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拍品專文
Robert Ryman’s Untitled demonstrates the artist’s intuitive grasp of the physicality of his materials, marshalling paint onto raw linen in a pure play of light and space. An early masterpiece made just as Ryman was establishing his iconic style, Untitled exhibits a radical economy and unhurriedness which, through the paring down of its constituent elements, generates a complete protean world unto itself. Exuding exquisite control, Ryman provides a direct and deliberate sensory experience to the viewer, the painting eloquently achieving the artist’s proclaimed ambition for his work to create the “experience of enlightenment. An experience of delight, and well-being, and rightness. It’s like listening to music. Like going to an opera and coming out of it and feeling somehow fulfilled—that what you experienced was extraordinary” (quoted in “Robert Ryman Interview with Robert Storr” in Abstrakte Malerei aus Amerika und Europa/Abstract Painting of America and Europe, exh. cat., Galerie nächst St. Stephen, Vienna, 1986, p. 219).
A fury of intense richly polychromatic underpainting—deep leafy and acidic greens, burnt ochres, turquoise, and terracotta browns—peak through the white terrain crafted from buttery white curls, with inch-wide brushstrokes impressing thick impasto where one dab of paint meets another. “As I worked and developed the painting, I found that I was eliminating a lot,” Ryman describes. “I would put the color down, then paint over the color, trying to get down to the few crucial elements. It was like erasing something to put white over it” (quoted in R. Storr, Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 16). The artist’s embrace of a full spectrum of brilliant color beneath his signature white pigment formulates an exuberant expression of visual delight. “The welts of underpainting exert pressure on their white mantle such that one begins to feel the temperature of the buried color like a pulse or sinuous movement beneath the skin,” writes Robert Storr. “Submerged colors seem to irradiate and be subsumed by the bleached plane that confronts the viewer, as if one were witnessing white light being created, as it theoretically is, by the chromatic fusion of the total spectrum” (“In the American Grain” in S. Hoban and C. J. Martin, eds., Robert Ryman, New York, 2017, p. 21).
This union of light and color is contained within Ryman’s square canvas by an outer boundary of untouched canvas. The textural and chromatic contrast between the artist’s painterly application and the desiccated linen border contains and focuses the work’s potent effects. Similarly to Mark Rothko’s “all-over” and all around canvases, Ryman attends to every facet of his works, and these poignant bare borders are as much a part of the overall composition as the painted ground, contributing to the whole via the revelation of the various layers and physical properties contained within the painted portion of the canvas.
Untitled’s powerful physicality leads from Ryman’s autodidact development as an artist, toiling with different paints, brushes, and supports alone in his New York apartment after shifts as a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, distilling the lessons learnt from the great masterpieces by Matisse, Cezanne, and Picasso adorning his workplace into experimental productions. Ryman thus learned how to paint much like the Old Masters, with one eye toward the achievements of his predecessors, and the other on the materials of his craft. Ryman was deeply intrigued by the differing qualities of paints, supports, brushes, and brushstrokes, and strove to understand how the most minute change in execution would affect an entire composition. Carefully attuned to the bristles of his brush and the angle of his application, the artist strove to directly render these lessons onto the canvas with as little interference as possible. Thus, each canvas became square, to remove any sense of external referent which rectangular forms might hold, be it a window or a doorway. His unprimed linen canvases establish a direct dialogue between paint and support without needless intercession.
Ryman’s first interest was in music, studying jazz in college and becoming a member of the Army Reserve Band while serving in the Korean War. Ryman later moved to New York to pursue his passion for jazz, studying under the bebopper pianist Lennie Tristano in 1952. Happenstance led Ryman to take a job as a security guard at MoMA to support himself while building his budding music career, just in time to see Mark Rothko’s Number 10, 1950 entering 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, exh. cat., op. cit., 1993, pp. 13-14). This revelatory experience pushed Ryman to put down the saxophone in favor of the paint brush, following Rothko’s example by pursuing painting.
Ryman’s oeuvre, however, remains inflected with his jazz training. The relentless tempo and improvisational structures constituent in jazz are made apparent in the riotous movement of Ryman’s brushstrokes, each work a painted bebop composition. Ryman describes this equivalence between music and painting in his work, saying that “I wanted to compose, to compose with my instrument, to improvise, to find out all the things you can do with the instrument… Painting really resembles music that way. You develop something and then you take the part that interests you. That’s how it happened” (quoted in J. Szwed, “Robert Ryman: Musician, Painter,” in op. cit., 2017, p. 111).
Untitled magnificently conveys Ryman’s conception of enlightenment, the work’s brilliant passages of chromatic energy abutting the artist’s iconic white registers. It perfectly expresses the irreproducible nature of Ryman’s idiosyncratic style. It is nigh impossible to convey in reproduction—either photographic or ekphrastic—the depths of energy and spatial potential expressed when experiencing the work in person. Storr remarks that the first step for appreciating Ryman is to “acknowledge the limits of the language at our disposal and so recognize painting’s essential independence from what can be said about it,” the artist instead insisting “example by example on contemporary painting’s equal demand and capacity to exist and be experienced as an irreducibly physical and aesthetic experience” (R. Storr, exh. cat., op. cit., 1993, pp. 15, 37).
A fury of intense richly polychromatic underpainting—deep leafy and acidic greens, burnt ochres, turquoise, and terracotta browns—peak through the white terrain crafted from buttery white curls, with inch-wide brushstrokes impressing thick impasto where one dab of paint meets another. “As I worked and developed the painting, I found that I was eliminating a lot,” Ryman describes. “I would put the color down, then paint over the color, trying to get down to the few crucial elements. It was like erasing something to put white over it” (quoted in R. Storr, Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 16). The artist’s embrace of a full spectrum of brilliant color beneath his signature white pigment formulates an exuberant expression of visual delight. “The welts of underpainting exert pressure on their white mantle such that one begins to feel the temperature of the buried color like a pulse or sinuous movement beneath the skin,” writes Robert Storr. “Submerged colors seem to irradiate and be subsumed by the bleached plane that confronts the viewer, as if one were witnessing white light being created, as it theoretically is, by the chromatic fusion of the total spectrum” (“In the American Grain” in S. Hoban and C. J. Martin, eds., Robert Ryman, New York, 2017, p. 21).
This union of light and color is contained within Ryman’s square canvas by an outer boundary of untouched canvas. The textural and chromatic contrast between the artist’s painterly application and the desiccated linen border contains and focuses the work’s potent effects. Similarly to Mark Rothko’s “all-over” and all around canvases, Ryman attends to every facet of his works, and these poignant bare borders are as much a part of the overall composition as the painted ground, contributing to the whole via the revelation of the various layers and physical properties contained within the painted portion of the canvas.
Untitled’s powerful physicality leads from Ryman’s autodidact development as an artist, toiling with different paints, brushes, and supports alone in his New York apartment after shifts as a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, distilling the lessons learnt from the great masterpieces by Matisse, Cezanne, and Picasso adorning his workplace into experimental productions. Ryman thus learned how to paint much like the Old Masters, with one eye toward the achievements of his predecessors, and the other on the materials of his craft. Ryman was deeply intrigued by the differing qualities of paints, supports, brushes, and brushstrokes, and strove to understand how the most minute change in execution would affect an entire composition. Carefully attuned to the bristles of his brush and the angle of his application, the artist strove to directly render these lessons onto the canvas with as little interference as possible. Thus, each canvas became square, to remove any sense of external referent which rectangular forms might hold, be it a window or a doorway. His unprimed linen canvases establish a direct dialogue between paint and support without needless intercession.
Ryman’s first interest was in music, studying jazz in college and becoming a member of the Army Reserve Band while serving in the Korean War. Ryman later moved to New York to pursue his passion for jazz, studying under the bebopper pianist Lennie Tristano in 1952. Happenstance led Ryman to take a job as a security guard at MoMA to support himself while building his budding music career, just in time to see Mark Rothko’s Number 10, 1950 entering 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, exh. cat., op. cit., 1993, pp. 13-14). This revelatory experience pushed Ryman to put down the saxophone in favor of the paint brush, following Rothko’s example by pursuing painting.
Ryman’s oeuvre, however, remains inflected with his jazz training. The relentless tempo and improvisational structures constituent in jazz are made apparent in the riotous movement of Ryman’s brushstrokes, each work a painted bebop composition. Ryman describes this equivalence between music and painting in his work, saying that “I wanted to compose, to compose with my instrument, to improvise, to find out all the things you can do with the instrument… Painting really resembles music that way. You develop something and then you take the part that interests you. That’s how it happened” (quoted in J. Szwed, “Robert Ryman: Musician, Painter,” in op. cit., 2017, p. 111).
Untitled magnificently conveys Ryman’s conception of enlightenment, the work’s brilliant passages of chromatic energy abutting the artist’s iconic white registers. It perfectly expresses the irreproducible nature of Ryman’s idiosyncratic style. It is nigh impossible to convey in reproduction—either photographic or ekphrastic—the depths of energy and spatial potential expressed when experiencing the work in person. Storr remarks that the first step for appreciating Ryman is to “acknowledge the limits of the language at our disposal and so recognize painting’s essential independence from what can be said about it,” the artist instead insisting “example by example on contemporary painting’s equal demand and capacity to exist and be experienced as an irreducibly physical and aesthetic experience” (R. Storr, exh. cat., op. cit., 1993, pp. 15, 37).