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Reprise: The Vera G. List Collection, A Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, October - November 1991, p. 26. illustrated
Bloomfield Hills, Cranbrook Museum of Art; Norman, Fred Jones Jr. Art Museum, University of Oklahoma; Baltimore, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Halifax, St. Mary's University Art Gallery; Brockton, Massachusetts, Fuller Museum of Art; Cleveland, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Painting Zero Degree, February 2000 - June 2002

Paul Stemson, "Robert Ryman", FlashArt, no. 88-89, April 1979, p. 25, illustrated
Donald B. Kuspit, "Ryman, Golub: Two Painters, Two Positions", Art in America, , no. 67, July-August 1979, p. 89
Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Robert Ryman, 1993, p. 164
Exh. Cat., Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Robert Ryman, 1993, p. 178

Ryman is an artist of unerring continuity whose oeuvre has many consistent themes and motifs, with none more prevalent than his use of white and the square. The most obvious elements of Ryman’s work, they are the neutral starting point for his thorough examination of the act of painting. In works such as Region (I), Ryman constructs non-illusionist paintings focusing on basic, material elements: the paint, the support, scale, texture, the stretcher edge, and the relationship of the whole to the wall. Region (I), with its gestural paint application, metal fasteners and flirtation with the pictorial edge, is a classic example of Ryman’s empirical exploration of the structure of painting.

A square is inherently `composed’ and symmetrical, eliminating the need to assign pictorial order. For Ryman, the square ``seems like the most perfect space. I don’t have to get involved with spatial composition, as with rectangles and circles.’’ (Interview with Phyllis Tuchman, ArtForum, May 1971, pp. 44-65). In the same literal fashion, Ryman does not choose white for symbolic reasons, but for its revelation of the inherent properties of paint: color, texture, density and light. Despite easy assumptions, the paintings are not strictly monochromatic, since the whiteness is subtly modulated by the support material Ryman chooses from painting to painting: metal, linen, board, and fiberglass among others. Using different kinds of brushes and lengths of strokes, Ryman may apply the pigment with heavy impasto and layering, as in Region (I), or drag it thinly across the surface with few painterly incidents. Region (I) also demonstrates Ryman’s exposure of the support and absence of paint at the edges, which often served to unify the whole, by emphasizing its construction. In the mid-1970s, Ryman introduced fasteners to his paintings, visibly uniting the painting with the wall. ``I thought that if the painting were visibly attached to the wall, then it would become part of the wall. …the painting does not exist without the wall.’’ (Interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, 1977 in Robert Ryman, Dia Foundation, 1989, pp. 27-30)