Does the concept of a retrospective imply chronology? The organizers of the Robert Ryman survey at the Haus der Kunst in Munich think not. The press release announcing the “fifty-work” show, cocurated by Bernhart Schwenk in Munich and Christoph Schreier and Volker Adolphs at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, expressly states that the show is “conceived as an ‘unusual overview.’ . . . In contrast to a traditional retrospective, the exhibition . . . emphasizes the effect of Ryman’s paintings. The individual works are not presented in chronological order but rather in their atmospheric relations to one another.”