Drawing a Blank

When people who don’t know much about modern art point towards something and say “I can do that,” what they’re most likely pointing at is something either painted or influenced by Robert Ryman, infamous father of minimalist painting’s all-white works, such as the one seemingly befuddling a patron in the image above.

Ryman’s career in the visual arts began as a museum guard at the MOMA. His first major work was a single-color abstraction called Orange Painting, not much different than the single-color International Klein Blue works of Yves Klein, of course. But whereas Klein tried to engage the viewer with saturated fields of color, Ryman moved away from color and tried to find expression in nuance and minimal gesture.

Ryman’s Series #9 (White) appears above. Ryman’s mimimalism is so minimal that reproductions usually appear to be completely white. I chose the photo of the patron looking at a Ryman painting at the top specifically to avoid leading off with an apparently empty box. Series #9 (White), however, does have enough variance, especially in the receding corners and in the visible texture of the center, to give us something to hold on to intellectually. It’s this frustrating nature of his works that, unfortunately, has brought him scorn in mainstream culture.

Ryman’s influence is still felt today, however, in artists such as Quentin Morris, who bases his minimalism in black rather than white to explore African-American culture within the context of society as a whole. I don’t see any corresponding racial aspect in Ryman’s work, but that’s the strength of his minimalism—it allows each viewer to engage the work and discover something already within him or herself. Unfortunately, as much as critics such as Kirk Varnedoe try to defend these “pictures of nothing,” they will always remain exactly that for many people.

Playing in the Dark

I made a field trip to Larry Becker Contemporary Art Gallery in Olde City Philadelphia last week to see the all-black paintings of Quentin Morris. These paintings need to be seen in person to be experienced, like any true single-color abstractions. (A view from the exhibit is above.)

Morris uses black gesso and acrylic on round pieces of canvas to create interesting textures and feels. The roughly cut edges of the circular pieces of canvas just add to the experience. You wish that you could just reach out and touch each of these pieces. The physicality of the works warms up any potentially chill from the intellectual concept of single-color abstraction. I recently saw a news piece about how Starbucks uses round tables because they seem psychologically “less lonely” than square tables when people sit alone at them. I felt something similar about Morris’ circular canvases. There’s an inclusiveness that makes them seem welcoming. Even the soft ragged edges avoid a sharp demarcation between the viewer and the viewed.

Looking at these paintings, I recalled Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, essentially an extended meditation on what it is to be an African-American in a culture that denies its African-American borrowings. Just as Elvis Presley played the music of black bluesmen, Huckleberry Finn spoke a Southern black dialect, and Bill Clinton was our “first Black President” (a phrase Morrison coined), much of mainstream “white” culture has deep “black” roots. It is this same underlying texture that I felt Morris’ paintings brought to the surface, without rancor or separatism but with joy and inclusiveness.

Quentin Morris’ black paintings also made me think of Herman Melville’s use of whiteness in Moby-Dick. Just as Melville took the whiteness of the whale to mean almost everything in the universe, from the pall of death to the essence of purity, Morris makes a universe of blackness by evoking every negative, evil meaning, and turning them around to discover a beauty and a power in the African-American experience and how that experience shapes us all.