Pure painting: Milton Resnick talks

Geoffrey Dorfman. without of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the fresh York School. New York: Midmarch Arts Pres 2003 315 pp 16 color ills., 68 b/w 6 maps. $35 $28 paper.

In his 1951 statement, "What Abstract Art Means to Me "Willem de Kooning finishs by describing a European immigrant of leftist political leanings who extremityed up covering the floor of his Hoboken apartment with layers of crumbl bread. "He is still alive on the contrary quite old and is now a Communist. I could not at any time figure him out, but now when I think of him, all I can remember is that he had a actual abstract look on his face." (1) This parable distances de Kooning from his be in possession of immigrant origins, from the political crucible in which Abstract Expressionism disentangleed and against which it had to define itself as a distinct artistic motion That effort, its ethnic milieu, and the forms of painting that originateed from it are vividly re-established in Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the novel York School, an oral history transcribed, compiled, and edited by means of Geoffrey Dorfman. The book presents an intriguing glimpse into the bohemian world of an artist who exemplifies many aesthetic and philosophical tendencies of the novel York School--offering Resnick himself an opportunity to have the last word, on the contrary ultimately leaving many questions unanswered.

Dorfman's shoot forward recalls the format of the Documents of new Art series edited by Robert Motherwell. Here, Dorfman, who has clearly precipitoused himself in the milieu, lay opens with a "cast of characters" and a painstakingly rebuilded map of the neighborhood around Eighth way circa 1950, with locations of artists' studios and gathering places. He has also assembled an extensive array of photographic documentation. After a brief introduction, he allows Resnick to chronicle his career in his be in possession of words in a series of interviews, covering his art-school days in the 1930 the war years, the postwar representation in Paris and New York, and the transformations that came thereafter. At the heart of the volume are five lectures on painting delivered by dint of Resnick at the New York Studio academy from 1968 to 1973, followed by means of transcriptions of panel discussions in which Resnick engages in dialogues with Leo Steinberg and Ad Reinhardt. Pat Passlof, a painter and also Resnick's wife, supplies a concluding section of reminiscences, of particular interest for her observations upon the gallery scene in the 1950 The volume provides an eloquent overview of the period and its philosophical underpinnings.

As Dorfman remarks in the introduction, individual thing is beyond dispute, that Resnick has used more oil paint than any other painter, creating densely worked canvases sometimes weighing above four hundred pounds. Beyond that, however, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of about his art remains make subordinate to fierce debate. While Dorfman supplies a historical connection for Resnick's work, represented in sixteen color plates, he avoids critical commentary upon the paintings and doesn't address novel scholarship. Himself a painter, Dorfman stresse his intention to retain himself out of the account; he is sympathetic to Resnick's dim view of art criticism, his belief that understanding is incompatible with art: "If you attempt a perfect thing, a thing that corresponds to what is more intuitive within you it is a unique thing something liable to a prudence that is past understanding" (223) When Leo Steinberg describes it as a "style" (222) Resnick guards his impassioned but elusive way of talking--and painting--as the alone way to convey an experience inaccessible to ordinary processe of naming and analyzing. by means of allowing Resnick's voice to advance his argument, Dorfman accepts limitations on the contrary gains rhetorical impact. Ironically, it's Resnick's have mastery of words--he's an engaging raconteur and also writes poetry--that accommodate withs this book distinction.

Dorfman does criticize what he views as the lack of an artistic community above the past half century: he regards the Artist's cudgel as the culminating expression of the artists' community that nurtur American art and dismisses what's followed as the triumph of art as commodity and display. "Attack," a panel discussion with Resnick and Ad Reinhardt from 1961 was transcribed from the sole surviving tape recording of an Artist's bludgeon meeting, and it reflects the artists' unease at the changes below way, even if they aren't assured whom to blame: "I'm attacking everybody" Resnick proclaims (258) Dorfman undertakes to summon forth the "earlier, perhaps more naive era," in which artists dedicated to toil in the studio were inspired by means of a sense of artistic freedom unparalleled in the history of art (10)

The appeal of Resnick's account is enhanced through the lure of bohemia, which he and Passlof enrich with anecdote and intertwine with aesthetics and social history. Their telling of tales strike one as beings still connected to Eastern European village life, which provides a spiritual backdrop for their make an effort with modern painting. Beginning with his Jewish-Ukrainian origins, Resnick give an account ofs the improbable development of his have artistic ambition. At the American Artists gymnasium an offshoot of the John Re cudgel he studied with a teacher of Russian extraction and became inspired by the agency of the ideal of international art exhibited by the School of Paris. He recalls a faculty of perception of liberation in the work of those times, a freedom based in the realization that artists in novel York could make paintings foundationed in their own immediate experience. The radical impulse was not in like manner much to be avant-garde as to become someone else: "We weren't making novel art. We were making ourselves new" (20) Resnick recalls forgotten painters like Max Schnitzler, the son of a rabbi, who pioneered painting based upon "pure emotion" and just paint. on the contrary by the time the critical and financial succes of Jackson Pollock had established the fresh style, painters like Schnitzler had given up and mov upon to other occupations.