Robert Ryman... The Real Thing

Anyone who’s ever done a bit of DIY at home will know the struggle of picking the right shade of white paint. That lovely, warm, buttery hue you’ve eyed up in the brochure inevitably turns into the jarring white of a doctor’s surgery once it’s on your own walls. The American artist Robert Ryman knew a thing or two about this, devoting his nearly 60-year painting career to exploring how paint, surface and light can transform what we see. 

Ryman wanted to ‘paint the paint’, you see. That is, he wasn’t interested in depicting people, places or things, but rather in how paint – more often than not white – behaved on different surfaces, catching and responding to real light rather than simply creating the illusion of it. A major retrospective at the Barbican, Robert Ryman... The Real Thing, brings together more than 60 works spanning his career, from his earliest experiments in the 1950s to his final paintings in the 2000s. Many might look deceptively similar at first glance, but it’s close up, with your nose inches away from the canvas, where things get interesting.

A young Ryman discovered the great rewards of looking at paintings while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a job also once held by British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan) . It was during those years that he made the first painting he would ever exhibit, which is on view here: ‘Gertrud Mellon’, named after the individual who bought it for $70 at the 1958 staff exhibition. Consisting of scribbles of white paint, overlaid with a short strip of black on the back of a piece of yellowing wallpaper, its uneven edges, exposed surface and broad brushstrokes are features he would return to throughout his career. You’ll also encounter his experiments with colourful underlayers and the looping white brushstrokes he tried out in the early 1960s; applied to the sound of jazz playing on his studio hi-fi. 

It’s close up, with your nose inches away from the canvas, where things get interesting

By the mid-60s, Ryman had settled on his signature square canvases, experimenting with different weaves, brush sizes and thicknesses of oil paint to see what effects he could produce. Then there are his ‘Stretched Drawings’, testing how the elasticity of canvas could distort a line, and works from the late 1960s stapled or taped directly to the wall, blurring the boundary between painting and wall, encouraging us to see both as part of the artwork. A glorious archive display offers a glimpse behind the scenes, from a photograph of Ryman clutching his saxophone (he originally moved to New York to become a musician) and his MoMA resignation to paint swatches, and photographs of his enviably spacious West Village studio.

The Barbican’s marketing campaign for this show trumpets the idea that these paintings have to be seen in person to be appreciated. And while you could say the same of most art, with Ryman’s it’s rather the point. How else would you notice that the white paint dragged across the raw linen of his ‘Winsor white’ paintings takes on an almost bluish tint against the gallery’s (grey-er) white walls? Or appreciate how a work like ‘Orrin Riley’, its unstretched linen stapled directly to the wall and outlined in blue chalk, is a ploy to get you to see the wall and painting as parts of the same work? The viewer’s experience is the meaning of the work. 

That so much of Ryman’s art depends on such subtle effects might explain why it leaves some critics cold. Outside the gallery, it can look like an awful lot of white paint signifying very little. But with the Barbican’s thoughtful curation (and an accompanying booklet mercifully free of artspeak), if there’s ever been a time and place for the sceptics to see what Ryman was getting at, it’s here.