“One day in 1965 I felt I had just finished being a student. I felt very confident. I felt I knew exactly what to do.”

—Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman’s Untitled, 1965, a canvas measuring 10 inches wide, is a site of radical experimentation. Horizontally brushed strokes of white oil paint, carefully applied to sized stretched cotton, accumulate into a surface that is at once minimal and expressive. A thin perimeter of raw canvas remains exposed along the edges, subtly asserting the objecthood of the painting. Created during a watershed year for the artist, this work stands as a testament to Ryman’s growing conviction in his abstract language. “One day in 1965 I felt I had just finished being a student... I felt I knew exactly what to do,” Ryman reflected—an assertion echoed in the self-imposed formal constraints that characterize Untitled, including his commitment to square formats and the exclusive use of white paint.ⁱ

By this time, Ryman had already left behind his early employment at the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art, focusing entirely on his art. Though still two years away from his first solo exhibition at Paul Bianchini Gallery in 1967, he had begun to crystallize the conceptual underpinnings of his approach. The absence of a title in this painting signals its proximity to the moment when Ryman began naming works not as narrative cues, but as practical identifiers—an evolution marking his maturation as an artist. The painting’s quiet insistence on material presence and perceptual nuance aligns with what critics have described as a “phenomenological” ambition: to shift how a painting occupies space and how viewers relate to it.ⁱⁱ Works from this period, now held in major museum collections such as Dia Art Foundation, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reflect Ryman’s career-long interrogation of abstraction, surface, and spatial experience. In Untitled, successive white strokes accumulate like restrained crescendos, embodying the quiet rigor and depth of one of the 20th century’s most subtle innovators. 

“White has a tendency to make things visible. With white, you can see more of a nuance; you can see more.”

—Robert Ryman

At first glance, the present work—like much of Ryman’s oeuvre—appears as a simple white square. Yet beneath this surface simplicity lies a profound investigation into perception, materiality, and light. Ryman’s paintings are not mere monochromes, but quiet meditations on the act of seeing. “You see, when you’re working with oil paint particularly, and you use it with a certain heavy consistency, it leaves brush marks. And those marks reflect the light. And how the paint is brushed on will determine how the light works on the surface,” Ryman once explained.ⁱⁱⁱ Indeed, close inspection of Untitled reveals a surface far from smooth: horizontal striations left by the brush animate the painting, registering the gesture of its making. For Ryman, every detail mattered. The size of the brush, for instance, had a specific purpose. Using a large brush allowed him to pull paint across a broad area while maintaining a consistent gesture—unlike a smaller brush, which required more strokes and created a different visual rhythm. The direction of the strokes also mattered, as it directly affected how light would interact with the surface. “I wanted all the brush marks to go in the same direction, because that would allow the light to be absorbed evenly, and you wouldn’t get certain areas that were reflecting, and certain areas not,” he said.^iv “And also, there was a matter of immediacy involved. I didn’t want to—and I called it fussing before—I didn’t want to work the paint too much.”^v Perhaps most essential to Ryman was this sense of immediacy and assurance. While composed of many individual brushstrokes, Untitled is intended to appear as if executed in a single, unbroken motion—a kind of mise-en-scène in which effort is hidden, and the act of painting itself becomes nearly invisible. 

Unbound by any specific school or theory, Ryman charted his own path with resolute autonomy. In the fertile artistic landscape of postwar New York, the dominant mode of painting broke decisively with European traditions—favoring monumental scale, gestural freedom, and chromatic intensity. This expressive mode placed the optical effects of color at its core. Ryman diverged from these concerns, finding in the square format a retreat from compositional hierarchies and in white pigment a focus on light and materiality rather than color. “If you have an equal-sided space and you're going to put paint on it... then [the square] seems like the most perfect space,” he explained. “I don't have to get involved with spatial composition, as with rectangles and circles.”^vi

“The meaning of painting depends not only on the interaction between a painting and a viewer, but on a painting’s relationship with space. Painting interacts with space (the wall, ceiling, floor, light) and with the viewer. It is an interaction that initiates the experience. You cannot understand painting by explaining something. You can only understand painting by experience.”

—Robert Ryman

Despite visual affinities with artists like Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, Ryman rejected the Minimalist label. He preferred the term “Realism.”^vii In his view, Minimalist art carried an “inward aesthetic”—one that posited imagined or conceptual worlds—whereas his own “outward aesthetic” emphasized the artwork as a real, self-referential object.^viii For Ryman, Realist painting did not point beyond itself; it was, above all, something that existed fully in the world. Instead, he found enduring inspiration in Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko, whose paintings he encountered daily while working as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. Writer Tom McGlynn recounts attending a panel discussion at the museum in 1995, during which Ryman remarked that what fascinated him most in Mondrian’s work was the grid stopping just short of the canvas edge.^ix A similar restraint appears in Untitled, where bands of white paint subtly resist touching the outermost edges, as if held in check by invisible force. Rothko, by contrast, evoked a more emotional connection. “[Rothko’s] work might have a similarity with mine in the sense they may both be kind of romantic,” Ryman said.^x “I mean in the sense that Rothko is not a mathematician—his work has very much to do with feeling, with sensitivity.”^xi Though often associated with a cool, impersonal aesthetic, Ryman firmly rejected this interpretation of his work, the quietness of which does not preclude emotional depth.

Serving the surface rather than any conceptual narrative, Ryman’s radical practice is aptly captured by art historian Robert Storr: “The idea that what an artist does is mark the world so that you can see it again (in addition to making a mark that is intrinsically interesting to look at) is, I think, the defining principle of Ryman’s work, as it is for a great many artists of his generation.”^xii Untitled stands as a quiet and potent celebration of painting itself: of light, material, and gesture distilled to their most elemental and luminous form.

ⁱ Robert Ryman, quoted in Maurice Poirier and Jane Necol, “The 60’s in Abstract: 13 Statements and an Essay,” Art in America, 1983, p. 123.
ⁱⁱ  Barbara Reise, “Robert Ryman: Unfinished I (Materials),” Studio International, Vol. 187, No. 963, February 1974, p. 80.
ⁱⁱⁱ Robert Ryman, quoted in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman, London & New York, 1993, p. 120.
^iv Ibid.
^v Ibid.
^vi Robert Ryman, quoted in Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Robert Ryman,” Artforum, Vol. 9, No. 9, May 1971, pp. 44-65.
^vii Robert Ryman, quoted in Thomas McEvilley, “Absence Made Visible: Robert Ryman,” Artforum, Vol. 30, No. 10,
Summer 1992, online.
^viii Ibid.
^ix Tom McGlynn, “Robert Ryman: Drawings,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2018, online.
^x Robert Ryman, quoted in Robert Storr, "Simple gifts," Robert Ryman, London, 1993, p.39.
^xi Ibid.
^xii Robert Storr, “In the American Grain,” in Robert Ryman, New York, 2015, p. 20.