Milton Resnick; Abstract Expressionist
Hyfler/Rosner
School of Abstract Expressionists
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
Milton Resnick, who died Friday at his studio in
Manhattan, was perhaps the last living major painter of the
original New York School, the Abstract Expressionists whose
ranks included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Ad
Reinhardt.
An early devotee of action painting, he took Abstract
Expressionism's expansive canvases to amazing lengths,
producing canvases up to 25 feet wide that were so laden
with paint they weighed up to 400 pounds.
Later in his career he diverged from Abstract
Expressionism into color field paintings on a smaller scale.
Yet even when his paintings were monochromatic, they were so
heavily worked that the paint acquired a three-dimensional
character.
His work is in many major American collections, including
the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of
Modern Art, and dozens of regional museums.
Rachmiel Resnick was born in Russia, the son of Ukrainian
Jewish farmers.The family landed at Ellis Island in 1923 and
settled in Brooklyn.A teacher renamed him Milton after his
nickname, Milya.
In 1932, when he was 14, Resnick enrolled in the
commercial art program at Pratt Institute. A teacher who was
astounded at his line-perfect copies of Rembrandt drawings
advised him to study fine art. When Resnick went along with
the advice, his father kicked him out of the house, and
Resnick survived for the next few years by working as an
elevator boy, an errand boy, and even selling his blood to
survive. He attended the American Artists School on 14th
Street and lived in a tiny room. He scrounged for leftover
food at the nearby Bradley Cafeteria and for leftover art
materials at school. Once, when he was working alone in the
studio,Eleanor Roosevelt dropped in for a visit.
"She was tall with a beautiful flower on her chest, was
introduced to me, and was shaking her hand and looking at
the flower on her chest," he recalled in an oral history
published last year. "She was saying 'Very nice, very nice,'
and I was saying 'Thank you, thank you.' The place was
empty."
At the American Artists School, he met Elaine Fried, who
would soon marry another classmate, Willem de Kooning.
In 1938, he moved to a studio on West 21st Street, near
de Kooning's studio, and the two ran with a motley crew of
pre-war artists and hangers-on including Arshile Gorky,
Isamu Noguchi, and Joseph Stella.
Resnick served five years in the Army during World War II
and was in the second wave on the beach in the DDay
landings.
He moved to Paris at the end of the war, studying on the
GI Bill. There, he met Alberto Giacometti and Constantin
Brancusi and occasionally hung out with the poet Antonin
Artaud. The canvases he painted in Paris were lost when he
returned to New York in 1948.
He rented a studio on 8th Street, near those of Hans
Hoffmann, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock,
who soon moved to rural Long Island. Resnick was a part of
the salonlike atmosphere of The Club, a group of artists
including his neighbors that met at the Cedar Tavern to hear
lectures by trendy intellectuals of the day. Late in 1948,
he was introduced to Pat Passlof, an abstract artist whom he
was to marry. He reveled in life in Greenwich Village, where
he was constantly bumping into fellow artists on the street
or in the bars. (He said he eventually broke with de Kooning
because "I just wouldn't drink with him any more" after
Resnick's doctor told him his liver was debilitated from
excess.)
In the early 1950s, Resnick was closely identified with
the emerging Abstract Expressionists, whose most famous
member was Pollock, who had been featured in Life magazine.
Resnick was in many group shows, and by 1955 had his first
solo exhibitions, in San Francisco and New York. He acquired
a very large studio to work on his ever-larger canvases.
According to Geoffrey Dorfman's "Out of the Picture: Milton
Resnick," a book of oral history and lectures published last
year, "more oil paint has passed through his hands than
those of any artist, living or dead."
Although he did not become a household name as did his
youthful contemporaries, he managed to exhibit annually. His
last solo exhibit was in 1992 at his longtime New York
dealer, the Robert Miller Gallery.
He recently said, "The artist is someone with an
overheated brain." While that may have been true for his
earlier paintings, with their kinetic and bold strokes, his
later work, with serene colors and on smaller scales, seemed
to indicate a more contemplative turn of mind.
Milton Resnick
Born Rachmiel Resnick in Bratslav, Ukraine, January 7,
1917; died March 12 in Manhattan after a lengthy illness;
survived by his wife, Pat Passlof.