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Lot Essay
“Scientists try to find solutions, and they pick one problem out of thousands to explore and work on. It’s a similar thing, I think, that painters do. You can’t work on everything, so you take what interests you most and you explore it, and you find what solutions are possible.” (R. Ryman, quoted in B. Diamonstein, Inside New York’s Art World, New York, 1979, pp. 337-338)
Every painter faces the same dilemma when looking at a new canvas at the beginning of their process: What to paint? For sixty years, Robert Ryman has answered with the famous response: “There is never a question of what to paint, only how to paint” (S. Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Cambridge, Mass., 2009, p. 245). Committing himself solely to the color white, a square-shaped support cut from a variety of materials and various tools for applying paint, Ryman examines the ways that paint, surface and support come together. What seems at first like a limited color palette is instead a study of subtlety and nuance in the variety of commercially available materials. The constraints of the monochrome have yielded a range of distinct surfaces and textures, what critic Christopher Wood has called a “sensuous friction of encounters with his surfaces,” over six decades of paintings, each utterly unique (C. Wood, “Ryman’s Poetics,” Art in America, January 1994, p. 64).
While the narrative around Ryman’s coming to painting is the stuff of legend (he was a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1953 to 1960 and taught himself to paint while looking at MoMA’s collection), he explains what would become a life’s project more simply: “There was a little art supply store on the corner. I went there and bought a couple of canvasboards and some oil paint—they didn’t have acrylic paint at the time—and some brushes, and I thought I would try and see what would happen. I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. That was the first step. I just played around. I had nothing in mind to paint. I was just finding out how the paint worked, colors, thick and thin, the brushes, surfaces” (R. Ryman quoted in N. Grimes, “White Magic,” Art News, summer 1968, p. 89).
While his MoMA co-workers, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt would be essential to the developments of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Ryman charted a course for a kind of painting that, while sharing visual affinities with the dominant movements of the 1960s and 1970s, is maverick; singular in its aims of experimenting with the nature of materials in his search for what makes a painting a painting. Critic, Peter Schjeldahl eloquently placed Ryman in the history of American Art, writing, “Ryman is rooted in a phase of artistic sensibility that was coincident with early minimalism and Pop, and is still in need of a name. Call it the Age of Paying Attention, or the Noticing Years, or the Not So Fast Era...What you saw, while not a lot, stayed seen. The mental toughness that defined sophistication in art back then is rare now” (P. Schjeldahl, “Shades of White: A Robert Ryman Retrospective,” The New Yorker, December 21/28, 2015, p. 112). As elaborated by art historian, Suzanne Hudson, “Ryman’s nonrepresentational paintings do not use paint illusionistically. Nor do they use color mimetically, symbolically, metaphorically, or even emotively. What is more, Ryman insists that his paintings are neither monochromatic or abstract—but rather that they are ‘realist’ in his lexicon” (S. Hudson, “Robert Ryman, Retrospective,” The Art Journal / College Art Association of America, 2005, pp. 64-65).
The “realism” of Ryman’s work, then, is founded on the attention given by the artist and the viewer to what is presented on the canvas as it is presented; paint as paint. For Composition, 1970, Ryman painted with oil paint on fiberglass affixed to board, making the painting part of the artist’s Surface Veil series from 1970 through 1971. The series is named for the brand of fiberglass the artist used as a support. Though fiberglass is not used in the first and largest paintings from this series (the first three are in the Guggenheim’s collection and the fourth in MoMA’s), Surface Veil I-IV literalize the brand’s and the series' name as Ryman produced a translucent veil of paint, a ghost that seems to hover over the surface of the board. In other works from the series, Ryman layered oil paint onto fiberglass on top of other materials such as wax paper, as is the case with Surface Veil from the San Francisco Modern Art Museum’s collection.
For Composition, the four corners of the square of fiberglass have been left unpainted. The size of the unpainted area corresponds to the width of tape the artist used to mask off the painting’s surface. Removed when the artist finished the painting, the unpainted marks reveal the artist’s process of making. The unpainted corners are juxtaposed with layers of white oil paint applied in different thicknesses to the fiberglass surface. Some areas have been scraped of excess paint or applied in thin washes so that the brown of the board underneath peaks through; others have been built up so thickly that the tools Ryman used, including a brush and a spatula, leave their mark. In this way, Composition only appears to be a monochrome. The unpainted fiberglass at the corners then becomes one end of a spectrum between unpainted and painted surface that Composition explores.
Every painter faces the same dilemma when looking at a new canvas at the beginning of their process: What to paint? For sixty years, Robert Ryman has answered with the famous response: “There is never a question of what to paint, only how to paint” (S. Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Cambridge, Mass., 2009, p. 245). Committing himself solely to the color white, a square-shaped support cut from a variety of materials and various tools for applying paint, Ryman examines the ways that paint, surface and support come together. What seems at first like a limited color palette is instead a study of subtlety and nuance in the variety of commercially available materials. The constraints of the monochrome have yielded a range of distinct surfaces and textures, what critic Christopher Wood has called a “sensuous friction of encounters with his surfaces,” over six decades of paintings, each utterly unique (C. Wood, “Ryman’s Poetics,” Art in America, January 1994, p. 64).
While the narrative around Ryman’s coming to painting is the stuff of legend (he was a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1953 to 1960 and taught himself to paint while looking at MoMA’s collection), he explains what would become a life’s project more simply: “There was a little art supply store on the corner. I went there and bought a couple of canvasboards and some oil paint—they didn’t have acrylic paint at the time—and some brushes, and I thought I would try and see what would happen. I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. That was the first step. I just played around. I had nothing in mind to paint. I was just finding out how the paint worked, colors, thick and thin, the brushes, surfaces” (R. Ryman quoted in N. Grimes, “White Magic,” Art News, summer 1968, p. 89).
While his MoMA co-workers, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt would be essential to the developments of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Ryman charted a course for a kind of painting that, while sharing visual affinities with the dominant movements of the 1960s and 1970s, is maverick; singular in its aims of experimenting with the nature of materials in his search for what makes a painting a painting. Critic, Peter Schjeldahl eloquently placed Ryman in the history of American Art, writing, “Ryman is rooted in a phase of artistic sensibility that was coincident with early minimalism and Pop, and is still in need of a name. Call it the Age of Paying Attention, or the Noticing Years, or the Not So Fast Era...What you saw, while not a lot, stayed seen. The mental toughness that defined sophistication in art back then is rare now” (P. Schjeldahl, “Shades of White: A Robert Ryman Retrospective,” The New Yorker, December 21/28, 2015, p. 112). As elaborated by art historian, Suzanne Hudson, “Ryman’s nonrepresentational paintings do not use paint illusionistically. Nor do they use color mimetically, symbolically, metaphorically, or even emotively. What is more, Ryman insists that his paintings are neither monochromatic or abstract—but rather that they are ‘realist’ in his lexicon” (S. Hudson, “Robert Ryman, Retrospective,” The Art Journal / College Art Association of America, 2005, pp. 64-65).
The “realism” of Ryman’s work, then, is founded on the attention given by the artist and the viewer to what is presented on the canvas as it is presented; paint as paint. For Composition, 1970, Ryman painted with oil paint on fiberglass affixed to board, making the painting part of the artist’s Surface Veil series from 1970 through 1971. The series is named for the brand of fiberglass the artist used as a support. Though fiberglass is not used in the first and largest paintings from this series (the first three are in the Guggenheim’s collection and the fourth in MoMA’s), Surface Veil I-IV literalize the brand’s and the series' name as Ryman produced a translucent veil of paint, a ghost that seems to hover over the surface of the board. In other works from the series, Ryman layered oil paint onto fiberglass on top of other materials such as wax paper, as is the case with Surface Veil from the San Francisco Modern Art Museum’s collection.
For Composition, the four corners of the square of fiberglass have been left unpainted. The size of the unpainted area corresponds to the width of tape the artist used to mask off the painting’s surface. Removed when the artist finished the painting, the unpainted marks reveal the artist’s process of making. The unpainted corners are juxtaposed with layers of white oil paint applied in different thicknesses to the fiberglass surface. Some areas have been scraped of excess paint or applied in thin washes so that the brown of the board underneath peaks through; others have been built up so thickly that the tools Ryman used, including a brush and a spatula, leave their mark. In this way, Composition only appears to be a monochrome. The unpainted fiberglass at the corners then becomes one end of a spectrum between unpainted and painted surface that Composition explores.