Robert Ryman: The Real Thing at the Barbican – these mesmerising paintings must be seen in person

Don’t let the images accompanying this review guide your expectations.

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing is the American artist’s first major retrospective in the UK for over 30 years.

The show, at London’s Barbican Centre, brings 68 works together from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s. It is arranged thematically, without traditional wall text. There are no labels, even to identify the paintings. The exhibition follows Ryman’s thought that “you cannot understand a painting by explaining something. You can only understand painting by experience”.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Ryman initially aspired to be a musician. After two years playing the tenor saxophone in the US Army Reserve Corps, he moved to New York in 1952 to pursue a career as a jazz saxophonist. Claiming that he “never saw a painting until I came to New York”, he became intrigued after taking a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. He began making his own works in an attempt to understand, through experience, how paintings are made.

The Real Thing charts Ryman’s decades-long investigation, from the first “professional” painting he made in 1955, right up to the year he died in 2019. During this time he experimented with different materials, from linen canvas to aluminium, waxed paper, rolled steel and fibreglass.

Like all paintings, Ryman’s works are material objects. Many pieces are remade in each installation. Some works, like Versions VI (1991), have elements that are stapled directly to the wall. As curator Wells Fray-Smith told me, this created unique problems during the hang. The Barbican’s walls had to be tested for “tenderness”, the ease with which they might take an ordinary staple, with some panels needing to be replaced with “tenderer” alternatives.

Dancing with light

Similar care has been taken over light. Few of the spotlights point directly at the works. Instead light is bounced from the floor, up onto the work.

In the main gallery, several large ceiling-mounted light boxes have been installed. In two of the side rooms, the Barbican’s windowed walls are similarly converted. These create the diffuse, atmospheric light that Ryman’s work demands. In the side rooms in particular the effect is subtle and rewarding, because the source is changing, natural light. The paintings seem to shift, while thin flashes of colour, breaking on the paintings’ edges, pulsate.

The fine variation of surface and light in Ryman’s paintings is lost in reproduction. The experience of visual art is temporal, like listening to music. By contrast, a photographic reproduction collapses a changing experience into a static, unchanging representation. Ryman’s works suffer badly from this effect, because his paintings rely so much on their variability of appearance through patient observation, shifting light conditions and the movement of the viewer. Don’t let the images accompanying this review guide your expectations.

One work that demonstrates this contingency of experience is Best or Worst (1996-1997). Hung above eye level in the main hall, it is composed on a matte white ground. The surface is almost covered with cadenced, horizontal, creamy-white strokes, a glossy, almost perfect white haunted by a memory of green.

These brushstrokes reflect the light, bustling as the viewer moves: the effect is joyous, like shoaling fish. As with many of his paintings, textual symbols anchor the composition: one matte, pale grey “96” in the centre, another top right, with a smaller number “7”, a typical self-reflection on the painting’s date of creation.

Ryman’s works guilelessly report the facts of their making while, simultaneously, they exceed them in the viewer’s visual experience. Some of them resemble tests that have been taken to conclusion. Others are just his signature, repeated. There is an oblique charm about how they are made, or fixed to the wall. His works are simple objects, not paintings of scenes, just paintings. He once stuck a Coke can to the wall adjacent to a painting, so he could photograph the work and retain a sense of scale. They are both objects in the world.

Ryman’s studio

The sense of the artist’s studio is present throughout the show. Although there is no textual interpretation, there is a video in a side room of the artist talking. Upstairs there is a display of archival material, including his Associated Musicians of New York Membership Card from the 1950s, paint tests from 1963 and several photographs of the artist in his studio.

Ryman’s work is singular and innovative, nevertheless, it reflects his contemporaries Sol LeWitt and Frank Stella (Stella’s early work in particular) and his germinal inspiration, Mark Rothko.

But there are the ghosts of other artists too. I was surprised when looking at the monumental centrepiece of the show, Surface Veil II (ca. 1970), to be reminded of the fleeting light of Pierre Bonnard’s large, later work.

Untitled (Background Music), (ca. 1962), in one of the upper galleries, is an energetic cluster of glyphic, textured marks on raw canvas, painted in veils of rust and ochre, largely obscured by an upper layer of white. Terminating or bending at the edge, the strokes form a frame that bounds the painting’s energy, like the walls in a music-filled room. This work made me think of the strange ink drawings made by poet Henri Michaux, in which clusters of caligraphic forms congregate the other side of meaning, an experience of language without words.

Ryman’s work is resistant to language, to reproduction, even to interpretation. It won’t perform on social media, or succumb to the relentless current of information through the attention economy. It demands all of that attention for itself.
Benedict Carpenter van Barthold does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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