Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman was an American artist best known for his monochrome white paintings. His art is widely associated with the movements of Abstract Expressionism and, above all, Minimalism. However, Ryman himself consistently rejected labels of any kind.

He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930. His early ambition was to become a professional jazz musician, and Ryman studied music at George Peabody College for Teachers in his hometown, before moving to New York in 1952. He took lessons with the jazz pianist, Lennie Tristano, and supported himself financially by taking up work as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a job he held for seven years.

In that time, he became acquainted with — and fond of — work by the likes of Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. One day, feeling inspired to create pictures of his own, he went to an art supply store, bought some paint and canvas, and set to work.

After initial experiments with colour, Ryman soon hit upon what would become his trademark type of painting: white, abstract, and executed on a square support. ‘There is never any question of what to paint, but only how to paint’, he said.

His monochromes reflected a career-long preoccupation with texture, technique and plays of light on a work’s surface. He managed to achieve remarkable variations by using an array of different paints, supports, brushes and brushstrokes. Oil, acrylic, gesso and casein were just a few of the paints he used; canvas, linen, fibreglass and linen just a few of the supports.

Ryman had his first solo show in 1967, at the Paul Bianchini Gallery in New York. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions since, including a touring retrospective between 1993 and 1994 organised by jointly by MoMA and London’s Tate Gallery, which was staged at those two institutions, as well as at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Centre.

In 2015, one of Ryman’s all-white paintings, Bridge (1980), sold at Christie’s for US$20,605,000 — setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by the artist at auction. He died four years later, aged 88.