A Paler Shade of White

By ROBERT HUGHES

The most understated art show of this or any recent year must be the retrospective of paintings by Robert Ryman now on view at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Robert Storr, it covers about 40 years of this American painter's work: a parade of 83 mostly white paintings on entirely white walls, with nary a label or a number to break the chaste spell of Ryman's strikingly unoxygenated imagination. (It was a good curatorial idea not to have wall labels, since anything verbal would have trapped the vacillating eye of any but the most determined Ryman fan. Besides, his titles don't tell you much.) Not since Kazimir Malevich's famous white square on a white ground, now somewhat yellowed by the passage of 80 years, perhaps not even since the 1890s in Paris, when a French satirist exhibited an all-white picture called First Communion of Consumptive Young Virgins in the Snow, has any painter come close to Ryman's enthusiasm for white.

Ryman, 63, is self-taught, a condition that may be said to show in the narrowness of his work. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he never went to art school, never learned to draw in the formal sense, and turned to painting only after some years of trying to make it in Manhattan as a jazz saxophonist. His main exposure to painting came from working as a guard in the Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s. There he saw the work of the American Abstract Expressionists, getting a bit here and a bit there from each of them -- Jackson Pollock's all-over paintings, Bradley Walker Tomlin's decorative gestural drawing, the blacks and whites of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko's hovering rectangles. What impressed him most of all was Matisse. With Matisse, Ryman says in the catalog, "there was his technical mastery, the way he could paint. When he worked, there was no fussing around. He was always direct."

Matisse's work, however, was also underwritten by an immense flexibility and inventiveness of shape and, above all, of space-creating color. This cannot be claimed for Ryman, whose desire to create an art of Matissean elevation and sensuousness is blocked by his rudimentary sense of form and his confinement to white. Autodidacts are apt to do whatever they can do, over and over, with refinements. This may not make them negligible artists, but it can cramp the range of their work. Barnett Newman was a patriarchal example of this fact; Ryman is a filial one.

He is not given to saying much about his art, but if there is one theme to which his utterances constantly return, it's the self-sufficiency of painting: "I wanted to paint the paint, you might say." And nothing outside the paint -- no figure, no landscape, no depicted space, nothing but the stuff itself. The results of this ambition can pall quite swiftly, but it's curious to note how Ryman has come to represent the last flicker of French Symbolism, as codified in the 1940s by the critic Clement Greenberg in the idea that the essential subject of art is the medium itself: that "means are content." There cannot be an American painter more stubbornly attached to the idea of art for art's sake than Ryman. Here is the final emergence of the beautiful nuance, not as an embellishment on some larger pictorial project but as an end in itself.

Ryman's obsessive purity of means has made him rather a cult figure in the American art world and even more of one in Europe. He is, on current charts, the chief exponent of what one might call soft Minimalism, as distinct from the hard, polemical, no-fingerprint variety of a sculptor like Donald Judd. Which is to say, Ryman's paintings are not absolutely programmed; they leave room for unforeseen effects and even accidents, and the individual traces of the artist's hand are crucial to their visual effect. If these nuances are lost -- as they almost always are in reproduction -- the residue, a white or whitish square sometimes inflected with edging strips of tracing paper and tabs of masking tape, looks ridiculous. With Ryman, once the picture is transposed into another medium, it loses whatever point it may once have had.

On the wall, matters are otherwise. Some of Ryman's big pictures are thin and vacuous -- the set of seven loosely brushed 5-ft. squares called VII, 1969, is as weak a painting as has ever been shown inside the Museum of Modern Art. But there is a kind of Ryman surface that is thoroughly pleasurable if you approach it on its own terms. It begins in the early '60s, with his way of laying a field of juicy, wriggling white marks (sometimes squeezed straight from the tube and then squished down with a blunt brush) over strokes of brown, red or blue that play hide-and-seek and create an explicit space behind the surface.

He can also, though much more rarely, create a sense of mood and evocation through white alone that seems to go beyond the medium-fixated gaze of his other work and is all the better for it. The most impressive work in this show -- benefiting from a slightly theatrical, chapel-like installation -- is a trio of mural-size canvases titled Surface Veil, 1971, in which huge, soft intrusions of denser white on a diffuse ground suggest depicted light in a way distantly related to Rothko, vaguely suggesting the large space of landscape.

Nevertheless, one is left with the impression of an artist stronger in taste than in imagination. This show -- and the claims made for Ryman's work in general -- recall the immortal quatrain of the late South African poet Roy Campbell:

You praise "the firm restraint with which they write" --

I'm with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb, all right,

But where's the bloody horse?