Dr Ben Street

I’ve written an audio tour for the new Robert Ryman exhibition at the @barbicancentre. It features my text alongside wonderful contributions by curators @wellsfs and Amber Li as well as one of the Barbican’s own gallery attendants (read the text below to see why). Ryman was a brilliant and generous artist. It will be a great show.

Here’s an extract from my Substack on Ryman. Find the whole text on Slow Looking; link in bio.

Ryman is known for his use of white in the same way that Charlie Parker was known for his use of the saxophone. What I mean by this is both artists committed to a choice that immediately cancelled out a whole list of other possibilities. In using white, Ryman was never going to be a successful society portrait painter. In using the saxophone, Parker was never going to play in a chamber orchestra. Both pushed the materials at hand as far as they were able to within the context of their times. Both dramatically expanded the vocabulary of their tools. To say Ryman only painted white paintings is like saying Parker’s songs all sound the same.

I mention Parker here because Ryman planned to be a jazz saxophonist himself. Things not quite working out as he’d hoped, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a gallery attendant. And what that gave him was the experience that would lead to him to becoming a painter himself. His education was not so much in making art as in looking at it. Extended exposure to the museum’s collections seeped its way into his mind. I think of him staring at paintings by Matisse, Rothko and Malevich over the long, slow hours of a weekday afternoon, gradually internalising their lessons.