羅伯特·賴曼

PaceWildenstein, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in January 1999

New York, PaceWildenstein, Robert Ryman: Small Format Paintings, January - February 1999
New York, Sean Kelly Gallery, Pure Exhibition, March - April 2007

Tom McDonough, "Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein," Art in America 87, no. 6, June 1999, p. 116 (text)
The Martin Z. Margulies Collection: Painting and Sculpture, Miami, 2008, p. 264, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. This work is not framed.
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 “There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image—the end product.” Robert Ryman cited in Exh. Cat., Zürich, Halle für internationale neue Kunst (and travelling), Robert Ryman, 1980, p. 15

Robert Ryman's Note from 1998 bristles with an unrivaled dynamism and a clear vitality that renders it a timeless explication of the very essence of beauty. Enrapturing our eyes in its immense purity and radical clarity, every peak of crisp phosphorescent white that emerges from its flurry of activity ineffably and incontrovertibly confirms the artist's painterly genius. Recalling Jackson Pollock’s esteemed 1950 series of 22-inch square paintings on Masonite, Ryman’s chosen framework here provides a jewel-like scale for the artist to explore the parameters of gestural abstraction. The vertiginous commotion of strokes seem as if held together by a strong magnetic inner force, accumulating toward the center of the picture plane away from the edges of the board. As the top corners of the white field hover closer to the borders, we feel as if this zone is in calm motion, floating across the surface and bouncing lightly from edge to edge. Ryman leaves areas of the board unpainted, revealing the materiality of the surface and emphasizing his interest in the physical conditions of painting. Given the constraints Ryman imposed on his paintings, specifying the square format and white color, his body of work is extraordinarily diverse through his manipulations of scale, texture, and medium. Heightening the viewer’s sensitivity to subtle permutations within a preordained format, Ryman’s paintings range broadly in his repertoire of materials, which include various forms of pigments, fixtures, and unique supports (including fiberglass, steel, aluminum, and wood). Note exemplifies this brilliantly inventive impulse, as Ryman uses the atypical fiberboard surface to support the incandescent white squall that he impresses upon it. The present work is a paragon of Ryman’s principal concern in exploring the multifarious ways in which paint engages with the surface.

The sureness of Ryman’s hand is astounding. Frothing in a turbulent squall of luscious impasto in brief, all-over contractions, the surface of Note erupts before our eyes while maintaining a fundamental exactness and precision. The warm luminous white strokes are layered in controlled chaos, appearing simultaneously calm and agitated—as if frozen mid-motion in a precise choreography of staccato brush movements. Breathtakingly stirring in its vital exuberance of directional vigor, while configured in a meticulous cross-hatched pattern governed by self-containment, Note retains the vitality of experimentation but is rooted firmly in the thoughtful exactitude that is so resolutely Ryman. The vehement motion of Ryman’s brushstrokes impels a substantial spontaneity, however restrained by the given format of the square fiberboard. While the surface of Note proposes a similar additive gestural syntax to the oil-encrusted abstraction of de Kooning, Pollock, and other of Ryman’s Abstract Expressionist influences, Ryman’s work completely eschews the notion of action painting. As explained by Robert Storr, “Ryman’s are the product of the fingers and hand, not the arm. Gesture, for him, served paint rather than the painter; painting was a question of application rather than of ‘action.’ Contrary, then to Harold Rosenberg’s view of abstraction as an exercise in the rhetoric of self-affirmation, Ryman understood it even at that formative state as a problem of material syntax. What paint had to say was its own name, and it said it best in measured tones.” (Robert Storr in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery (and travelling), Robert Ryman, 1993, p. 15)

Ryman insisted on identifying the relationship of a painting to the wall on which it hangs. With many of his works on steel and aluminum, Ryman affixed the supports directly to the wall with metal fastenings; moreover, many of his paintings on paper were fastened to the wall with visible tape. Concerned with clearly delineating the apparatuses involved in hanging a picture, Ryman utilized the aesthetic properties of such devices as both visual and practical elements, illuminating his resolve to emphasize the physical, concrete conditions of an abstract painting. On the surface of Note, Ryman inscribed an upward arrow toward the top center edge to re-affirm the corporeal quality of the work—an installation direction that would normally find its place on the reverse of the picture is here located on the front, asserting Ryman’s archetypal praxis of making no claims toward representation and laying bare the machinations of a painting’s own creation and installation. For Ryman, the circumstances of a painting’s hanging are not subsumed behind its proposed ulterior meaning, but rather become an integral component of the work. Ryman’s assertion that the content of painting came from the paint itself and not the pictorial outcome revolutionized the characteristically modernist understanding of painting for painting’s sake. The characteristics of white paint that were alluring to Ryman are innumerable: its tone, transparency, vibrancy, richness, and cohesion all provoked grand inspiration for the artist. While Ryman is compared often to Malevich or Albers in his utilization of the monochromatic square, his painterly concerns align more closely to with those of Jasper Johns—repelling associations with conceptual art, his pictures rather are embroiled in the real properties of the paint instead of the theoretical capitulations of such influential modernists. Ryman’s paintings do not stand in service to an idea—they stand in service to the surface.

After moving to New York City to be a jazz musician in 1952, Ryman took a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. He exposed himself equally to all of the various styles that surrounded him, and this concentrated absorption of artistic influence ignited an experimental drive, leading him to purchase a set of brushes, some oil paint, and canvas boards. As he remembers, “I was just seeing how the paint worked, and how the brushes worked. I was just using the paint, putting it on canvas board, putting it on thinly with turpentine and thicker to see what that was like, and trying to make something happen without any specific idea what I was painting.” (the artist cited in Ibid., p. 12) This initial investigation into the nature of the painterly medium evolved into a pioneering exploration of the very limits of painting as a genre, and came to define the style of one of the most celebrated painters of the post-war era.