Milton Resnick
Ukrainian-American Painter
Bratslav, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
New York, New York
Summary of Milton Resnick
Having put down his marker as one of the pioneering first-generation New York School painters, Resnick became better known for his immense canvases. As his style matured, he pursued a form of distilled abstraction; an approach that was much less about Action Painting and more about the artist's personal search for the very essence of painting. Characterized by their massive size, and the sheer weight of Resnick's mud-thick impasto paint, his signature "all-over" canvases fill the viewers' whole field of vision. Refusing interpretation, his monochromatic paintings appear rather to "float" in a state of "just being" that brings them a timelessness that engulfs the viewer with their physical and lyrical power.
Resnick was well into his mature years before he took an interest in figurative works. These pieces, which add a more intimate dimension to his oeuvre, were rendered through acrylic and gouache on paper and they often carried a melancholic element. Resnick augmented his painting career by writing poetry and through prestigious teaching appointments.
Accomplishments
- For Resnick painting was a "defiant act" that should resist the compulsion to produce imagery that the viewer was then obliged to read and interpret. For him, the value of a work of art should be located in the processes and materials involved in the works' production. Resnick was thus at the center of a shift in thinking from an image-fixated art, towards works that prompted a more intuitive and meditative experience in the viewer.
- Although he ranks alongside those artists who refuse to be defined by a given style or movement, Resnick's early work reveal the influence of his close friendship with Willem de Kooning, and fellow pioneers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, such as Arshile Gorky and Ad Reinhardt. Like them, his works featured primary colors and abstract forms that brought a new and dynamic sense of rhythm and movement to the burgeoning post-war New York art scene.
- As Resnick's career progressed, he became increasingly absorbed with the idea that the physical canvas should act as a material bond between artist and audience. He built up heavy impasto surfaces that gave the impression of being dominated by a single color (when the works were in fact multi-hued). These enormous canvases overwhelmed and astonished his audience, not just in their scale, but in their weight too, which could be in excess of 300 pounds.
- Resnick's monumental canvases, such as his series Veil of Isis, fall into the category of Monochromatic art (even if the artist himself would have resisted such generic labelling). His monochromatic pieces, which place him in the company of the likes of Kazimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, and Agnes Martin, refers to work that contains a single base color (though it may, or may not, include different shades). For Resnick, his interest lay not so much in the tonality of the work, but rather the emotional potential for the physicality of paint as a substance, thereby also aligning him with the categories of Art Informel and Matter Painting.
- In his last years, Resnick (by now stricken with debilitating arthritis) produced many paintings on paper. In these pieces he turned for the first time in his long career to figuration. Works with titles such as Women of Crete (1990), feature loosely-defined human figures rendered in vivid colors against a darker, mottled backgrounds. These pieces tend to carry a sorrowful emotional resonance that becomes all the more acute in the knowledge of Resnick's tragic suicide.
The Life of Milton Resnick
The art critic Roberta Smith called Resnick "Volatile, acerbic, unfailingly blunt, widely read and singularly dedicated to the ideal of the painter's hard, solitary life". He fitted, in Smith's words, "the popular stereotype of the bohemian angst-ridden artist" and that he just might have qualified "as the last Abstract Expressionist painter."
Progression of Art
Untitled
This early work was painted by Resnick shortly after he was discharged from five years' army service. It features organic yellow and red forms, with a few smaller square-ish and rectangular shapes, appearing in purple, dark blue, and green that stand out against their off-white background. Each form occupies its space without being crowded by another form. Arts writer Jonathan Goodman argues that "Even early paintings by Resnick display great perspicacity", and this work "nicely demonstrates how sophisticated a painter he was even before turning 30".
Goodman identifies de Kooning's influence in Resnick's organic forms. Indeed, this work looks very similar to de Kooning's Abstraction (1949-50) and one can imagine how the two friends may have even worked on these pieces side-by-side. Resnick and De Kooning were also looking to the work of fellow members of the New York School, especially Arshile Gorky, for inspiration (Gorky's works of the 1940s are also characterized by rhythmic abstractions, dominated by primary color forms, and pitched against a blank white background).
Goodman finds it "surprising" that Resnick became a "somewhat neglected painter" given that he was "so much in the thick of things in New York". He calls Resnick "a painter of high courage and integrity" and asserts that "there exists within the body of Resnick's art a vision that promises to be seen not as tangential but rather central to the New York School's early history". This work in particular offers evidence of a "poetic tone" that never entirely leaves Resnick and which "remains even when he starts to paint according to a darker vision".
Oil on board - The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, New York
Burning Bush
In Burning Bush, thickly applied and closely grouped strokes of red and yellow paint stand out against a dark background dominated by blue. Artist and writer Thomas Micchelli suggests that that, if one considers the title of the work, the small area of white in the lower right corner could be understood as representing "a cowering Moses". Artist and critic Stephen Maine recognizes that with this work, as well as Boston and Whelan (painted the same year), "Resnick had arrived at a distinctive approach to his generation's existential confrontation with the void of the canvas — an insistent, fluttering brushstroke sustained across the entire visual field, shifting dramatically in hue but not by much in scale". Maine adds that in these works, "Figure/ground relationships are indistinct when they exist at all; ruptures in pictorial space are avoided in favor of a relentlessly present mark-making, a polychrome monsoon that seems a descendant of Turner's 'tinted steam'" (a reference to John Constable's famous quote about his compatriot's use of luminous color techniques – "he seems to paint with tinted steam [it is] so evanescent and so airy").
Indeed, it was in the late 1950s that Resnick was enjoying new levels of recognition. Critic Roberta Smith says of these titles, "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".
This was also the period when Resnick's paintings were growing significantly in scale. This was the result of shift in emphasis from a vision-based painting process to an intuitive, feeling-based process. As he explained, "I go and put some paint there and at a certain moment it is like I am buoyant. It has an expanded height, a quality in which I feel I'm lifted. I say, 'Now I have to hold on to this feeling.' So I walk around and say, 'Have I got this feeling?' and I put some paint down and say, 'No, I haven't quite got it.' I put it here and I put it there and suddenly I hit it again and that reinforces the feeling and then it goes on. It's like a day spent with futility. And then that grows and the months and days and pounds grow at the same time 'til I feel as if I can actually hang by the emotion of applying paint to where it is missing, where it needs more or where it needs to be taken away".
Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
New Bride
This monumental work was painted just two years after Resnick had declared he was finished with art and was going to become a poet. He claimed that he kept a single 18-foot-wide canvas in his studio "just to keep busy". Art critic Hilarie M. Sheets explains that "What started out blue became heavily encrusted with white paint from many hundreds of tubes, the canvas ultimately weighing more than 300 pounds". Says Sheets, New Bride, "pointed the way toward enormous paintings, built up from many hues that coalesce into monochromatic fields, that the artist produced though the 1970s — widely considered Resnick's finest works". These include Saturn (1976), Elephant (1979), and Veil of Isis (1985).
New Bride is almost entirely white, with the component strokes of color and their precise placement reading more as an exploration of white itself rather than a hue. The viewer feels as though, perhaps, they could be looking at a many-times-magnified image of an eggshell. It is maybe because of the lighter quality of this work that it has become so popular and so inviting to viewers. It illustrates the artist Thomas Micchelli's observation that, "You don't so much look at a Milton Resnick painting as step into it, like an elevator shaft. Unmoored from the formal constraints of space and form, Resnick 's picture plane vaporizes into an arena of agitated indeterminacy - a nebulous interlacing of strokes darting with the incessant motion of acute anxiety".
Similarly, art historians Geoffrey and David Dorfman write that "The eye is both challenged by unfamiliarity and yet guided, in a sort of odd comfort. Resnick's paintings carry this ambiguity, which has the quality of a meditation—that which dwells in the Open yet retains a secure glimpse of its own origins. […] A Resnick appears to have been painted in a sentient, painstaking manner and its results are indicatively sentient and fulfilling. Its significance to the ambitious painter is in the postmodern return it requires to more meditative and deeply esthetic values".
Oil on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C.
Veil of Isis
Veil of Isis (the first of a series carrying that title) is one of Resnick's largest paintings, measuring 53 x 93 inches. His works of the 1970s and 1980s not only reached daunting sizes, but also astounding weights, with some coming in at several hundred pounds, with layers upon layers of thickly applied oil paint. Indeed, as artist and critic Stephen Maine notes, while visually these works appear simple and monochromatic (with Veil of Isis being mottled dark green), they exemplify the way in which Resnick's interest lay mainly in "the physicality of paint as a substance, of which color is not necessarily the most important or even the most interesting quality".
Ever-concerned with the metaphysical qualities of painting, Resnick took the title for this work and series from "Madame" Helena Blavatsky's foundational writings on the occult movement of theosophy. As art historians Charles Cramer and Kim Grant explain, "Theosophy was a source for many artists [including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Modrian, and Hilma af Klint] who sought higher spiritual truths and a non-perceptual basis for their art, and it validated the idea that a fully spiritual art would leave behind all basis in natural objects and would be fully abstract". In The Secret Doctrine (1888), which expanded upon her earlier book Isis Unveiled (1877), Blavatsky wrote that ancient world cultures possessed powerful, mystical, and "absolute" "truths" or wisdom, which had gradually become "veiled" by "symbolisms" specific to each society and culture, and that it was the task of the theosophist to "lift the veil" to uncover these deeper spiritual truths that lurk behind what we perceive as "reality". Indeed, Resnick's friend and biographer Geoffrey Dorfman notes that Resnick was clearly inspired by Theosophy and Russian Mysticism, and "had photographs of Theosophists and mystics pinned to the wall of his little studio; Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Rasputin."
When questioned about the work, Resnick stated "I don't know why it should weigh four hundred pounds or more; I didn't deliberately make it heavy. It grows heavy because at a certain moment I think, 'Where is the end of this silly, crazy thing I'm doing? How far do I have to go before it is so dense, so compact, nothing will escape?'". Of these works, artist and critic Eric Sutphin writes, "The endless depths of paint lead to a confrontational and impenetrable impasto that confronts and compels the viewer. […] even the most archaic form is purged and any reference to external influence is ostensibly denied. […] Exhaustive physical and psychic energy are contained within these canvases. A skeptic could argue that these are a contrarian's monolithic reaction towards neo-Expressionism, a lamentation for Abstract Expressionism's displacement".
Oil on canvas - The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, New York
Women of Crete
This work is one of countless smaller paintings on paper that Resnick produced in the final decades of his life, when severe arthritis prevented him from standing and working on the enormous canvas paintings that most defined his career. During these later years, he stayed mainly in his bedroom and tiny closet, which doubled as a studio. In these pieces, something appeared in his work that had never been there before, and which he had spent the majority of his career avidly rejecting: figuration. In Women of Crete, three loosely-defined human figures, painted in vivid, nearly neon, orange and pink, stand out against a darker, muddier, mottled background of yellow, orange, green, blue, pink, and purple.
Art historian Geoffrey Dorfman, who was also a close friend of the artist, explains that at this stage of his life, Resnick "was exhausted, physically and emotionally. He felt that he was able to take 'the blank' to where he couldn't go further". So, seeking something new, the artist accumulated an array of source materials, from Victoria Secret catalogs to books with reproductions of works by artists like Renoir, Poussin, and Rubens, and he even hired live models, and he painted his own, abstracted versions of these images. Women of Crete is evidently inspired by a Minoan fresco known as the Ladies in Blue, discovered at the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur John Evans in the early 1900s. Resnick's painting, like the fresco fragment, contains three figures, spaced evenly apart, with the figure on the left looking to the left, and the figures in the middle and on the right looking to the right.
Resnick himself once stated, "You always come around to what you hate" (figuration). Dorfman states that "The figuration of the 1990's wasn't by any means a rejection of his earlier paintings. Nor was it a return to something earlier. He was always abstract, unless you go back to his student years in the 1930's. Yet any time you start to have shapes in a picture, there is 'implication' present. People can read into just about any shape; their imagination is fertile. You're not avoiding that by embracing geometry either. Recognizing a stripe or grid is functionally the same as recognizing a waterfall, a crucifix, or a pile of laundry. 'Meaning' is a refuge from the sort of confrontation a painting ideally ought to provide. Why? Because the belief that one understands —can identify — what one is looking at, ineluctably domesticates feeling. It leaves the audience feeling comfortable, and that's not the artist's business".
Acrylic on paper - Van Doren Waxter Gallery, New York, New York
X Space
In the final five years of his life, Resnick produced several dark, monochromatic works (usually black and/or red) with simple geometric shapes (squares, circles, and semicircles), and simple X's formed with strokes of white paint. These X's developed out of his experiments with figuration during the 1990s; as if the artist were "re-abstracting" the figures. As Dorfman explains, when venturing into figuration, Resnick "embraced the tyranny of the rectangle" which he had come to think of as a pre-condition of figurative art. He writes, Resnick understood all the "conventions of figuration: gravity, volume, room, near and far, light and dark" but that in his hands they "don't enter into it except as epiphenomenon [secondary effect], the flotsam and jetsam cast off from his paint handling".
These final works, created in the half-decade before his suicide, are undeniably dark. Arts writer Jonathan Goodman notes that "Likely the most pertinent fact about Resnick is his emotional intensity. […] One has to weigh the melancholy of these final paintings against the tragedy of Resnick's suicide. Clearly, they communicate a more and more isolated psychological state; the artist's viewers are reminded throughout of his death to come as they contemplate his morose art. […] The emotional depth of his abstraction is highly impressive and must be seen that way. In a way, he survives because his art communicates negative feeling in magisterial ways — a bit of a contradiction, perhaps, but one that asserts the truth of his career". As Dorfman writes, "Resnick may have lived to paint, but towards the end he painted to live".
Gouache on paper - The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, New York
Biography of Milton Resnick
Childhood
Rachmiel Resnick was born in the village of Bratslav, in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine). His Jewish parents both came from prosperous families. His father's family, the Resnicks, were successful builders; his mother's family, the Mutchniks, made their money as flour merchants. The Russian Revolution, and the ensuing Civil War, had left Bratslav, which was repeatedly terrorized by (Orthodox Christian) Cossack gangs, decimated. With the constant threat to their lives hanging over them – Resnick carried boyhood memories of people being dragged from their homes and shot dead on the street throughout his life - his mother and father abandoned their home and business and, with Milton, his younger sister, Ethel, and members of the Mutchnik family, took the decision to flee the country in 1922.
Before the family managed to escape the country (which involved bribing officials) Resnick's father had been in hiding as a way of avoiding military conscription. The family finally arrived in America, travelling via Romania, France, and Cuba, in 1923. The Resnick's set up home in Brooklyn when Milton was still just six years old. His early years in Brooklyn were a time of difficult readjustment, not least because he only spoke Russian. Resnick later recalled how he spent his first grade, sat at the back of the classroom, methodically reproducing the English alphabet: "I didn't know what it was", he said, "I only knew I had to make an A, B, C, and make it stay on the same line". It was while attending secondary school that one of Resnick's teachers renamed him Milton (after his nickname, Milya, itself derived from his birth name of Rachmiel).
Education and Early Training
From adolescent age, Resnick harbored a desire to become an artist. At fourteen he began taking art classes at the Pratt Institute Evening School. To appease his father who was opposed to his career aspiration, Resnick studied architectural drafting and lettering at the Hebrew Technical Institute. When he completed his studies there in 1932, and in the midst of the Great Depression (which had all but halted new construction projects), he was unable to find work in this field. The following year, he entered the Pratt School of Design in Brooklyn, where he briefly studied commercial art. When his father learned of this, he kicked his son out of the family home. Resnick earned money by modeling, selling his blood, and by doing, in his words, "anything to keep alive".
After a few months, Resnick left Pratt, and began working as an elevator and errand boy at the American Artists School in exchange for tuition fees. The school also provided him with a tiny basement room in which to paint. He graduated in 1937. Cultural historian Geoffrey Dorfman notes that "When Milton started [his artistic career], it was very much a New York thing, either immigrants or sons of immigrants, a couple of women but not many. Everybody was poor and knew each other. Milton had a romantic view of the artist's mission and purpose. Everything else was tangential".
At the American Artists School, Resnick dated Elaine Fried. She introduced him to Willem de Kooning in 1938. Their friendship would prove significant and long-lasting. As Resnick's wife, Pat Passlof, would later explain, de Kooning "thought of Milton as his best friend and his most interesting artist friend, the person he could talk with most". After Resnick and Fried broke up, she would go on to marry de Kooning (taking and keeping the name, Elaine de Kooning). It was at this time that Resnick set up his first studio, on West 21st Street, and enrolled in the Works Progress Administration (WPA)'s Federal Art Project. He frequented Stewart's cafeteria, where many WPA artists would hang out, and where he befriended several other artists, including Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Ad Reinhardt, and Ibram Lassaw.
In 1940, Resnick was drafted into the US Army. He served in Iceland, Normandy, Northern Europe, and the Rhineland, before being discharged in 1945. He spent the next two years studying at the Académie Julian in Paris under a military veteran's program called The Serviceman's Readjustment Act (or the G. I. Bill, as it was better known). He set up a studio at 21 Rue de Seine next-door to the painter, Wols. While in Paris, Resnick was regularly visited by Graham (travelling from New York), and he also befriended sculptors Constantin Brâncuși and Alberto Giacometti, painters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and writer Antonin Artaud. He also made friends with the art dealers Katia Granoff and Pierre Loeb, which rather contradicted the criticism aimed at him by the Dadaist poet and essayist Tristan Tzara, that Resnick was blind to the idea/fact that art was essentially a business like any other.
Resnick returned to New York in 1948. De Kooning had stored many of his paintings, although a number of his earliest pieces became lost. Once back in the United States, Resnick focused on making abstractions. Still in 1948, de Kooning introduced Resnick to a student of his, Pat Passlof. She and Resnick would become lifelong partners.
Mature Period
In 1949, Resnick became - with de Kooning, Reinhardt, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov - a founding member of the 8th Street Club, an important forum for Abstract Expressionist artists. 8th Street group sessions would also be attended by Dylan Thomas, Hannah Arendt, John Cage, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Goodman, William Barrett, Edgar Varese, and Pierre Boulez. In 1949 Resnick was poised for his solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery, but a dispute over paintings that went missing led to its last minute cancellation.
In 1951, Resnick participated in the first group exhibition of the Abstract Expressionists, the 9th Street Art Exhibition. Earlier that year, Life magazine published a photograph of eighteen key members of the movement – "The Irascibles" as they became known - including de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Hedda Sterne. The photograph, as arts critic and journalist Hilarie M. Sheets explains, "helped enshrine the pecking order of the nascent Abstract Expressionist movement", but Resnick refused to sit for the photograph because of a deep "disdain for self-promotion". Resnick was not a withdrawn or anti-social character. Geoffrey Dorfman, a close friend of Resnick's, mentions the fact that he had a performative streak and habitually, "experimented with how he would appear to people: crew cut serviceman, poet-maudit, convict, Jazzman, prospector, magus [and] by the time he died he looked pretty rabbinical, like Pissarro's twin brother". Nevertheless, his general reluctance to embrace the social aspect of the commercial art scene saw his career suffer in comparison with some others in the movement.
In 1953, Resnick was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and underwent a successful operation in 1955 in California. (He had moved there to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, for the 1955-56 academic year.) It was also in 1955 that he held his first solo exhibitions in San Francisco and New York respectively. This overdue "debut" of his work led to him being mistakenly classified by some critics as a Second-Generation Abstract Expressionist. It was not a mistake that troubled Resnick, who said "I am not an action painter. I am not an Abstract Expressionist. I am not younger than anybody or older".
Late Period and Death
By the late fifties, with Abstract Expressionism beginning to be eclipsed by Pop Art and Conceptual Art, Resnick temporarily retreated from art and devoted his time to his home life, tending to his garden and writing poetry. He returned, recharged, in 1959 when he rented a 5000 square foot "light loft" (featuring a full wall of windows and eight skylights) on lower Broadway. It was the ideal place to paint, and the ample space allowed him to further expand the size of his paintings and to work on several pieces at one time. In 1961 he and Passlof finally married and the newlyweds spent an extended honeymoon touring Europe. Dorfman notes that "Milton and Pat were idealistic people on a great artistic adventure. They thought of themselves as revolutionaries, really". (They remained married until Resnick's death, and never had children.) Resnick published a collection of his poetry, Milton Resnick: Up and Down Poems, also in 1961.
On their return to the US, Resnick gave up the lower Broadway studio and moved into a studio on Spruce Street, near City Hall. It was there that he made the personal commitment to, as he put it, "learn how to paint [and] begin all over again". In 1963, he and Passlof purchased a former storefront synagogue on Forsyth Street, which they converted into living and studio spaces. They lived and worked there together until 1971, when Resnick left for a time to live on his own in the Catskills.
Resnick returned to New York in 1975. He purchased a second synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which he converted into a studio-cum-apartment. Although he and Passlof now lived apart, his new residence (at 87 Eldridge Street) was very close to Forsyth Street where she continued to work and live. Commenting later on their relationship, Passlof said, "There is no way I can put into words what Milton meant to me. We were incompatible but couldn't manage without one another". During the late 1970s and 1980s he was exhibiting regularly and also lecturing at the Pratt Institute, and at New York University. Resnick also took to writing poetry daily, a habit he continued for the remainder of his life.
By the turn of the century, crippling arthritis made it impossible for Resnick to stand and paint. He still continued to produce works on paper, however, and made his first forays into figuration. These emotionally charged pieces were executed in his bedroom and closet where he now spent nearly all of his time. On March 12, 2004, aged 87, Resnick took his own life. He left behind 16 envelopes of handwritten poetry with around 40 poems in each. His estate is held in trust by the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation. His Eldridge Street studio has been preserved by the Foundation and is used as a public exhibition space to showcase works by the couple and other Abstract Expressionists.
The Legacy of Milton Resnick
Resnick's long career meant he was one of the last surviving members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters. But for many it remains a grave injustice that he has been marginalized, or erroneously categorized as part of the second generation of the movement, in the telling of the movement's history. In truth, he was one of the New York School's pioneers, working closely with his friend, Willem de Kooning and other giants of the movement. As arts writer Jonathan Goodman writes, "Milton Resnick deserves recognition greater than what he has received […] From the start to the end, he was a painter of high courage and integrity — someone who belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists but who never quite found the validation he is worthy of".
As he matured, Resnick's paintings developed a near sculptural painterly technique that was chiefly concerned with the materiality, multi-sensory, and even, metaphysical qualities, of paint. These works captured a sort of "timelessness" in the sense that they carry no definable beginning or finality and exists, rather, in a permanent state of just "being". This approach to art-making paved the way for future generations of American painters such as Frank Stella and Robert Ryman who have also placed great emphasis on the physical properties of paint. He can also be cited as a forerunner of the contemporary New Materialism movement in which artists, such as Éva Mag and Lee Mingwei, ask their audience to rethink the nature of art by promoting the idea that content comes out of the material and is not simply communicated through it.