[Untitled]

Vesela Sretenović: Is your lack of interest in making representational or narrative paintings the reason you avoid giving titles to your works?

Robert Ryman: Actually, titles came simply for identification purposes, and nothing was titled until it went out someplace. That’s why most of the small works from the early 1960s that have rarely been shown are still untitled.

VS: In the mid 1960s you started to use titles that were playful and associative, like Lugano, Archive, General, Pace, Courier, Spectrum, etc. You would think they had meaning, until you realized they were brands of paint, office supplies, shipping companies, or industrial materials. Was this an intentional tease?

RR: No, it was just a matter of finding a title that wasn’t so easy to associate with something specific. There was one title, Signet 20, that was from the brush I used, and someone called me and wanted to know if there was another Signet. But it was because it was a number 20 brush—there were not 19 previous Signets. The title Standard was from the company where I got the steel. Standard was just a word that couldn’t make one think of a landscape or a sunset or something.

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, 2010 (Phillips Collection exhibition catalog)