Robert Ryman

I really like Robert Ryman's paintings. There is a deceptively simple graphic quality to his work - he was creating incredibly contemporary looking work in the 1950s -60s; and his use of white is inspired.

Robert Ryman was born in 1930 in Nashville. In 1948 he enrolled at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute but transferred the next year to George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, where he studied music. In 1950 Ryman enlisted in the United States army reserve corps and was assigned to an army reserve band during the Korean War. In 1952 he moved to New York and studied with jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. Taking on odd jobs to support himself, Ryman took a position as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in June 1953. During that year, the artist made his first paintings.
In 1955 Ryman began what he considers his earliest professional work, a largely monochrome painting known as Orange Painting.

1955-59 Untitled (Orange Painting)

His work was first exhibited in a staff show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958, and later that year he was included in a group show at the Brata Gallery, New York. In the late 1950s Ryman became friends with artists Dan Flavin and Michael Venezia, both of whom were also working at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1961 he also began to paint on a full-time basis. During the early 1960s, Ryman spent a great deal of time with other artists whose studios were on the Bowery, including Tom Doyle, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Sylvia and Robert Mangold. At this time, Ryman began executing his first paintings on metal (vinyl polymer on aluminium), a support he would use many times again. In 1966 Ryman’s work was included in Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, along with twenty-eight other artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York, in 1967. Two years later, Ryman was included in When Attitudes Become Form, a seminal exhibition of works by Minimalist and Conceptual artists organized by the Kunsthalle Bern. Throughout his career, Ryman has isolated the most basic components of painting and experimented with their variations.

In 1972 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibited thirty-eight of Ryman’s works from 1965 to 1972, in the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York museum. That summer, Ryman was included in Documenta 5 in Kassel. In 1973 the artist was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the next year he had a retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Additional retrospective exhibitions were organized by the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1977 and by InK, Halle für Internationale Neue Kunst, Zurich, in 1980, the latter of which travelled throughout Europe. A permanent exhibition of Ryman’s work was installed at the Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen in 1983. In 1991 his works from 1958 to 1981 were exhibited at Espace d’Art Contemporain, Paris. In 1993 and 1994 an exhibition of Ryman’s work travelled to the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 1994 Ryman was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and assumed the role of the organization’s Vice President in 2003. He lives in New York.

1958 To Gertrude Mellon

1958 Untitled

1958 Untitled

1959 Untitled

1959 Untitled

1961 Study

1961 Untitled

1961 Wedding Picture

1962 Untitled

1962 Untitled

1964 Untitled

1965 Untitled

1965 Untitled

1968 Classico 5

1976 Untitled

2002 Period

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2003 Untitled

2004 Series #13 (White)

2004 Series #33 (White)

Meredith Frampton - portraitist

Here’s a change – some old fashioned and very elegant portraiture from English painter Meredith Frampton (1894 – 1984). Frampton was born in London; the only son of the noted establishment sculptor Sir George Frampton and the artist Christabel Cockerell. Meredith studied at John’s Wood Art School and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1913. His first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1920, his work winning increasing critical recognition. The final years and aftermath of the Great War saw a return of realism and of styles dating back to before Post-Impressionism, in the so-called ‘Return to Order’. This became known as ‘Neo-Realism’ or ‘Modern Realism’ in England and it was led by Meredith Frampton, Charles Ginner, Harold Gilman and the Euston Road School.
Frampton produced highly finished portraits and still-lifes, sometimes with a slightly Surrealist flavour. He excelled at conveying the intellectual qualities of his sitters. Frampton’s portraiture harks back to the tradition of full-length portraits of women associated with the work of earlier artists, such as Van Dyck and Gainsborough.

1919 Sir George James Frampton

On the death of his father in 1928, Meredith took over his studio at 90 Carlton Hill in St John’s Wood. Frampton became one of the most sought-after portraitists of the inter-war years, but was a painfully slow worker and unsurprisingly, his output was small, but significant. He painted a few female portraits that helped define the ‘Roaring Twenties’. His 1921 portrait of Winifred Radford was commissioned by her husband, Douglas Illingworth.

1921 Winifred Radford

Frampton’s elegant full-length portrait Marguerite Kelsey is in the collection of the Tate Galleries.

1928 Margeurite Kelsey

His oil on canvas Portrait of a Young Woman was also presented to the Tate. Frampton later said that he painted that picture as ‘a relaxation from commissions, and to celebrate an assembly of objects… beautiful in their own right’. The sitter was Margaret Austin-Jones, then aged 23. Her dress was made up from a Vogue pattern by Frampton’s mother. The vase in the picture made of mahogany, was designed by Frampton himself.

1935 Portrait of a Young Woman

Frampton was elected ARA in 1934 and RA in 1942. His Diploma Work was Still-life. Most years between 1926 and 1945 he exhibited a picture at the RA. His refined and highly finished portraits of attractive young women and men of science and of letters, carefully posed with appropriate accoutrements, were lauded for their psychological intensity and the artist’s personal sense of mystery. Frampton’s overriding concern for formal clarity was paramount, his exceptional ‘clarity of expression’ considered ‘a vehicle for a celebratory delight in the material world.’ Due to failing eyesight Frampton retired from the active exercise of his profession in 1953 and fell into obscurity, but his 1982 Tate retrospective somewhat revived his reputation. He wrote of his own work: ‘I think my principal aim has always been to paint the sort of picture that I would like to own and live with had it been painted by someone else.’ Frampton died in 1984.

1927 Still Life

1929 King George VI

1931 Sir Henry John Newbolt

1932 Still Life

1937 A Game of Patience

1945 Dr. Clive Forster-Cooper

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still (1904 – 1980) was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota. He became a leader in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists that emerged after World War II. Still's contemporaries included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Philip Guston.

Still attended Spokane University, Washington for a year in 1926 and again from 1931 to 1933. After graduation, he taught at Washington State College in Pullman until 1941. He spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation in Saratoga Springs, New York. From 1941 to 1943, he worked in defence factories in California. In 1943 he had his first one-man exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he met Mark Rothko in Berkeley at this time. In the same year Still moved to Richmond, where he taught at the Richmond Professional Institute.

When Still was in New York in 1945, Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a one-man exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in early 1946. Later that year, the artist returned to San Francisco, where he taught for the next four years at the California School of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1947, 1950, and 1951 and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947. In New York in 1948, Still worked with Rothko and others on developing the concept of the school that became known as the Subjects of the Artist. He resettled in San Francisco for two years before returning again to New York. A Still retrospective took place at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1959. In 1961, he settled on his farm near Westminster, Maryland.

Solo exhibitions of Still’s paintings were presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York in 1969–70. He received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975. Also in 1975, a permanent installation of a group of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gave him an exhibition in 1980. Still died that same year in Baltimore.

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