Robert Ryman valuation
Painted white on white for sixty years, making the paint, the surface and the fixings the whole subject.
Robert Ryman was born in Nashville in 1930 and studied saxophone before serving in an army reserve band during the Korean War.
What a work by Robert Ryman is worth
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Bio
Robert Ryman was born in Nashville in 1930 and studied saxophone before serving in an army reserve band during the Korean War. He moved to New York in 1953 to be a jazz musician, took lessons with Lennie Tristano, and worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art until 1960, where he met Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin and began painting in his apartment. From the late 1950s he worked almost entirely in white, on square supports of canvas, paper, metal, fibreglass and other materials, making the brushstroke, the surface, the edge and the way a painting is fixed to the wall his real subject. 'There is never any question of what to paint,' he said, 'only how to paint.' He had his first museum show at the Guggenheim in 1972 and a retrospective at Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in 1993 and 1994, and died in New York in 2019.
Ryman's paintings are subtle and easily damaged, so condition, and any restoration, matter more than for most painters; the fixings and the way a work hangs are part of it. Paintings, works on paper and prints all appear, and provenance through his galleries is usual.
MoMA, the Guggenheim and Dia
In 2017 he gave twenty-one paintings to the Dia Art Foundation, which shows a permanent group of his work at Dia Beacon.
His Classico paintings of 1968 and 1969 were made by taping sheets of heavy Classico paper to the wall, painting them white, and mounting them on board.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
