Robert Ryman -Classic or Classic?

Just think he should have his own thread is all.

Does anyone really believe that these are just white paintings, by which I mean that he's conning people into buying essentially artless artefacts
Are there serious students of art history or criticism that have made this claim? I've heard it made of somebody like Barnett Newman--whose work is much easier to stick this accusation to on a very superficial level--but not to Ryman.

Now if the question is "is he merely repeating himself at this late stage in his career"-- there is merit to the question, but only in that it's practically unavoidable considering the way he works and the self-imposed limitations of his material process/subject matter.

I saw him give a lecture once-- the thing he said that always stuck with me was his discussion of light in painting. He said that (paraphrase) "I like light in painting, but rather than use metaphorical light, I use actual light." That really opened his work up to me.

Wow

I don't know what you mean by serious, but some of the retards in my class dismissed it because it wasn't expressive or something.

I would call them "not serious". The artist as con-artist is at least as old as modernism.

I like you.

The feeling is mutual, my friendly internet phantom.

You must be in art school I would guess

You would guess correctly.

Art students fear and despise any art that doesn't support or help explain their own work. This is a mindset that takes a long time to grow out of.

This is of course purely anecdotal based on my own experience and observations

That is a good observation and one thing I'm probably very guilty of doing actually.

It's practically unavoidable. In a way it makes sense when you're figuring out what's compelling to you. When you reject something, at least you know what you don't want in your work.

As for Ryman being expressive or not expressive-- it's interesting because his early work has alot of markmaking and gesture and things that would be associated with expressiveness--but because it's small and white those signifiers get subverted.

The other thing that's so surprising about his early work is just how early it is--his first paintings that we associate with his classic process came from the mid-50s. He had Ad Reinhardt beat on the spiritual reductivist tip by nearly 10 years, and the process-based abstraction/ minimalist generation was still in undergrad when he was getting going. I guess he's about contemporaneous with Frank Stella, and maybe 5 or 6 years older than Johns-- and between the 2 of them I think he's pretty well triangulated.

I guess my only answer to this would be classic, but it would be a good answer! I've always been fascinated with R.R. Reductive painting has always been a thing of mine, but I haven't yet really studied/read up on him, nevertheless I think he's really interesting, and have always had a sort of attraction to his work.