An Interview with Robert Ryman
By Peter Blum
Much has already been said about your paintings. But I’m interested in your life story and your origins. How did you get involved with art?
I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. I had never seen any paintings before moving to New York. Except for paintings of flowers -but never anything remotely high quality. There was nothing there.
And your parents? No influence came from them at all?
No. But I had music. That was what counted. That was what interested me and why I moved to New York. There I started going to galleries and museums and saw paintings for the first time. Actually not so much galleries but museums. I was like a tourist but gradually I became more and more interested in painting and such.
Was it going to the museums that made a difference? Is that what made you decide to study painting?
Well, my main concern was actually music. I was a jazz musician, a saxophonist. That was in 1952. But entertainment music didn’t appeal to me, neither did Pop or dance music, and I didn’t care much for performing in public. Actually I wanted to compose: to compose with my instrument, to improvise, to find out all the things you can do with the instrument. In that respect it’s related to painting. What’s important is the composition, the discoveries you make while working. Painting really resembles music in that way. You develop something and then you take the part that interests you. That’s how it happened
And then you decided it was time to learn how to paint. How did you go about it?
Mainly by watching. You see I didn’t know any artists at all. I didn’t know a single painter. All of my friends were musicians. Besides I was very shy. I couldn’t just go up to someone and say I want to be a painter. So what I did – I just kept at it. From the beginning, I was never interested in painting that was supposed to represent something. I knew I would be able to do that if I wanted to and if I practiced. But that’s not what I wanted. I wouldn’t make any new discoveries that way. What intrigued me were the possibilities of painting itself. I had to study the basics of painting, obviously — like what can be combined and how paint works.
And how did you learn from that?
Actually I got to know a few painters pretty much on my own at the Museum of Modern Art, like Bill Sharf. I asked him how you stretch a canvas. So he showed me, but I figured most of it out myself.
Were your paintings completely non-objective from the beginning?
Yes, I just studied color, composition, and format and I experimented with thick paint, thin paint and watercolors, and I explored the effect of light on the works. My only goal was to produce something that interested me personally and that gave me the feeling I had achieves something. But I never painted and abstraction of nature.
Has white always been an important factor?
In 1957 I still made a couple of paintings in color. White actually means taking away, eliminating. It’s not the case of painting white paintings. It’s a question of using white pigment. Of course, I use it differently today because the issues have continued to develop. I never thought that there should be a lot of things in a painting that don’t necessarily belong there. After all I didn’t simply make a decoration or paint an accumulation of things in order to see what works well. My main concern was to develop the structure of the paintings so that it contains the essentials and everything superfluous is eliminated…the composition extends to the wall and becomes a part of the wall… when you take my paintings off the wall, they don’t exist anymore. The painting needs a wall in order to exist. Otherwise it makes no sense.
Excerpts from an interview with Robert Ryman by Peter Blum originally published in DU Magazine, Zurich, August 1980 and republished in the book: Robert Ryman, Works on Paper 1957 – 1964, Peter Blum Edition, New York, 2004.
