Robert Ryman

The most basic and prevalent elements of Ryman’s work are his use of white and the square, the neutral starting points for his examination of the act of painting. As in Untitled 1963, Ryman, from the very beginning, made non-illusionist paintings focusing on formalist elements.  A square, with its universal symmetry, is inherently `composed’, obviating the need to assign pictorial order. In the same literal fashion, Ryman chooses white for its ability to reveal the inherent properties of paint: color, texture, density, and light.

As early as 1957, Ryman painted small square works of predominantly white pigment, often revealing glimpses of underlying colored pigment. By the early 1960s, he chose linen canvas as his preferred ground, retaining a border of unpainted linen as a contrast to the painted surface. In discussing this group of works, Ryman recalled, `` I would put the color down, then paint over the color, trying to get down to a few crucial elements. It was like erasing something to put white over it.’’ (Nancy Grimes, ``White Magic’’, Art News, Summer 1986, p. 90)  In later works, the artist would enlarge this cumulative approach onto more expansive fields of stretched linen canvas, but the same transitions from unpainted to painted surfaces and from white to color are just as revelatory of the artist’s creative process and endeavor; that is the act of painting.