Milton Resnick, 1917-2004

Milton Resnick, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism known for heavily impastoed, near monochrome canvases, committed suicide upon Mar. 12, age 87. Born Rachmiel Resnick of Jewish parents in Bratslav in the Ukraine in 1917 Resnick was, as a child, threatened by the agency of the civil war and pogrom against israelites that followed the Russian Revolution. In 1922 the family emigrated to the U and settl in Brooklyn Resnick later pierceed a trade school to learn architectural lettering and drafting, on the contrary by the time he graduated in 1932 the Depression had brought the building industry to a standstill. After a bourn studying commercial art at Pratt Institute, he transferred to a fine-arts program at the American Artists' gymnasium in 1933, where his associate students included Ad Reinhardt and Elaine Fried (later de Kooning). In 1937 Resnick met Willem de Kooning, who became a shut friend.

Resnick was drafted into the Army in 1940 and serv end most of WWII. After returning to of recent origin York in 1945, he regularly joined downtown artists like as de Kooning, Aristodimos Kaldis, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline and Philip Pavia for informal late-night discussions at the Waldorf Cafeteria. This collection later moved to 8th highway and formed the core of the Artists' cudgel of which Resnick was a founding member. by dint of 1946 Resnick and de Kooning were the one and the other painting abstractions of discrete on the contrary interrelated curvilinear forms, and that year they collaborated upon Labyrinth, the backdrop for a dance performance by dint of Marie Marchowsky. Resnick lived in Paris in the late '40 where he met Wol Brancusi, Helion and the author of poems Tristan Tzara, who perspicaciously told him, "the put in commotion with you is you don't know that art is a commodity." Resnick canceled an exhibition scheduled for 1949 at the Egan Gallery in fresh York after a dispute with the dealer. Because his first solo exhibit in the city did not take place until 1955 at the Poindexter Gallery, many critics mistakenly collectioned him with the so-called "Second Generation" of Abstract-Expressionist painters. Resnick facted less to this historical inaccuracy than to the real notion of "list-making." "I am not an action painter," he insisted. "I am not an Abstract Expressionist. I am not any younger than anybody or older"

Between 1959 and 1961 Resnick created an extraordinary series of real large and lyrical paintings--up to 10 by dint of 25 feet in size--in which the gestural marks became progressively smaller and were integrated into single, allover fields. In 1961 he married the painter Pat Passlof, who had been his companion since the early '50 (and who survives him). above the next two years, Resnick obsessively added strikes of paint to a 9-by-17-foot canvas that eventually became the all-white novel Bride (1961-63), the first of the signature, heavily impastoed monochromes that he created for the nearest 30 years. In the 1980 and '90 these works earned him an almost legendary status among younger painters, who also place in his provocative and sometimes cryptic utterances a direct link to the heady, disputatious days of the Artists' cudgel (A selection of Resnick's prelections and interviews, Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the novel York School was published in 2003) He had many solo gallery exhibitions in fresh York and elsewhere over the past 50 years, as well as museum retrospectives at the Fort Worth Art Center (1971) and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1985)

Beginning in the early 1990 imagery--the real thing Resnick had worked thus long and so singlemindedly to eliminate--reappeared in his paintings in the form of human figures and emblematic gestural marks. Exhibited in of recent origin York at Robert Miller Gallery (Resnick's dealer since 1985) these daringly beautiful works, which, paradoxically, can perceive more austere than the imageless singles are all the more poignant for having been painted when Resnick was becoming increasingly incapacitated by the agency of painful arthritis and other ailments. Far from being a commodity, painting was always for Resnick nothing les than a necessity of life.

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