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Lot Essay
This work will be listed as catalogue number RR 64.040 in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné being organized by David Gray.
A jewel-like example of Minimalist pioneer Robert Ryman’s early practice, Untitled finds the artist exploring size and color in the singular style that he would use to explore the limits of painting for the next half-century. Working primarily with the color white in all its incarnations, Ryman’s career has seen the artist work tirelessly across scale and medium. Untitled features a tightly composed latticework of white, under-painted by a bright yellow that shines and works to define the white oil paint’s form and, indeed, its perfect whiteness. Operating alongside the Modernist credo that art ought to refer solely to its medium, Ryman’s singular practice has seen him push that idea to its logical extreme, producing paintings so insularly of and about themselves that they become universal and radically human. Untitled, with its quick and sturdy brushstrokes, recalls Cézanne or van Gogh as much as Malevich, creating a powerful bridge between centuries of painterly tradition while pushing the medium forcefully forward.
Situated neatly in the center of the textured, burlap-colored linen support, Ryman’s quietly radiant brushstrokes vibrate with a restrained concentration. Behind the white is a field of yellow, bubbling up under the top layer of paint in staccato movements. Piercing the surface, the yellow both counteracts the white and functions with it symbiotically : without just one element, or even one seemingly ancillary stroke, the painting is fundamentally incomplete. Wholeness, for Ryman, is crucial; his paintings’ life force is the precision with which they are architected, stroke by mason-like stroke, until the last one is laid down. Untitled demonstrates this to great effect, with each brushstroke buttressing its neighbors like an impenetrable Greek phalanx. Achieving total harmony and formal cohesion, Untitled coalesces under the improbable weight of its constituent elements into a vastness wherein the very act of painting becomes the subject of the work. Describing this process and his use of color, Ryman states “[It] was a matter of making the surface very animated, giving it a lot of movement and activity. This was done not just with the brushwork and use of quite heavy paint, but with color which was subtly creeping through the white” (R. Ryman quoted in David Batchelor, “On Painting and Pictures: In Conversation with Robert Ryman”, Frieze, Issue 10, London, 1993).
In a brilliant and prescient reversal of Abstract Expressionism, Ryman worked to oust personal expression of any kind, while simultaneously miming the movement’s intuitive handling of paint and exultation of medium. Reacting against it while co-opting some of its essential strategies proved crucial to Ryman, whose early masterpieces—Untitled among them—are partially defined by their decided but subtle departure from any antecedent painting. Negating both the all-over compositions of previous abstraction and its often heroic size, Ryman casts Untitled as firmly a work of the mind over the heart: a bold proposition in a medium so often associated with emotion and grandeur.
Ryman began his career nearly a decade earlier than his one-man show in 1967, while working at the Museum of Modern Art in order to be close to painting. Recognized early on amidst the rising tide of conceptual and minimal art, Ryman was included in the foundational exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968, which codified the early and important efforts of those congruent movements. Lauded for his hyper-consistent and immediately recognizable style, Ryman is recognized among the founders of Minimalist painting and is a principal participant in the wave of monochromatic painting that helped define the painting of the 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike most other monochromatic painters who aim to evoke a mood or a sense of sculptural objecthood from their pictures, Ryman, according to Roberta Smith, “…wants us to understand [paint’s] sensuousness while he demonstrates that paintings are in effect ‘built’ from scores of decisions and details, and then proceeds to challenge our definition of his medium, ‘Is this a painting?’ ‘Is that a painting?’ could be taken as the main credo of his art” (R. Smith, "In ‘Robert Ryman,’ One Color With the Power of Many." New York Times, December 10, 2015).
Ryman’s self-referencing and self-evident approaches to painting have both changed and stayed remarkably singular over his long career. Untitled captures a wonderfully exploratory moment in Ryman’s practice where, drawn to color and its potential for interacting with white, he jumped into it cautiously but enthusiastically. Peter Schjeldahl, describing both his overall career and his use of color in the early-mid 1960s, writes, “…Ryman eschewed imagery and any apparent irony. There was, as there remains, something monkish about his submission to austere forms and procedures. For a while, in the early sixties, he flirted with color and with mildly decorative effects, such as layering whites atop reds and blues. It was as if he were straining against a principled compunction and toward an indulgence in the hedonistic rewards of painting” (P. Schjeldahl, "Shades of White," New Yorker, December 21, 2015). Ryman’s work, with its laser-like focus on medium, form, and, in Untitled’s case, color, continues to captivate viewers with its unshakable reverence for paint and its powerful insistence on painting as a most worthy end in and of itself.
A jewel-like example of Minimalist pioneer Robert Ryman’s early practice, Untitled finds the artist exploring size and color in the singular style that he would use to explore the limits of painting for the next half-century. Working primarily with the color white in all its incarnations, Ryman’s career has seen the artist work tirelessly across scale and medium. Untitled features a tightly composed latticework of white, under-painted by a bright yellow that shines and works to define the white oil paint’s form and, indeed, its perfect whiteness. Operating alongside the Modernist credo that art ought to refer solely to its medium, Ryman’s singular practice has seen him push that idea to its logical extreme, producing paintings so insularly of and about themselves that they become universal and radically human. Untitled, with its quick and sturdy brushstrokes, recalls Cézanne or van Gogh as much as Malevich, creating a powerful bridge between centuries of painterly tradition while pushing the medium forcefully forward.
Situated neatly in the center of the textured, burlap-colored linen support, Ryman’s quietly radiant brushstrokes vibrate with a restrained concentration. Behind the white is a field of yellow, bubbling up under the top layer of paint in staccato movements. Piercing the surface, the yellow both counteracts the white and functions with it symbiotically : without just one element, or even one seemingly ancillary stroke, the painting is fundamentally incomplete. Wholeness, for Ryman, is crucial; his paintings’ life force is the precision with which they are architected, stroke by mason-like stroke, until the last one is laid down. Untitled demonstrates this to great effect, with each brushstroke buttressing its neighbors like an impenetrable Greek phalanx. Achieving total harmony and formal cohesion, Untitled coalesces under the improbable weight of its constituent elements into a vastness wherein the very act of painting becomes the subject of the work. Describing this process and his use of color, Ryman states “[It] was a matter of making the surface very animated, giving it a lot of movement and activity. This was done not just with the brushwork and use of quite heavy paint, but with color which was subtly creeping through the white” (R. Ryman quoted in David Batchelor, “On Painting and Pictures: In Conversation with Robert Ryman”, Frieze, Issue 10, London, 1993).
In a brilliant and prescient reversal of Abstract Expressionism, Ryman worked to oust personal expression of any kind, while simultaneously miming the movement’s intuitive handling of paint and exultation of medium. Reacting against it while co-opting some of its essential strategies proved crucial to Ryman, whose early masterpieces—Untitled among them—are partially defined by their decided but subtle departure from any antecedent painting. Negating both the all-over compositions of previous abstraction and its often heroic size, Ryman casts Untitled as firmly a work of the mind over the heart: a bold proposition in a medium so often associated with emotion and grandeur.
Ryman began his career nearly a decade earlier than his one-man show in 1967, while working at the Museum of Modern Art in order to be close to painting. Recognized early on amidst the rising tide of conceptual and minimal art, Ryman was included in the foundational exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968, which codified the early and important efforts of those congruent movements. Lauded for his hyper-consistent and immediately recognizable style, Ryman is recognized among the founders of Minimalist painting and is a principal participant in the wave of monochromatic painting that helped define the painting of the 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike most other monochromatic painters who aim to evoke a mood or a sense of sculptural objecthood from their pictures, Ryman, according to Roberta Smith, “…wants us to understand [paint’s] sensuousness while he demonstrates that paintings are in effect ‘built’ from scores of decisions and details, and then proceeds to challenge our definition of his medium, ‘Is this a painting?’ ‘Is that a painting?’ could be taken as the main credo of his art” (R. Smith, "In ‘Robert Ryman,’ One Color With the Power of Many." New York Times, December 10, 2015).
Ryman’s self-referencing and self-evident approaches to painting have both changed and stayed remarkably singular over his long career. Untitled captures a wonderfully exploratory moment in Ryman’s practice where, drawn to color and its potential for interacting with white, he jumped into it cautiously but enthusiastically. Peter Schjeldahl, describing both his overall career and his use of color in the early-mid 1960s, writes, “…Ryman eschewed imagery and any apparent irony. There was, as there remains, something monkish about his submission to austere forms and procedures. For a while, in the early sixties, he flirted with color and with mildly decorative effects, such as layering whites atop reds and blues. It was as if he were straining against a principled compunction and toward an indulgence in the hedonistic rewards of painting” (P. Schjeldahl, "Shades of White," New Yorker, December 21, 2015). Ryman’s work, with its laser-like focus on medium, form, and, in Untitled’s case, color, continues to captivate viewers with its unshakable reverence for paint and its powerful insistence on painting as a most worthy end in and of itself.