Robert Ryman: Used Paint (October Books) [Hardcover]

Suzanne P. Hudson (Author)

Book Description

Series: October Books | Publication Date: March 6, 2009

This first book-length study of Robert Ryman argues that his work is a continuous experiment in the possibilities of painting.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Adopting as her lodestar the artist's assertion that the question that engages him is not what to paint but how to paint, Suzanne Hudson incisively addresses 'meaning insofar as it attends method' in Ryman's work over the past five decades. As she explores the extraordinary level of formal invention he has brought to bear on this bedeviling question, she persuasively grounds his practice in a form of Dewey-derived Pragmatism, and thereby brilliantly circumvents the twin shoals of 'antiaesthetic historicism and anticonceptual hedonism' on which most previous commentators have foundered."--Lynne Cooke, curator, DIA Art Foundation

In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist's production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his recent gallery shows. Ryman's largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting's conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman's method--an act of "learning by doing"--as well as his conception of painting as "used paint" sets him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman's approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D'Amico and colleagues. Ryman's introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at the MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.)Hudson's chapters--"Primer," "Paint," "Support," "Edge," and "Wall," named after the most basic elements of the artist's work--eloquently explore Ryman's ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman's work, she writes, tests the medium's material and conceptual possibilities. It signals neither the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings.

"In Used Paint, Suzanne P. Hudson detaches the painter's 'white' paintings from the usual stylistic and polemical framings. Her focus is Ryman's practice (its recycling and recombination of the painter's concerns: support, paint, edge, wall) and its emergence in the pedagogical milieu of modernism's temple, the Museum of Modern Art. Hudson's Ryman is both pragmatic and pragmatist, a devotee of Dewey and James, D'Amico and Barr: a Ryman for whom idea and action, the what and how of painting, are inextricable terms. In these pages we encounter a Ryman who staves off doubt through the assertion of belief, a belief in painting not as medium or essence but as a cognitive and bodily activity. Her account persuades."--James Meyer, Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University

(James Meyer )

About the Author

Suzanne P. Hudson is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (March 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262012804
• ISBN-13: 978-0262012805
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Robert Ryman's white, July 11, 2009

By 

Jose Maria (Barcelona, Spain) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Robert Ryman: Used Paint (October Books) (Hardcover)

This book offers a great view of the not-so-often understood white painting of Robert Ryman. It puts his art in relation with another artists, schools and movements, and there's an exhaustive reproduction of almost his entire creations over his long career.

Definitely recommended for any abstract-painting lover and Ryman's admirer. Like me, by the way!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Art criticism as it should be done, October 15, 2009

By 

R. Meadows-Rogers "www.epiklesis.com" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Robert Ryman: Used Paint (October Books) (Hardcover)

Suzanne Hudson has written a stunning and moving response to Robert Ryman's painting. (When was the last time you heard such adjectives used to describe a work of contemporary art criticism?). She even takes on Rosalind Krauss... and somehow MIT press, the postmodern press of choice, still published it! Unlike so many other critics, Hudson takes as her task the leading of the reader into a more profound and sensitive encounter with Ryman's paintings, rather than attempting merely to snare the reader into awestruck obeisance to the critic's perspicacity. She almost never falls into opaque prose or solipsistic neologisms. Her writing instead tends to clarity, precision, and sensitive insight, which deepen the reader's appreciation for Ryman's courageous undertakings. Like the best of critics of any period, Hudson focuses on the work of art as a material product, which also resonates with particular aesthetic goals and attitudes and with the particular dilemmas of its historical moment-in-time. She provocatively teases these resonances out of a close and careful observation of the specifics of Ryman's facture and never mistakes her interpretations for the artist's production. Reading this book uplifted me and affirmed myriad possibilities for all those of us who are artists and art historians alike. Thank you, Dr. Hudson.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant Book, April 16, 2011

By 

rlutfy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Robert Ryman: Used Paint (October Books) (Hardcover)

This is one of the most elegantly written, keenly insightful, and useful books I have ever read on a single artist. It explains in astonishingly clear prose the mesmerizing quality as well as what can sometimes feel like the inexplicability of Robert Ryman's white paintings. Hudson offers a way in to Ryman's work that makes me love his paintings even more than I did before reading this text. She also does an amazing job of explaining American pragmatism.
I've never commented on another review before-- but the comments made by an earlier reviewer who thought the book was just an extended effort to say what others have already said are crazy. Not only is this simply wrong (Hudson's analysis is thoroughly original), but some of the people this reviewer mentions actually wrote their texts on Ryman after Hudson's book.