Exceptional Works: Robert Ryman

One, 1969

Enamelac on corrugated paper 60 1/4 x 60 inches
 153 x 152.4 cm

“There is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image—the end product.”

—Robert Ryman, 1969

Robert Ryman (1930–2019) is widely celebrated for his tactile works using white paint, in all its many permutations, which he executed using a range of painterly media on various supports, including paper, canvas, linen, aluminum, vinyl, and newsprint. Emerging in the 1960s, Ryman eschewed self-contained representational and abstract imagery, instead giving precedence to the gesture of applying paint to a support. His works are novel and sensitive explorations of the visual, material, and experiential qualities of his media that exist in a dialogue with their surroundings.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel, 2025, One (1969) is an early work showing Ryman’s unique commitment to painting’s physical properties. A former jazz musician who taught himself to paint while working as a guard at New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s, surrounded by European exemplars, Ryman later recalled “I was moved by many things. But I tried to always see what they were doing with the paint…. I was never interested too much in symbolism or story telling.”

Robert Ryman in his studio, New York, 1969. Photo by Dorothy Levitt Beskind

One is from a body of work that Ryman made in 1969 using Enamelac—a flat pigmented shellac primer—on 60-by-60-inch corrugated paper panels. Here, the support is visible in several areas beneath the thin, overlapping, loose strokes of paint, which have a light, rhythmic, and highly gestural quality to them.  As the artist notes of these works: “I thought [Enamelac] wouldn’t affect the paper the way oil would. It would not cause it to deteriorate later, with the oil eating the paper. And also it sealed the paper so it was really the ideal medium for this situation.”

Ryman’s use of a square format, too, is important: “It was the square,” he later said, “which seemed to me the perfect space to paint on…. Everything is equal.”

Robert Ryman, One, 1969 (detail)

“Now the work was about the nature of paint: the paint was the content of the paintings, as well as the form.”

—Nancy Spector, art historian, 1974

Installation view, Robert Ryman, Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1969

One is titled after its single-panel support, while five related works—four of which were included in Ryman’s 1969 solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York—have one, three, four, five, and seven panels respectively and have Roman-numeral titles that reference the number of panels in each work. Among the other paintings from this series, I, 1969, comprising one panel, is in the Rausmüller Collection, Basel; IV, 1969, comprising four panels, is in the Milwaukee Art Museum; V, 1969, comprising five panels, is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Panza Collection); and VII, 1969, comprising seven panels, is in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Ryman created five additional works using these materials and format. Stations, 1969, is composed of four panels laid out horizontally. Untitled, 1969, a square composition of four panels, is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Panza Collection). The three other related paintings were originally presented as a single work for the 1969 exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Robert Ryman, V, 1969, installed at Villa Panza, Varese, Italy, c. early 1970s

Installation view, Whitney Revision Painting #1 and Whitney Revision Painting #2 (both 1969), conceptual art, arte povera, land art, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1970

Robert Ryman, Whitney Revision Painting 1, 1969

“Ryman was taking painting apart to see how it worked, then reassembling it from degree zero. The support. The surface. The spread of one material over another. The limits.... He always came back from the brink. This is why his paintings are both so quiet and so exciting.”

—Adrian Searle, critic, 2019

Robert Ryman, 1974

“[I want to communicate] an 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 feeling somehow fulfilled that what you just experienced was extraordinary.”

—Robert Ryman, 1986

David Zwirner at Art Basel