Robert Ryman - Softcover

Storr, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870705660 ISBN 13: 9780870705663

Publisher: Tate Gallery, 1993

Synopsis

Known as the "painter of white paintings", the American Robert Ryman is one of the foremost abstract artists of his generation. Catalogue entries for 81 works draw extensively on interviews with the artist. A detailed chronology places Ryman's work in the context of his major contemporaries.

About this title

From Booklist

Robert Ryman is a nonfigurative artist who makes white paintings. One might think, upon a cursory examination of these works, that Ryman was an academic type, fond of the rhetoric of abstraction. But Ryman is self-taught, self-effacing, and rather romantic. Storr, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, summarizes Ryman's quiet life and elucidates his passionate but methodical approach to painting with consummate narrative skills, supporting his commentary with excerpts from numerous interviews with the artist and, of course, a superb set of, yes, colorplates. Ryman's first medium was music. A bebop saxophone player, he took a day job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art and scrutinized the masters for seven years until, suddenly, in 1953, he began to paint. He's been at it ever since. Ryman chose, early on, to work within strict limitations, hence the white paint, and has devoted himself to seeing "what visual riches can be coaxed from such slender means," a mission not unlike the improvisations of jazz. Curiously, like many jazz musicians of his generation, his work has been more highly regarded in Europe than in America, but a major traveling retrospective exhibition, and this fine volume, will increase his visibility and earn him the recognition he deserves. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Tate Gallery
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870705660
• ISBN 13: 9780870705663
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236