Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

A vital resource for understanding the depth and significance of Ryman’s practice, this volume reveals his steadfast belief that painting, when really seen, is for pleasure

American artist Robert Ryman believed that the poetry of painting was in feeling. For almost 60 years, he devoted himself to making paintings devoid of pictures of symbolic content, instead focusing his attention on materials and their effects. In works that range from intimate to monumental and flat to three-dimensional, Ryman explored the basic assumptions of painting―that it involves paint, on a surface, hung on a wall. His rigorous and playful body of work is marked equally by surprise and subtlety, sameness and difference, and by shifting uses of paint, gesture, support, size, line, fastenings to the wall and space. This new publication designed by Studio Mathias Clottu documents a range of Ryman’s paintings, showing the variety he produced as he experimented with painting’s expanse. Alongside new scholarship from influential writers, artists and musicians including Darby English, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle and Howardena Pindell, this book includes never-before-seen archival material and pays special attention to Ryman’s studio.
Born in Nashville, Robert Ryman (1930–2019) moved to New York with the hopes of becoming a professional saxophonist. To make ends meet, he took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, but became fascinated with the Abstract Expressionist works on display there. He started painting in the early 1950s, and was honored with a retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 1993, almost 40 years later.