The name Ryman almost automatically conjures up an image of a square surface painted a uniform white. And indeed, Robert Ryman (1930-2019) is that New York painter who, from 1959 onwards, devoted his work to the question of what to do with white alone. The fact that the Orangerie is devoting an exhibition to him – the first large-scale exhibition of his work in a French museum since 1981 – can only be seen as paradoxical or provocative. Ryman's work hangs just a few meters from Monet's Water Lilies; at first glance his immaculate geometry close to floating streams of color is unexpected.

But it's better not to judge by appearances and preconceived ideas: the aim of the retrospective is to show that Ryman's art is far more complex than the simplistic formula to which art history tends to consign it, and that, in fact, it is not entirely unrelated to Monet, whose views of Rouen Cathedral conclude the exhibition. It's a successful endeavor, provided one takes the time to carefully study the works exhibited. There are only a few – about forty – so that each one, whatever its format, has enough space around it, and that its singularities can be clearly observed and are distinguishable from the others. For they are all different: variation was Ryman's principle – with more or less clearly defined, and more or less perceptible differences.

Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and before he moved to New York City in 1952, he studied music and played tenor saxophone. Initially, his move to New York was for music. To make a living, he worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he received his artistic education and met Mark Rothko, who exhibited there in 1961. That same year, Ryman abandoned music for painting, which he had been practicing for several years. Abstract painting – a must in New York at the time – and in patches of color as far as can be determined, for the patches on the earliest canvases exhibited, dating from 1959, were already almost entirely covered in a thick, slightly lumpy white, where the brushstrokes have left visible traces.

He was certainly neither the first nor the only artist to be dazzled by whiteness. Kasmir Malevich came before him with White on White in 1918, and closer in time were Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings of the early 1950s, which go hand in hand with his Black Paintings. Contemporaneously, Piero Manzoni was developing his achromes, which were white compositions made up of sheets, cottonwool, or kaolin. More generally, Ryman's early work contributed to the beginnings of New York Minimalism, and over the decades he was displayed in several exhibitions of minimalist art. His work at this time shows his experimentation with horizontal white stripes in enamel paint on Bristol board or lacquer on cotton or aluminum.

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