Customer Reviews

Robert Ryman: Used Paint (October Books)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I recently came across this book while working at my job at a library. The book is beautifully designed, in line with the aesthetic of Ryman. The book also has many interesting, candid details about Ryman's history at the MOMA and his job's relationship to his own self taught, art practice.

This was an extended effort to say much about what has already
been well documented by Gary Garrels, Vesela Stretenovic, Charles
Wylie, and of course the definitive monograph by Robert Storr. I
was disappointed that these writers, as well as the numerous art
rag reviews, were not sited and compared. There was far too much
thesaurus pontificating to glorify the author. This was not a scho-
larly result regardless what the subject offered.
HJ BOTT

Filled with information about the artist but was dissappointed about the reproduction of the paintings...they were small and rather "dull" in color tones.