Robert Ryman at the Barbican: How to Look at a White Painting

A room of white canvases brings on a particular gallery-goer’s anxiety: are you missing something, or is there nothing to miss? Robert Ryman spent six decades answering that question, and the Barbican’s new retrospective, Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, may be the best chance British audiences have had to hear his reply.

The exhibition, which runs until 28 February 2027, is the American painter’s first major showing in the UK in more than thirty years. It brings together more than sixty works spanning the mid-1950s to the early 2010s, and it has been greeted warmly. The Arts Desk gave it five stars and called it painting at its most joyously intelligent; Time Out awarded four. It is worth understanding why a body of work so often dismissed as “just white” has critics reaching for words like joy.

A museum guard who taught himself to paint

Ryman’s route into art was unusually sideways. Born in Nashville in 1930, he moved to New York in the early 1950s to become a jazz saxophonist. To pay the rent he took a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, and the long hours spent standing among the collection gradually turned his attention from music to painting. He had no formal training. He simply began.

That musical beginning matters. Ryman approached painting as a jazz player approaches a standard: take a structure, usually a square, and improvise within it, almost always in white.

Why white?

Ryman was famously irritated by the suggestion that he had abandoned colour. When the critic Sarah Kent once asked him about it, she recalls, he told her to look more carefully. His own explanation was practical rather than mystical. White, he said, “has the tendency to make things visible”. Strip away the distraction of hue and image, and what remains becomes the subject: the thickness of the paint, the direction of a brushstroke, the weave of the canvas, the way light falls across a surface, the shadow cast by a staple.

Once you know that, the paintings start to open up. Beneath many of the white surfaces sit coloured grounds that warm or cool the top layer. In some early works the colour fights back: one canvas from around 1962 is a blizzard of white marks pinning down a riot of green and magenta beneath. The exhibition also includes Untitled (Orange Painting), begun in 1955 while Ryman was still at MoMA, which he regarded as his first professional work. It is a blazing orange over an acid-green underpainting, and he often left it out of his own shows because he found the colour “shocking”.

The wall is part of the work

The other great revelation is how Ryman’s paintings meet the wall. He worked on canvas, but also on wallpaper, aluminium, Plexiglas, copper and paper, and he treated the method of hanging as a creative decision in its own right. Some pieces are held up by masking tape, others by visible metal bolts, others stapled directly to the plaster. Some canvases hang limp; others sit on stretchers so deep they become shallow boxes. His signature, too, becomes a compositional element, running down the middle of one canvas or spaced letter by letter along an edge.

The showpiece is Surface Veil II, a twelve-foot-square canvas from around 1970 that rarely leaves the Guggenheim because of its size. Ryman painted it unstretched on the floor inside a blue chalk square; when it was later stretched, a narrow margin of bare canvas was left showing. It is a small accident of process, left visible in the finished thing.

A show without labels

Perhaps the boldest decision at the Barbican is curatorial. In parts of the exhibition there are no wall texts at all. Information is provided instead in a printed handout you can carry and read at leisure. The curator, Wells Fray-Smith, has explained that Ryman believed the analytical, “thinky” part of the brain was not essential to a meaningful encounter with painting. Remove the captions and you are left, a little nervously at first, with the work itself.

Not everyone finds this easy. One reviewer found the sustained concentration tiring, and Time Out conceded it can sound like a lot of white paint signifying very little. Fair, but the experience is the point. Ryman once compared looking at a painting to listening to a symphony: you do not need to read the score to be moved.

What it offers the rest of us

For regular visitors to independent galleries, there is a useful lesson here. Much contemporary abstraction, from artist-run spaces in Glasgow to galleries in Margate, asks for the slow attention Ryman demanded, and this show is a masterclass in giving it. Stand closer than feels natural. Look at the edges. Notice how the work is fixed to the wall. Trust your own response before you reach for an explanation.

Go on a quiet weekday morning if you can, and give yourself longer than you think you need. You may leave, as the curator hopes, not only with a fresh sense of Ryman but with a little more confidence in your own eyes.

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing is at Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 28 February 2027.