Milton Resnick's New York Times Obituary
Bill Schenley
Milton Resnick, a New York painter known for dour, thickly
impastoed near-monochrome canvases, died on March 12 at his
home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was 87 and also
had a home in Cragsmoor, N.Y.
His wife, the painter Pat Passlof, said Mr. Resnick
committed suicide.
Volatile, acerbic, unfailingly blunt, widely read and
singularly dedicated to the ideal of the painter's hard,
solitary life, Mr. Resnick was in many ways the popular
stereotype of the bohemian angst-ridden artist. In the
introduction to his 2002 collection of interviews and
lectures, "Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New
York School," the artist-critic Geoffrey Dorfman recounts
how a young man, recognizing Mr. Resnick on the street,
asked if he might accompany him on his walk. "Are you a
painter?" Mr. Resnick asked. "No," the young man replied.
"Then you can't," Mr. Resnick said.
In terms of longevity and dedication to first principles,
Mr. Resnick might qualify as the last Abstract Expressionist
painter. In terms of timing he had some claim to being among
the first. Born in the Ukraine in 1917, he emigrated to New
York with his family in 1922 and grew up in Brooklyn. He
left home as a teenager when his father forbade him to
become an artist.
By 1938 he had rented his first studio, on West 21st Street,
and was friendly with artists like Ad Reinhardt, Willem de
Kooning, Elaine Fried (who married de Kooning) and Ibram
Lassaw. He worked briefly on the W.P.A. arts project,
started painting abstractly in the early 1940's and was a
founding member of the Club, the Abstract Expressionist
forum.
Yet Mr. Resnick was, as he put it, out of the picture.
Having spent much of the 1940's serving in the Army during
World War II and studying in Paris on the G.I. Bill, he was
generally seen as working in de Kooning's shadow until the
mid-1950's and therefore relegated to Abstract
Expressionism's second generation, which he bitterly
resented.
As the 1950's progressed, his contemporaries became
prominent, and Pop and Minimalism loomed; he came to feel
excluded from the New York art world's past as well as its
present. In the introduction to "Out of the Picture," Mr.
Dorfman poignantly and succinctly sums up Mr. Resnick's
predicament: "His most significant achievements took place
subsequent to the dissolution of the world that bred him."
Mr. Resnick's mature works came in the late 1950's, when his
obsession with paint and his admiration for Cézanne and
Monet gelled, and he began to let his expanses of quick
Impressionistic brushwork build into encrusted surfaces
dominated by a single color. Adamant in their denial of
drawing, composition and subject matter, these works
presented enveloping expanses that were at once lyrical and
anxious. Their power was only slightly diminished when, in
later years, he periodically added faint figures or forms.
While Mr. Resnick's emphasis on a continuous surface built
of myriad painterly gestures was in some ways the
culmination of Abstract Expressionism, the sheer materiality
of his surfaces also foreshadowed the proto-Minimalist
paintings and reliefs of artists like Robert Ryman, Ralph
Humphrey, Frank Stella and Donald Judd.
Mr. Resnick taught at art schools across the country as well
as at the New York Studio School. It is part of his legend
that a solo show scheduled at the Charles Egan Gallery for
1948 was canceled because of a misunderstanding. Beginning
with the Poindexter Gallery in 1955, he had 25 solo
exhibitions in New York, the last 10 at the Robert Miller
Gallery, most recently in 2002. In 1985 the Contemporary
Arts Museum, Houston, organized a retrospective of his work,
which is also represented in many public collections,
including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
In addition to Ms. Passlof, his companion since 1952 and his
wife since 1961, Mr. Resnick is survived by his godson, Guy
Fried, of Langhorne, Pa.