Robert Ryman

Exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, 6 March - 1 July 2024

"The question is never: what to paint, but only: how to paint".

Robert Ryman (1930-2019), an American painter active in New York from the 1950s onwards, was originally destined for a career as a musician. To earn a living, he worked as a caretaker at the Museum of Modern Art, where his interest in painting grew through contact with the European modern masters (Monet, Cézanne, Matisse) and new American references (Rothko, Pollock). He then devoted himself entirely to painting, repeating on canvas after canvas the formula of the white square, chosen for its neutrality. He explored everything that goes to make up a painting, from the support and surface to the lighting and hanging system. His painting is both open and active, interacting with the space around it and inviting the viewer's gaze as much as the painter's own.

This exhibition catalogue, conceived as a monograph, brings together the leading Ryman specialists and offers a fresh approach to his work. It is structured around simple but fundamental notions of painting - surface, limit, space, light, duration - whose potential Ryman exhausts, the better to make them reveal each other.