White Noise: Pousette-Dart and Ryman at The Phillips Collection

This summer at The Phillips Collection there’s a different kind of colorblindness going on. White is the “new black,” or at least the color telling the most interesting stories in Pousette-Dart: Predominantly White Paintings and Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, both of which run through September 12, 2010. Richard Pousette-Dart and Robert Ryman share not only an affinity for using white to express larger ideas, but also a love of music—Pousette-Dart being the son of a musician and father of musicians, which Ryman himself played jazz before turning to painting. Their white works represent a different kind of “white noise,” namely that of minimalist, abstract, nonnarrative, nonillustionist art that clears away all peripheral cacophony and allows us to hear ourselves think about painting and about the world. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "White Noise."

[Image: Richard Pousette-Dart .White Cosmos, 1950-51. Oil and graphite on board, 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of Knoedler Gallery. © 2010 Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to The Phillips Collection for providing me with press materials for and the image above from Pousette-Dart: Predominantly White Paintings and Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, both of which run through September 12, 2010.]

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.