American painter, born in Nashville, Tennessee. After settling in New York, he made his first totally monochrome paintings in about 1955. Although he always works in white and in a square format, there is an enormous variation in the work because of differences in medium, support, handling, and scale. Sometimes coarse canvas is used, sometimes paper, sometimes metal. Untitled (1959) has an unusually large signature. Ryman explains that this element of the work, accepted as conventional in painting, aims to avert any suggestion of symbolism and prevent assumptions that the painting is trying to say something. His paintings received little attention until the late 1960s and tended at that time to be linked with *Conceptual art. This is far from Ryman's intentions, as he is concerned not with idea but with painting itself.