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

 

Robert Ryman’s Untitled, Prototype, 1969, rewards close looking. Viewed from afar, one sees a white square punctuated by four brown notches, one in each corner. Take a step closer, however, and a wealth of texture is revealed. The artist’s application of the white paint is almost cross-hatched in nature, creating subtle ridges and channels of paint, a mountainous terrain—while the brown gaps remain flat and untouched.

 

Untitled, Prototype is part of a series the artist began after 1967, in which he purposefully used the thinnest possible supports—such as canvas, card or fiberglass—with the intention of having the work lie as close to the wall as possible, as if part of the wall itself.ⁱ The four unpainted tabs in Untitled, Prototype are the result of sticky tape that Ryman used to hold the sheet of fiberglass against the wall while painting. There is an intentionality to the absence of paint at the corners—a deliberate reminder that Untitled, Prototype is just board and paint. The present work is also one of the first in the artist’s oeuvre to bear the title Prototype—Ryman began using the term in the late 1960s to distinguish the paintings he identified as models for subsequent works in their respective series.ⁱⁱ Untitled, Prototype, then, is quite literally the exemplum of its kind.

 

Ryman was born in Nashville and moved to New York in 1952 with the intention of becoming a jazz musician rather than an artist. However, his abstract painting practice would ultimately be equally informed by both his day job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, and his nightly devotion to modern jazz. Inspired by the strict and theoretical teaching style of his jazz mentor Lennie Tristano, Ryman’s art practice was similarly structured in pursuit of “nonreferential and self-sufficient objects.”ⁱⁱⁱ Throughout his life, he would remain committed to four tenets in his practice: white paint, square format, brushstroke, and support.

 

 “I don’t think of myself as making white paintings. I make paintings; I’m a painter. White paint is my medium.”
—Robert Ryman

 

Ryman’s use of white paint holds no hidden symbolic or mystical implications; rather, it is a technical choice, an engagement with material over imagery. For the artist, white paint allowed him to focus on the subtleties of color—more specifically, the color that arose when white paint was applied over various supports. Moreover, Ryman saw too much color as confusing, for which reason he largely limited himself to white.

 

Untitled was painted the same year as Ryman’s exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf—the artist’s second exhibition in Europe. This exhibition presented the artist’s “Classico” series, named after the brand of paper support used for each work. Classico 5, 1968, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, consists of one dozen vertically orientated sheets taped to the wall to create a horizontal composite that was partially covered with a synthetic polymer white. Once the paint dried, Ryman removed the tape, exposing small tabs of untouched paper beneath. This pattern of notches serves to visually reinforce the grid of papers and the painted rectangle.^iv

 

Like Classico 5, Untitled makes use of tape to create a palpable tension between presence and absence, and to disrupt what would otherwise be a uniform application of paint. It is these tensions and disruptions which make Untitled such a pivotal work in Ryman’s oeuvre, and which grounds the work in the artist’s ultimate fascination with the fundamental properties of the materials he employs.

 

 

ⁱ “Untitled, Robert Ryman, 1969,” Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, accessed Oct. 4, 2023, online.

ⁱⁱ Jeffrey Weiss, “Radiant Dispersion: Robert Ryman’s Philadelphia Prototype, 2002,” Artforum, vol. 41, no. 1, Sep. 2002, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ “The man who turned Robert Ryman onto jazz,” Phaidon, May 30, 2018, online

^iv Robert Storr, “Robert Ryman,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed Oct. 5, 2023, online.