WEARING WHITE
A pop song sends one back, happily or not, to the time one first heard it, and to the feelings it first delivered. It was like that, for me, seeing the collection of Robert Ryman paintings on long-term view at Dia Beacon. When I first saw Ryman, at MoMA, as a college student, I was thunderstruck by the elegance of his square white-on-white canvases, and the drama they extracted from such slender means. To say it simply, Ryman applies white paint to canvas and then attaches the canvas to a wall. Seeing his paintings at Beacon brought me back to that moment of discovery, after which all other painting began to seem, somehow, rather obvious.
The friend I visited Beacon with, a designer, found the paintings monotonous, and I suppose they are. If one searches in painting for figure, narrative, composition, or message, one won’t find it in Ryman. Like a lot of conceptual art, his works seem more like questions than things. And if the primary question is What is a painting? Ryman’s response is, A surface covered with paint.
The canvases here, painted from 1958 to 2003, vary in size and medium. Some are as small as memo pads and some are as large as garage doors. Some are aluminum panels screwed to the walls with clips, some are sheets of paper stapled to the walls, and some are stretched canvases hung on wire. The canvases, from the early 1960′s, are the richest. They are small, about twelve inches by twelve inches, which draws one close. From this vantage one sees clearly the warp and weft of the fabric, the chemical tint of the paint, and the field of squirming, whirling brushstrokes. The yellowing canvases and rusting hardware give spatial depth and cultural authority. These works, which once seemed to me bracingly contemporary, are now historic.
Robert Ryman, “Untitled,” ca. 1960. Artwork courtesy 2016 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.
