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Lot Essay
"I do something with paint, but I’m not painting a picture of anything." - Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman’s Register is a poetic realization of the American artist’s decades-long engagement with the possibilities of paint. Painted in 1978, six years after the artist’s celebrated exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which Ryman identified as marking his artistic maturity, the present work is one of the first to use metal fasteners to attach the canvas to the wall, an important innovation for the artist and a motif which would go on to become a hallmark of his practice. Ryman’s subtle mastery of material is eloquently elaborated in Register. Each white brushstroke enacts a meticulously considered intervention onto the support, weaving a complex tapestry of paint and canvas together into a mesmeric visual field. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the previous decade, Ryman’s gesture served the paint, not the painter, the artist using refined flicks of his hands and fingers rather than furious, energetic swoops, splashes, and scrapes. Like Mark Rothko’s “all-over” paintings, Ryman considered his canvas in three dimensions, attending to every aspect of the work and its spatial and environmental relationships. The art historian and curator Robert Storr writes how, “intuitive at its source, Ryman’s work respects one strict rule: what is present is what matters and what came before or after matters only insofar as it too makes a unique claim for our attention” (“Simple Gifts,” in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 9). Register is a magisterial example of this, the work’s scale, technical achievement, and three-dimensionality showing the full force of Ryman’s exceptional creative vision. First acquired at Ryman’s 1979 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery by Morton and Rose Neumann, the painting has remained in the same family collection, only appearing rarely in public for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Ryman first developed his austere style in the 1950s, while he worked as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. This allowed the young artist to dive deeply into modern painters, reveling at the achievements of Cezanne, Malevich, Picasso, and Matisse. Recalling his development, the artist detailed how, “as I worked and developed the painting, I found that I was eliminating a lot. 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” (quoted in ibid., p. 17). He eventually arrived at a sparse white canvas: “The use of white in my paintings came about when I realized that it doesn’t interfere. It’s a neutral color that allows for a clarification of nuances in painting. It makes other aspects of painting visible that would not be so clear with the use of other colors” (quoted in ibid.). While previous monochromatic paintings, such as Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York), operated in line with geometric abstraction and external referents, Ryman achieved a way of painting where the pictorial means are reduced to the absolute essentials.
Ryman’s first passion was music, and he moved to New York in order to pursue this passion, studying under the famed bebopper pianist Lennie Tristano in 1952. When Ryman took a job at MoMA to support his budding music career, he joined just in time in order to see Rothko’s Number 10 (1950) enter the museum’s collection. This experience profoundly impacted him: “When I saw this Rothko, I thought ‘Wow, what is this? I don’t know what’s going on but I like it.’ What was radical with Rothko, of course, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was color, there was form, there was structure, the surface, the light—the nakedness of it, just there. There weren’t any paintings like that” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., op. cit., 1993, pp. 13-14). This revelatory experience prodded Ryman to pick up a paintbrush, following Rothko’s example by pursing painting.
In Register, Ryman’s signature is completed in white paint and almost completely integrated within the structure of his composition. This minimization of his own creative ownership of the work operates in tandem with his minimalistic palette, allowing the viewer to focus instead on the pared-back essentials of paint and support. Ryman’s painterly triumph here served as a celebration of painting’s continued relevance in an age of the time-cherished medium’s seeming irrelevance. Contemporaries including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol worked to eradicate any notion of painterliness from their tableaux, while the sweeping tide of Minimalism positively rejected artwork conceived as paint on canvas. “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall,” Donald Judd wrote in his seminal 1965 treatise (“Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, vol 8, 1965, n.p.). Ryman’s project, fully accomplished with Register, sought to discover new directions with which to take painting, rescuing the medium from his contemporaries. “I do something with paint, but I’m not painting a picture of anything,” Ryman explained of his work, revealing the importance he placed on his materials ahead of any representational or expressionist aims (quoted in R. Storr, “In the American Grain,” in S. Hoban and C.J. Martin, eds., Robert Ryman, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2017, p. 20).
Ryman’s technical finesse is on full display in Register. The artist’s unrivaled abilities with paint and pigment are expressed with his precise painterly interventions onto the surface of his canvas. He appropriates the weft and warp of the linen as both support and media, employing its slightly off-white color as a chromatic contrast to the cool white tones of his paint. Register reveals Ryman at his most potent, the artist here eliminating even the heavy impasto of his early work; casting aside the shadows and texture achieved with his heavy painted peaks, Ryman deliberately challenged himself to create even more profound effects with fewer tools. As the conservator and Ryman expert Sandra Amann writes, “I truly think of Robert Ryman as being quite singular. He commands his materials—his use of paint, the ability to manipulate it, build it up, take it down to the thinnest layer, the complete incorporation of the structure and how each element contributes to the whole” (“Learning Robert Ryman’s Language: Thoughts from a Conservator,” op. cit., p. 169).
Ryman’s employment of metal fasteners here further contributes to the aesthetic effects achieved by his superb technique. Ryman considered the way his work attached to the wall to be an essential element of the piece, as important as any paint or brushstroke. He had first bolted his paintings to gallery walls in 1976 as an evolution to previous means of fixing his works on walls, including tape, plastic straps, staples, screws, and aluminum tubing. The purposes of this innovation are manifold: The structure granted Ryman more control over how his paintings would be displayed, their deployment indicated to his viewer that every facet of the work—its face, sides, front, and top—were equally essential in contemplating meaning, and the installation allowed Ryman to elaborate on his work’s relationship to the wall.
Following painting Register, in 1979, Ryman proclaimed: “My paintings don’t really exist unless they’re on the wall as part of the wall, as part of the room” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, op. cit., p. 156). By structuring the painting so that it can only be presented attached to a wall, the artist ensured that his work would always be viewed in the appropriate environment. “When you see the wall, the setting, the environment, it has a lot to do with the way [my paintings] work,” Ryman described. “A lot of my paintings… cannot really be shown to anyone in the usual way of dragging a painting out of the closet or storeroom and saying, here’s a painting… it has to be on a wall, in a situation. Then, it’s complete” (quoted in K. Swenson, “Exposures: Ryman and Time,” in Robert Ryman, Dia Art Foundation, op. cit., pp. 261-262).
Explicating his decision, Ryman noted: “I used metal fasteners to make the painting project from the wall. All my canvases at the time extended off the wall a few inches. It seemed to make the work actually closer to the wall, curiously… because you saw it was attached, and you saw it coming off the wall, but it was also very much part of the wall. It was important that it had an immediate relationship with the wall plane, because this was not a picture of anything. So I wanted it to really look like it and the wall were together. They had to be together for it to be complete. And so you would see it attached. And when it came away from the wall—it looked more as if it were a thing of its own, with the wall” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, op. cit., p. 164).
"That was when I went back to canvas… I let the paint become more an image of itself." Robert Ryman
1978 was an important year for Ryman. “That was when I went back to canvas,” he later recalled, “I go back to canvas and work with paint in a more immediate way… how to explain it? I let the paint become more an image of itself than in certain other paintings” (quoted in ibid.). Ryman had embarked on a period of experimentation earlier in the decade, exploring the possibilities of alternative supports, including Acrylivin plastic (Criterion #1, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and blue acrylic (Midland #1, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Paris), both of which were exhibited in the artist’s 1977 exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. Ryman first exhibited his paintings with bolts and fasteners at another seminal show in 1976 when he was invited to the inaugural exhibition of P.S. 1 in New York. After exhibiting his more experimental materials, Ryman returned to his more traditional painterly technique with Register, working more immediately with his paint and the surface of the linen canvas in order to achieve the perfect fluency. The Chicago art collectors Morton and Rose Neumann, whose famed collection assembled masterpieces of twentieth-century art from Picasso, Miró, and Matisse, to important Pop works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, acquired Register immediately after the work’s first public exhibition, and the work has retained within the family collection ever since.
Robert Ryman’s Register is a poetic realization of the American artist’s decades-long engagement with the possibilities of paint. Painted in 1978, six years after the artist’s celebrated exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which Ryman identified as marking his artistic maturity, the present work is one of the first to use metal fasteners to attach the canvas to the wall, an important innovation for the artist and a motif which would go on to become a hallmark of his practice. Ryman’s subtle mastery of material is eloquently elaborated in Register. Each white brushstroke enacts a meticulously considered intervention onto the support, weaving a complex tapestry of paint and canvas together into a mesmeric visual field. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the previous decade, Ryman’s gesture served the paint, not the painter, the artist using refined flicks of his hands and fingers rather than furious, energetic swoops, splashes, and scrapes. Like Mark Rothko’s “all-over” paintings, Ryman considered his canvas in three dimensions, attending to every aspect of the work and its spatial and environmental relationships. The art historian and curator Robert Storr writes how, “intuitive at its source, Ryman’s work respects one strict rule: what is present is what matters and what came before or after matters only insofar as it too makes a unique claim for our attention” (“Simple Gifts,” in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 9). Register is a magisterial example of this, the work’s scale, technical achievement, and three-dimensionality showing the full force of Ryman’s exceptional creative vision. First acquired at Ryman’s 1979 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery by Morton and Rose Neumann, the painting has remained in the same family collection, only appearing rarely in public for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Ryman first developed his austere style in the 1950s, while he worked as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. This allowed the young artist to dive deeply into modern painters, reveling at the achievements of Cezanne, Malevich, Picasso, and Matisse. Recalling his development, the artist detailed how, “as I worked and developed the painting, I found that I was eliminating a lot. 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” (quoted in ibid., p. 17). He eventually arrived at a sparse white canvas: “The use of white in my paintings came about when I realized that it doesn’t interfere. It’s a neutral color that allows for a clarification of nuances in painting. It makes other aspects of painting visible that would not be so clear with the use of other colors” (quoted in ibid.). While previous monochromatic paintings, such as Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York), operated in line with geometric abstraction and external referents, Ryman achieved a way of painting where the pictorial means are reduced to the absolute essentials.
Ryman’s first passion was music, and he moved to New York in order to pursue this passion, studying under the famed bebopper pianist Lennie Tristano in 1952. When Ryman took a job at MoMA to support his budding music career, he joined just in time in order to see Rothko’s Number 10 (1950) enter the museum’s collection. This experience profoundly impacted him: “When I saw this Rothko, I thought ‘Wow, what is this? I don’t know what’s going on but I like it.’ What was radical with Rothko, of course, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was color, there was form, there was structure, the surface, the light—the nakedness of it, just there. There weren’t any paintings like that” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., op. cit., 1993, pp. 13-14). This revelatory experience prodded Ryman to pick up a paintbrush, following Rothko’s example by pursing painting.
In Register, Ryman’s signature is completed in white paint and almost completely integrated within the structure of his composition. This minimization of his own creative ownership of the work operates in tandem with his minimalistic palette, allowing the viewer to focus instead on the pared-back essentials of paint and support. Ryman’s painterly triumph here served as a celebration of painting’s continued relevance in an age of the time-cherished medium’s seeming irrelevance. Contemporaries including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol worked to eradicate any notion of painterliness from their tableaux, while the sweeping tide of Minimalism positively rejected artwork conceived as paint on canvas. “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall,” Donald Judd wrote in his seminal 1965 treatise (“Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, vol 8, 1965, n.p.). Ryman’s project, fully accomplished with Register, sought to discover new directions with which to take painting, rescuing the medium from his contemporaries. “I do something with paint, but I’m not painting a picture of anything,” Ryman explained of his work, revealing the importance he placed on his materials ahead of any representational or expressionist aims (quoted in R. Storr, “In the American Grain,” in S. Hoban and C.J. Martin, eds., Robert Ryman, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2017, p. 20).
Ryman’s technical finesse is on full display in Register. The artist’s unrivaled abilities with paint and pigment are expressed with his precise painterly interventions onto the surface of his canvas. He appropriates the weft and warp of the linen as both support and media, employing its slightly off-white color as a chromatic contrast to the cool white tones of his paint. Register reveals Ryman at his most potent, the artist here eliminating even the heavy impasto of his early work; casting aside the shadows and texture achieved with his heavy painted peaks, Ryman deliberately challenged himself to create even more profound effects with fewer tools. As the conservator and Ryman expert Sandra Amann writes, “I truly think of Robert Ryman as being quite singular. He commands his materials—his use of paint, the ability to manipulate it, build it up, take it down to the thinnest layer, the complete incorporation of the structure and how each element contributes to the whole” (“Learning Robert Ryman’s Language: Thoughts from a Conservator,” op. cit., p. 169).
Ryman’s employment of metal fasteners here further contributes to the aesthetic effects achieved by his superb technique. Ryman considered the way his work attached to the wall to be an essential element of the piece, as important as any paint or brushstroke. He had first bolted his paintings to gallery walls in 1976 as an evolution to previous means of fixing his works on walls, including tape, plastic straps, staples, screws, and aluminum tubing. The purposes of this innovation are manifold: The structure granted Ryman more control over how his paintings would be displayed, their deployment indicated to his viewer that every facet of the work—its face, sides, front, and top—were equally essential in contemplating meaning, and the installation allowed Ryman to elaborate on his work’s relationship to the wall.
Following painting Register, in 1979, Ryman proclaimed: “My paintings don’t really exist unless they’re on the wall as part of the wall, as part of the room” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, op. cit., p. 156). By structuring the painting so that it can only be presented attached to a wall, the artist ensured that his work would always be viewed in the appropriate environment. “When you see the wall, the setting, the environment, it has a lot to do with the way [my paintings] work,” Ryman described. “A lot of my paintings… cannot really be shown to anyone in the usual way of dragging a painting out of the closet or storeroom and saying, here’s a painting… it has to be on a wall, in a situation. Then, it’s complete” (quoted in K. Swenson, “Exposures: Ryman and Time,” in Robert Ryman, Dia Art Foundation, op. cit., pp. 261-262).
Explicating his decision, Ryman noted: “I used metal fasteners to make the painting project from the wall. All my canvases at the time extended off the wall a few inches. It seemed to make the work actually closer to the wall, curiously… because you saw it was attached, and you saw it coming off the wall, but it was also very much part of the wall. It was important that it had an immediate relationship with the wall plane, because this was not a picture of anything. So I wanted it to really look like it and the wall were together. They had to be together for it to be complete. And so you would see it attached. And when it came away from the wall—it looked more as if it were a thing of its own, with the wall” (quoted in R. Storr, ed., Robert Ryman, op. cit., p. 164).
"That was when I went back to canvas… I let the paint become more an image of itself." Robert Ryman
1978 was an important year for Ryman. “That was when I went back to canvas,” he later recalled, “I go back to canvas and work with paint in a more immediate way… how to explain it? I let the paint become more an image of itself than in certain other paintings” (quoted in ibid.). Ryman had embarked on a period of experimentation earlier in the decade, exploring the possibilities of alternative supports, including Acrylivin plastic (Criterion #1, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and blue acrylic (Midland #1, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Paris), both of which were exhibited in the artist’s 1977 exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. Ryman first exhibited his paintings with bolts and fasteners at another seminal show in 1976 when he was invited to the inaugural exhibition of P.S. 1 in New York. After exhibiting his more experimental materials, Ryman returned to his more traditional painterly technique with Register, working more immediately with his paint and the surface of the linen canvas in order to achieve the perfect fluency. The Chicago art collectors Morton and Rose Neumann, whose famed collection assembled masterpieces of twentieth-century art from Picasso, Miró, and Matisse, to important Pop works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, acquired Register immediately after the work’s first public exhibition, and the work has retained within the family collection ever since.