Robert Ryman

‘... one of the most important American artists to emerge after World War II, a Minimalist who achieved a startling non-Minimalist variety in his paintings even though they were mostly white and usually square, died on Friday at his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

... Mr. Ryman preferred the square, he said, because it avoided representational suggestions of doors, windows and landscapes. His works could be small squares of stretched canvas alive with fat, juicy, commalike strokes of oil paint. They could be pieces of cold-rolled steel, four feet square, brushed perfunctorily with a thin matte enamel. They might feature thick, methodical horizontal bands of shimmering white with slivers of brownish raw linen glinting between them, a little like plaster and lath.’ New York Times, Feb, 10, 2019.