Milton Resnick

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Milton Resnick (January 7, 1917 - March 12, 2004) was a major abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his mystical, abstract and figurative paintings. He was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery of New York City. Born in Bratslav, Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1922.

Resnick was one of the last survivors of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. He endured near-starvation in the thirties, painting in a garret studio in Paris. In the late forties he debated painting with Willem DeKooning, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, sometimes at The Club, a regular meeting of modern artists working in and around Tenth Street in New York. Like them Resnick was striving for an overall quality for his pictures, a way to unite foreground and background, in order to achieve a resolution of opposites, a metaphor for all dialectics. While the others moved toward throwing or dragging quantities of paint across the face of the canvas, Resnick retained a particularly personal and impassioned confrontation with brush painting.

Coming into prominence just as Pop Art moved into the limelight, his great accomplishments were never recognized to the extent some thought they merited, as a painterly integration of Western metaphysics and Eastern philosophy. In his mature years, he worked in a converted synagogue on Eldridge Street in the Lower East Side, attended by devoted students, admirers, and his wife and lifelong companion, the painter Pat Passlof.

[edit] References

His life and work are chronicled, mostly in the artist's own words, in Out of the Picture, Milton Resnick and the New York School, by Geoffrey Dorfman, published by Midmarch Arts Press, NY.

[edit] Books

American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, New York School Press 2003 ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, New York School Press 2000 ISBN 0-9677994-0-6