White noise and dark silence: Ryman meets Rothko

An aspirational saxophonist and functional alcoholic, Robert Ryman left the army reserve band in the Korean War and moved to New York in 1953. He arrived with hopes of becoming a professional jazz musician, not an artist. By June, Ryman had taken up a job at the Museum of Modern Art, where he mainly worked as a security guard in the galleries. As he sat in the corner of the exhibition rooms or stalked around the permanent collection, Ryman found himself increasingly fascinated by the paintings on the walls. He fell in love with Henri Matisse, especially Red Studio (1911), which depicts the artist’s work space in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, but it was Mark Rothko’s feathery rectangles which captivated the impressionable young man from Nashville the most.

Rothko’s No. 10 (1952) was one of the works on display, hung alongside paintings by fellow émigré Arshile Gorky as well as the moody, philosophical Robert Motherwell. In No. 10, large passages of metallic marigold yellow – usually a warm colour, but in Rothko’s handling, the yellow seems cool and hardened – border deep blues and washed-out teal. Reflecting on the way his father worked on No. 10 (1950), Christopher Rothko imagines how “he controls the action, he basically sets the stage” of the composition, as the “rounded, softened, and cut off” rectangles emphasise the “humanness of the painting, [which is] no machine age painting.” This feels right. Rothko depicts porous rectangles that are imperfect and fallible; they are impossible to reproduce. Ryman was initially not sure what to make of No. 10 because it was like nothing he had seen before: “But when I saw this Rothko I thought, ‘Wow, what is this? I don’t know what’s going on, but I like it.’ I knew there was something there. What was radical with Rothko, of course, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was the colour, the form, the structure, the surface and the light—the nakedness of it, just there.”

‘Just there’ is the title of a new exhibition which opened this week at Hauser and Wirth’s gallery on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, curated by Dieter Schwarz. Schwarz, the formidable Swiss curator who is also co-organising the major Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton this autumn, was struck by the formal correspondences between the two artists and decided it was high time to put on a show where they could be experienced together. “In his lifetime, Ryman would not have liked to be exhibited along with another artist because he considered his paintings too difficult for this and probably also too demanding”, Schwarz tells me. The same was true of Rothko. “Rothko, in the 1960s, had very few gallery shows, and, given his position at that time, was not subject to be compared to another painter… It was during my research for the Zwirner Ryman catalogue essay [Robert Ryman: 1961–1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023-24] that I found that Ryman spoke about Rothko in his interviews and that he had a particular interest in his work. This made me think of showing the two artists together, for once.”

By situating the two giants of American art together, it makes for a fascinating encounter. In life, the two painters never strictly met but they once shared a table at the restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art. The younger artist was bashful and reticent to make an introduction. “I was very shy”, Ryman reflected, “and I didn’t feel like I was a painter at all yet and so, how could I talk to him?” It is tempting to think about what Ryman might have asked the ageing master. Why are your works untitled, or numbered only in sequence? Why the reduced number of colours? Are you painting in oil or acrylic these days? Ryman had been working on his ‘white paintings’ for around three years by the time of this interaction around the time of Rothko’s retrospective at the Museum. The ‘white paintings’ were a format of painterly works in many different guises – made on various supports, including paper, canvas, linen, aluminium, vinyl, and newsprint – which would go on to dominate his practice for the next sixty years. He seldom made anything else.

One of those early works, Untitled (1959), is in the Zurich show. I look at this work up close. I look closer. While Untitled might superficially recall a Rothko of the classic style – if it was only rotated ninety degrees clockwise, and so keep the logic of the vertical rectangular structure – it feels different. I’m drawn to the scrawled ‘RYMAN5’ on the right-hand side, as though the white paint to make his signature has been squeezed directly onto the canvas, but he has run out of space to finish ‘59’ and so date the work. Schwarz writes that the overall effect feels “almost casual”, hardly sharing anything with the brooding old master Rothko who, among many declarations, said: “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” Heavy stuff. I’ve always been fascinated, though, by those final three words: “and so on.” There seems to me to be something so casual about those words – etcetera, and what have you, and whatnot – when dealing with the meat and potatoes of life and death.

Does seeing Ryman together with Rothko enable the former to bring something lighter out of the latter? By encouraging us to think about the thingness of Rothko and Ryman – as two artists from different generations who were grappling with the meaning of abstraction from the vantage point of its heyday – Schwarz asks us to think about the materiality of painting when all the hifalutin varnish has been wiped away. Reflecting on his ‘white paintings’, Ryman shirked at the idea that they were merely ‘white paintings’ (and so reduced, economical, about one single thing) at all: “The gray of the steel comes through; the brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through, the cotton (which is not the same as the paint—it seems white): all of those things are considered. It’s really not monochrome painting at all. The white just happened because it’s a paint and it doesn’t interfere.” I agree with him. When I visited Zurich, I was struck by how often the white on the surface calls attention to the object of the painting – there is no suspended disbelief with a Ryman, only a cold hard confrontation with what painting is when it is unapologetically itself.

I spent ages walking around the edges of the pictures, those places that seem so secondary to the subject of art: the industrial framing of Core (1983), the gorgeously imprecise and unnecessary staples on the side of Dominion (1979). “That is what Ryman calls his realism, the fact that every part of the painting should get the same attention, from the surface down to the way it is fixed to a wall”, Schwarz reflects to me: “In his practice, Ryman doesn’t overlook anything, all aspects are of the same importance to him, and he teaches us to keep thinking about so-called details as well.” This is key. At the heart of Ryman’s brilliance is the nature of being there: to look at all aspects of one’s surroundings, all the little bits of debris in one’s life, with the same awe as we look at the thing we are told holds all the meaning. Ryman reminds us to pay attention.

Is there a modern artist who has commanded his audience’s attention – forced them to really stand still, to reflect, to really look – more than Rothko? This is particularly true of his last works, especially those produced in the two or three years before his suicide in February 1970 but beginning in earnest all the way back in 1964: his ‘black paintings.’ In one respect, it feels arbitrary that Rothko used black and Ryman white. (When asked “Does your use of white have any symbolic or mystical significance?” Ryman replied, simply, “No.”) Critics have sometimes read Rothko’s use of black as a melancholy premonition of his end. But the real picture is more complex.

In 1968, Rothko had been ordered by his doctor not to paint anything over 40 inches high. This was the reason he was working on paper. It was around this time or just earlier that the artist Jacob Kainen recalls bumping into Rothko and noticing “a fleck of blue acrylic on his forehead. It was very faint but I knew it was acrylic and I said ‘oh, you’re using acrylic.’ He said, ‘I’m using everything.’” Rothko revealed something about his practice – he uses everything – in such a way that he revealed nothing. In Zurich, an untitled work from 1969 – a painting of overwhelming black with thin edges of background blue – is the furthest away from the door. Rothko made the work using acrylic on paper, laid down on canvas. It is a painting that demonstrates just how much can be done with just two colours. For a moment at least, we see Rothko like Ryman did for the first time. We pay total attention.