“It was never an intention of mine to make white paintings,” he told Art News magazine in 1986. “The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible.”

Robert Tracy Ryman was born on May 30, 1930, in Nashville. His father was an insurance salesman, his mother a schoolteacher and amateur pianist. He later said that he saw almost no paintings growing up. His first goal, which his parents reluctantly endorsed, was to be a jazz saxophonist. He studied music at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and then the George Peabody College for Teachers for two years and then spent another two in the Army Reserve Corps, assigned to a band that toured bases in the South.

Discharged from active service in May 1952, he went directly to New York, found a tiny apartment on East 60th Street, near Bloomingdale’s, and, supporting himself with odd jobs, began to study with the jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. He also began to visit the city’s museums and found himself fascinated by painting.

Mr. Ryman got a temporary job as a vacation relief guard at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 and ended up staying seven years. He was especially inspired there by the economy and sureness of Matisse’s paintings, but it was the works of the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, with their floating rectangles of color, that he found most startling.

“What was radical about Rothko, of course, was that were was no reference to any representational influence,” Mr. Ryman later said. He was struck by what he called “the nakedness of it.”

A few months after starting at the Modern, he went to an art-supply store near his apartment and bought some canvasboard and tubes of oil paint. “I thought I would try and see what would happen,” he said. “I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work.”