ArtSeen
Robert Ryman
Works on Paper 1957 – 1964
Peter Blum

In Walt Whitman’s ecstatic "Chanting the Square Deific," the poet proclaims the square as a symbol of theological divination, in sharp contrast to Tolstoy’s interpretation of the square as an object of great anguish and demonic terror. Their respective readings of the square, both spiritually charged in different ways, have always haunted me when I confront the work of Robert Ryman.
Robert Ryman, unlike Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, or others of his generation, is a painter who appeals to me for his sheer peculiarity: practically self-taught, from early on he had the lucidity of mind, and depth of conviction, to proceed in his work with little stylistic evolution. By not relying on representational modes as a starting point from which abstractions evolve, his paintings are in some ways at odds with the very concept of the "act of painting." Ryman’s work is a singular, insistent, and humble meditation on what he knows, and he naturally allows his intense but selective focus to decode the process of painting in a modest and quiet manner. That is not to say that his painting is a mere representation of his will. It is Ryman’s careful, monastic pace, not his intellectual ambition, which embodies the essence of his painting. His self-reflexiveness is at once emphatic and simple. Without the historical context and obvious difference in the physiognomy of their paintings, Bonnard is a similar artist—a painter whose entire career from the beginning to the end, without vexation of spirit and discrepancy in modes of expression, remained steady and constant in style.
In this rare exhibit of Ryman’s works on paper from 1957 to 1964, I was looking for ways to reconcile my past ambivalent feelings about his work. As one would expect, half of the works are identifiable by the artist’s movement of hand; the well-considered pacing of brush-marks over occasional exposed tan paper shows the irregularities of edges. Many others, however, display a remarkable collision between playful experiments with placement within the pictorial field and a kind of tunneling toward the inner pulse, by way of the more intimate idiom of drawing. Those works on paper are by far the most emotional that I have seen by Ryman. They reveal an aspect of the artist that would otherwise have remained unknown to me.
In the first group, "Untitled" (1960) contains two areas of white and gray brush marks painted from the bottom left upward in one diagonal movement. From the upper left corner, a painted small, ochre square descends toward another irregular square of tracing paper cutout. Both areas of gray color, as well as the cutout square, are placed off-center, so our eyes are not directed toward the axis of the two diagonals. This in turn creates a more dynamic space, although I could foreshadow how Ryman would later try to stabilize the four small squares in the top and bottom edges of his larger fiberglass paintings with more uniform surfaces. In the second group is a series of gray drawings made between 1962 and 1963. Feverish pencil marks move on and off the grid, at times tracing the artist’s signature in repetition, at others just doodling off into a random field of white chalk ground. Ryman was previously a jazz musician and I wonder if these drawings would be the nearest to his musical sensibility. I suspect that they may well be the anxious transition from improvisation towards minimalism.
I left the gallery feeling less fixated on the square, though my circling thoughts became more whole as I came to realize that the square, as a given shape, is both dynamic and stable and composed. But even more remarkable is Ryman’s pervasive act of whiting out (as he often describes his initial use of white paint) his pictorial fields. Their majestic whiteness embodies a monastic practice of a kind that belongs solely to the knowing self. I admit that I have never liked the term "transcendental"—what in the end can be transcended from one experience to the next? White paint on a square canvas, with its minute variations and its mysterious power of transfixing while suspending the observer’s judgment for an extended period of time, may well be the closest visual equivalent to transcendence.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Looking Back, and Forward, as Ma-Yi Celebrates 30 Years of Innovative Work
By Billy McEnteeMAR 2020 | Theater
The Obie and Lucille Lortel award-winning theater company started out in 1989 producing solely the work of Filipino American writers; while that has evolved, so has the theaters definition of what a Ma-Yi play is. And thats a strength: in a company whose ethos and blessings are fortified by its creators, each new playwright brings with themto Ma-Yis numerous productions and artistic programstheir own world and experiences to expand and delight the companys evolving landscape of thought-provoking, envelope-pushing American plays.

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet
By Louis BlockDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
The Metropolitans concise retrospectivean abbreviated version of what was shown at Londons Royal Academypresents the printmaker and painter as a merciless interpreter of his environment and its characters.
Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.
Printmaking and Studio Work
DEC 19-JAN 20 | Critics Page
I have difficulty imagining what my work today might be, or look like, if I had never made prints. I take for granted so much of the experience made possible by the printing process that subsequently circled back into my studio, that I find it impossible to sort it all out and remember, let alone understand, what comes from where.