“A white board with white borders.” Can we just reduce Robert Ryman’s work to this acerbic quote from Yasmina Reza’s biting piece? In 1994, the playwright joked about the beauty of a blank canvas purchased by a rich Parisian collector and sketched, through this blind monochrome, the snobbery of contemporary art. Sometimes mocked, sometimes adored, the little white squares of the misunderstood Robert Ryman are now competing for several million dollars on the auction market. The Musée de l'Orangerie has chosen its camp by plunging us, five years after his death, into the white paradise of an artist of the visible and the invisible who experimented with painting through its relief, its speed and gestures without ever escaping its trademark: a white square with countless points of light.

Did you know?
Robert Ryman dreamed of being a jazz musician. To make ends meet, the young man decided in 1953 to take a small job and became a museum guard at MoMA. It was a revelation, the artist soon swapped his saxophonist for his brushes, met the minimalist Dan Flavin and the pop genius Roy Lichtenstein, before achieving recognition forty years later by being the subject of a retrospective... at MoMA. The circle is complete.