Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman (born May 30, 1930, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died February 8, 2019, New York, New York) was an American painter whose lifelong production of white paintings reflect a connection to minimalism. Despite the look of his paintings, however, Ryman did not consider himself an abstract painter because, as he said, “I don’t abstract from anything.…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.”

Ryman attended Tennessee Polytechnic Institute (now Tennessee Tech University) and George Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University) in his native Tennessee and then served in the military for two years. In 1952 he moved to New York. Initially he had expected to become a professional jazz saxophonist, but while working as a guard in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a job he held for seven years, he began to examine the basic elements of painting. From the outset Ryman concentrated on monochromatic canvases, and, setting himself apart from the Abstract Expressionist painters, he quickly determined that white—the absence of colour—would be his central pictorial element. By restricting his palette to white, Ryman discouraged any referential colour or hint of subject matter. Yet he claimed that white had no special significance, that it was “just a means of exposing other elements of the painting.”

Within his self-imposed boundaries, Ryman attempted to investigate the core issues of painting—how paintings are made, how they are placed on the wall, the relationship of paint to surface, and so on. Sometimes his brushstrokes were highly visible, though often his surfaces seemed imperturbable and spare. He experimented with many supports, including canvas, aluminum, steel, paper, fibreglass, copper, and Plexiglas, and often employed a wide range of fasteners—which he considered fully a part of his works—to attach his artwork to the wall. Using this approach, he examined the interstices between art as object and art as surface.

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He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. In 2005 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting.