WILLIAM CORBETT: It’s 1954. He’d been an abstract painter for six or seven years, with a number of successful shows. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar, where he spoke in that Kline-ese that Frank O’Hara caught so beautifully in “Franz Kline Talking” (1958). He’d moved around, possibly rivaling Hokusai’s 734 addresses. When you see photographs of his homes, you see why Kline once said, “Bohemia is a place where a dog would go to die.”

This is a pretty big painting, at this time, but he was to paint bigger pictures. He was dead in 1962, but now he’s in his late 40s, maybe at the top of his game, though the money hadn’t yet come to him.

Let me go back: I said coming up here that one of my interests in Kline is extra-aesthetic. My early childhood was in East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which isn’t far from Lehighton, where Kline grew up. I was 12 in 1954 and didn’t know anything about him. But when I learned about him and saw his work in the early 1960s, I immediately recognized the landscape elements. I responded to those as if I’d come home in a way. Here you can find the train tracks he saw up and down the Lehigh River. I’m not saying he was trying to abstractly paint a landscape. I’m saying those things were so deep within him that they naturally came out when he picked up a brush.

This has associations with buildings, with timber and with scaffolding. A number of his pictures can be read that way. But I’m now seeing something I haven’t seen before: he has a number of paintings, such as Wotan (1950), where there’s an off or wobbly square. It’s starting to emerge here, and that will be a central image. He’ll clean this up in many cases, all that wonderful stuff, all that ideogrammatic stuff. He always said, “I don’t know anything about ideograms”; he liked to disassociate himself with that. And I believe him.

There’s also another quality that I associate with New York: the billboard size that he was moving toward, just like most of his contemporaries. Those guys went to the movies. They began to get a sense of scale. We know he worked from small things and blew them up with a Bell-Opticon projector. Imagine that he’s starting with intimate drawings — covering his studio floor, drawn on telephone book pages. And he’s blowing them up.

I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate the viewer in that immediacy, and then to make it happen in paint. A work like this, it seems to me, is absolutely recognizable, because it’s a clear, firsthand apprehension of a reality. That communicates to me.

These men, and the few women, liked to remind you that they were at work; you see the uncleaned drips. For Harold Rosenberg this was Action Painting. Alright, I get that, and I think that’s probably right. With Kline it’s a little bit different, because when you know the Bell-Opticon, the action’s over! But he’s doing something else. I think it’s like when I would first go to openings, in the early 1960s, the painters would come in with their clothes and their shoes all paint-stained. And, man, it always looked so hip.

It sends a message.

But I think there’s more: he wants to show that the work he put into this is part of his aesthetic. Not that he’s going to be praised as, “Oh, Franz, what a hard worker,” but for his notion of what could come at the end of a brush. It could be a splatter, or incomplete lines where the paint has run out of the brush. He also, I think, wanted to give a sense of the moment, make you feel present. As you pointed out, he used house paint and the image is now getting lost: it’s cracking, yellowing, it’s a conservator’s nightmare. In a way, I think it’s too bad that conservators feel compelled to restore this painting to what it was.

How’s that?

Well, just like de Kooning, he used house paint because he couldn’t then afford fine paint. But it means this painting is for the here and now. And I think that in the back of his mind he may have had the idea that it would change and move into a new here and now.

I think of Auden going back to his poems and second-guessing them, even famous ones like “September 1, 1939” (1939), changing lines because he thought better of them. I’m ambivalent about that. Did he think there would be a perfect poem? What about the poem in its moment? Didn’t it have the right to be there? I think we lose something by taking Kline’s paintings away from that original impulse. But I wrote a sequence of poems about Kline, and when I opened it again recently, and began to read again, I did an Audening and made a few corrections.

I remember these paintings fresh and new, and I’ve watched them age over time. I can hold that all in my mind. But if you think of the bohemian guy, living the life he did, painting in one studio after another, using house paint, it seems to be part of his aesthetic. It would age, absolutely — needing a kind of footnoting. Those footnotes would be a little like restoring this.

I think that about a lot: it’s hard to pull the former context up with you, and it’s hard to pull the present back into the past.

Absolutely, and it’s going to be hard. That’s part of the great pleasure of looking at art. Does it take us back there? This certainly takes me back to what was, after all, a black-and-white world: the photographs, the movies. You can imagine this being an aerial shot of the city in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It has the life of that moment.

I’m curious about the painting’s development, because some marks (such as the drips) reveal that it was turned upside down. Do you have any thoughts about why that is, or how that works in the image itself?

Well, I wonder where this was in his studio. As soon as you said that, I thought, OK, he didn’t frame this. This is probably by Robert Kulicke, as you can see by the small gap you see all around the edge. It’s modest, and it certainly puts the painting forward.

This looks like color in the center, some gray, which is unusual for him at this time. He didn’t come back to color until very late. And some of those paintings I find the least compelling. Or I’m torn. I can’t tell: is it because he didn’t know how to use color? Or is it because I’m so used to the moves he makes and want to see them in new combinations and permutations?

Now that we’re being more formal, I’m thinking that this is a spur-of-the-moment picture; but he got to an underpinning. That’s why the Opticon is so important. I think many people imagine that Kline pulled out the canvas and the brush and just whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! But you don’t see much under this, which is where the Bell-Opticon is. The casualness, the spontaneity, isn’t mocked, it’s not parodied, but he sees it as a start with a different ending. It’s not like de Kooning, where the approach is first to get it right and then fuck it up.

He also talked about the whites being as important and the blacks, which you can see in how they’re laid on with the white dripping out over the black at the top, or vice versa along the left edge. There’re also formal echoes between the white fields and black marks in places.

It’s the blacks that I always remember, but I wouldn’t see them without the whites, so they’re at least as important in that way. Form’s gotta have a ground. He’s right. We can’t ignore the great things he did on phone book pages. It’s obviously an issue of not having any money and using the materials at hand. And it’s black on shitty paper and over phone numbers. It’s a little bit like those monotypes that show up on de Koonings, like Easter Monday (1955-56), where the pictures on the newspaper are transferred into the paint. It’s another aspect of him that de Kooning influenced, and that touched everybody. De Kooning caught all that was going on in New York so profoundly that it was hard to look at it. People were drawn to those painters. I can’t think of too many painters that came out of Kline.

Well, Brice Marden perhaps, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker — painters who work at that synthesis of painting and drawing you talked about earlier. I think you could describe them as being indebted to Kline.

Yes, indebted, but indebted for what? What kind of effect did these have? I think that part of the reason why they didn’t follow him is that he takes care of all the possibilities he opens for the viewer. What you’re inspired to with this painting is that, Jesus Christ, if he can do that then I’ll do exactly what I can do. I’ll feel free. Because, again, in a world of color, he’s reminding us that black and white are colors. In a world of Action Painting, he’s putting the word “action” in quotes. This is more radical in some ways. And radical art, of course, can spawn any number of minions.

And think of the one-of-a-kind things he did: no one’s gonna come up with a phone book page after Kline, unless you’re using it ironically, or you’re doing it in such a way that it becomes part of the work.

Right, that it’s for Kline or it’s quoting him very directly.

We’ve touched on this a little already, but I wonder if you could talk about how this space affects the painting or how you feel the painting affects the surrounding space.

I’m aware of the room. I’ve been coming to the Modern since about 1959. I was young and knew very little, and I got educated here. I believed the story, and then I began to discover that it’s just a story. Maybe it’s a necessary narrative. Walking in it now is like picking up the books of poets I’ve loved: I’ve read them so much, but at times I’m a little tired of them. Other times I want that pang, want to be back there. And every once in awhile something knocks me out.

I usually don’t look at them as long as I’m looking at this. And this painting, as so often, is growing on me. This is across from a Barnett Newman and you have Helen Frankenthaler here, and near Mark Rothko, de Kooning — all people he knew. Rather than being frozen, this is part of a bigger story.

I wonder what this looked like in Kline’s studio, or in a home, what it first looked like in a gallery. Now it’s ensconced. Has it lost something because of that? Inevitably. I’m sure it affects you. But that’s what a museum does. And in this case I’m standing with this at my left and the Newman at my right; that might not happen in another place.

I wonder how his art — or this painting in particular — finds its way into the work that you do.

I wrote that sequence of poems about Kline and I know a lot about him. I have the background of Lehighton. The paintings are in my head, and I like writing documentary poems. It was fun. There were so many words that kept coming up: suave, and the black of the tuxedo’s lapel. I also wrote a suite, around the same time, to de Kooning. I keep on wondering if I’ll get another one out of somebody. Joan Mitchell keeps coming up. So first of all, there’s the viewer literally inspired by an attempt to get some of that from it. For me, as somebody who loves paintings without knowing why he loves them, and still loves them and the study of them, and wants to know more about the artist, it’s their example, in every way.

One of the things I always like to know, and is a dream for me, is how you get the compositional elements — all that flurry and hurry and bustle — into something that can come up just in the sound of words or the juxtaposition of images. Words seem to insist upon a kind of linear meaning, especially if that poetry comes through the ear as well as the eye. As I wrote about Kline and his work, it often came through finding something that got me writing about art in the beginning. James Schuyler very modestly said, “I just wanted to know what it was like to use words to describe things.” I want that, too. And this gives us new possibilities. We thought of the railroad tracks, the city aspects, the calligraphy, the scaffolding. Those become words, and it’s not just what’s there, it’s what’s here, inside you. For the reader, it’s something to give them the sense of standing here now, the delight I feel in talking about it at this minute. But it also opens it up, so that they could internalize that.

I guess that there’s something else, too. I’ve certainly spent more hours seeing movies, and now television, than I have looking at paintings. What’s the difference? Well, there is a hand involved in this and I’m always aware of it. We’re aware of it from the drips. I can see a person here; I can imaging those studios.

You can see the motion of the hand and the gestures it’s making.

Absolutely. There’s also something here that’s generational, I guess: the first painting I saw that really said to me “This could be yours” was an abstract picture. It pissed my parents off, just like listening to jazz did. It certainly separated me from the world I grew up in. But it turned me on in ways I couldn’t figure out. There are things that choose you just as much as you choose them.

As a poet and an art writer, you hope it’s still out there, and that you don’t get to bottom of it. The stuff you get to the bottom of never finds its way into your work. And if it does, you’ve gotta get over it and get out of it.

One of the things I miss in this picture and that I really love is his signature. Kline had one of the great signatures, that blocky, stick-fingered print. It always moves me. I wonder why he didn’t sign it…

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April 2 to May 9, 2015
529 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 9666

Julian Hatton’s painting seems to have been focused for some time on the contention that abstraction, if allowed to breathe in a deeper pictorial space, can maintain visual opulence without drifting too far from its essentially two-dimensional syntax. Among a generation of artists who matured on this side of painting’s pluralist expansion, where each painter’s style, look and touch was far more varied than that of their canonic New York School predecessors, Hatton held to a loose figurative scaffold based on landscape elements both perceived and imagined. Though the iconography in this recent work remains readable — each painting’s horizon is still easy to find — there is, in newer panels such as trouble and scrim (both 2015), a softening of the edges and a swelling of forms that now shimmer behind translucent washes instead of bending, as they once did, into each other’s space. From an optimal distance — coerced from the viewer by the five-foot spread of their frames — their reconfigured cohesion seems to rely less on drawing and more on a spontaneous manipulation of hue and texture.

The resulting airiness is a clear departure from his earlier work, which is reprised in this exhibition by trio (2012-13), an example of his harder-edged shapes, apparently reconstituted during the painting’s many stages of development so as not to diminish the careful co-ordinating of its unique structural invention. To drift from the success of this method is risky, for what’s been so appealing about Hatton’s work until now has been precisely its interconnected complexity. The changes seen in this exhibition may be attributed in some measure to his establishing a new studio in upstate New York. Like Bonnard in the south of France, Ellsworth Kelly in Chatham or de Kooning in East Hampton, a move from city to country will, for reasons not always linked to the landscape itself, reset a painter’s perspective.

A clue to the path taken in this shift between the earlier compositions and these newer, cloudier apparitions may be found in imprint (2014-15), a five-foot-square panel representing the artist’s trials at keeping the structure fixed tighter to the surface. Here, a familiarity with Hatton’s elevated horizon line helps the viewer read the ghost of a landscape that still exists despite the missing diagonals and story-book trees of his earlier work — elements that had once supported Hatton’s penchant for excavating spatial illusion with little cost to a lively surface. Imprint marks the change as its simplified shapes are not immediately recognizable as landscape elements. They also seem unusually tolerant of each other’s position in the composition.

And yet warbler (2014-15), to my eye the most adventurous of the newer canvases in the show, still owes something to the lexicon of the earlier work, though here it seems Hatton’s method has turned to a new and pronounced improvisation. warbler’s surface remains in an agitated state. Not a single section of color is truly resolved. Edges are ragged and makeshift. Translucency dominates. There is even a gestural coarseness replacing what was once a controlled chaos of endlessly suggestive shapes. The color alone in Warbler provides the link to earlier work, being mostly middle tones of contingent primary and secondary hues.

For anyone who has followed Hatton’s work these many years, an effort to catch up to where he is now will require diligence, which I believe is a fair expectation for him to make as his paintings have always appealed to a visually smart audience. Because his abundant inventiveness had constituted as near a legible pictorial language as created by any painter in recent memory, encountering its contraction will demand a real and unavoidable learning curve. The fact that Warbler takes pride of place on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue seems more than a hint that he is unlikely to turn back. Hatton is a painter whose strength had always been his ability to develop variations on a theme. The construction of an intelligent, readable and teasingly ambiguous pictorial image, even in this new looser style, still speaks to a continuity of vision.

Hatton has never been a painter fixated on concocting a new look, and there is no indication here of chasing novelty, nor is there any hint of applying arbitrary effects to avoid comparison with contemporaries. From the beginning his work has been a conscious adaptation of landscape elements knit tightly into compositions that owed a great deal of their cohesion to those compositional properties that as any instructor knows are maddeningly difficult to formulate verbally but can be appreciated in its many variations from the mature Nicolas Poussin to the early Richard Diebenkorn. As art fairs continue to hawk brightly colored things apparently meant for the simpler aim of accessorizing the expansive blank walls that once provided inexpensive working space for New York’s artists, it gives one hope to watch a painter keep to self-imposed limitations, not in spite of, but because there is more than enough room within a rectangle of canvas to address a thoughtful and historically aware sensibility.

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Milton Resnick deserves recognition greater than what he has received until now. This large show of work covering his entire career, presented in immaculate galleries at the epic-sized Mana Contemporary arts complex in Jersey City, goes a considerable distance to recognizing Resnick’s contributions. 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. At this fine show we have much of his oeuvre in a single place, where his contribution can be assessed from the vista of his entire career for the first time. Photos of his pictures cannot do justice to the rough but exquisite surfaces he came to paint over the decades of his efforts; 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. In fact, the Mana show makes it clear that we have missed integrating Resnick’s art into the accomplishments of the New York School’s first generation. His gifts, from the early colorful efforts to the final depressive, but marvelously rough paintings accompanied by simple figures, clearly need to be organized within a revised understanding of the art of his time.

It is surprising to see Resnick as a somewhat neglected painter, in large part because he was so much in the thick of things in New York. Born in 1917 in Bratslav, Ukraine, Resnick immigrated to New York in 1922 with his parents, where the family took up residence in Brooklyn. He took art classes at Hebrew Technical Institute, Pratt and the American Artist’s School between 1929 and 1934. Unfortunately, his father disapproved of his studies in art and forced him to leave the family’s home. He began a relationship with Elaine Fried around 1935, but she left him for Willem de Kooning in 1938. During the Depression he worked for the WPA and he served in the US Army during the Second World War. Afterward, he became a founding member of the Artist’s Club and was friendly with Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and de Kooning himself.

In 1948, Resnick met and later married Pat Passlof, a fellow painter, and traveled to Europe, but he was unable to paint there due to emotional difficulties. He returned to New York and in 1951 he helped organize the noted “Ninth Street Show.” At the beginning of the 1970s, Passlof and Resnick separated, with Resnick living in the upstate New York town Rifton. Max Hutchison Galley began showing his work in 1972, and continued to through the early ‘80s. In 1975, he and Passlof reconciled. In 1984, after decades of abstraction, he started to incorporate figurative imagery in his work. By 2000, Resnick had begun suffering from arthritis, which made it impossible for him to stand and paint, though he continued to work on paper. Then, in March 2004, distressed over his illness and his difficulties working, he took his life at home in New York. Resnick was recognized by the New York art world, but never to the extent to which his contemporaries gained fame.

Resnick’s art realized a considerable amount, both graphically in the overall gestalt of the painting and, as he developed, texturally in the surface of his art. Even early paintings by Resnick display great perspicacity. An untitled oil on board from 1946 nicely demonstrates how sophisticated a painter he was even before turning 30. In this small work, we see some of de Kooning’s influence, his organic forms echoed in Resnick’s work of this time. Biomorphic yellow, purple, black and red forms, along with two small, green squares, embellish an off-white ground, communicating a lyric experience to Resnick’s audience. This poetic tone never entirely leaves; it remains even when he starts to paint according to a darker vision.

Resnick’s art throughout evinces a thorough interest in surface; and this becomes clearer as time goes on. During the 1970s and ‘80s he began making exceptionally rough, striated exteriors, nearly minimal in appearance. In a very large (more than 10 feet long), untitled work of 1975, the application of paint is deliriously thick, building up and off the canvas to the point of low relief. The color of this horizontal painting, an olive green with hints of yellow underneath, shows us that his gifts included experimentation with color in highly original ways. Here Resnick exhibits his talent for understated color, as well as his penchant for an impasto surface. Melancholy in feeling, the painting’s muted hues bear an ongoing, and deeply moving, emotional stance. Straws in the Wind II (1981), another big, horizontal painting, continues the artist’s interest in a heavy build-up in paint; its color, a dark charcoal listing toward black, is dense with excrescences, adds a heightened tangibility to its roughened surface.

One finds these works embracing gloominess in the 1980s, and the emotional register of his work remains substantially the same for the rest of his career, being oriented toward a dark, emotional palette. The show also makes it clear that the figure entered into Resnick’s paintings late in his career. In one 30-by-40-inch canvas from 1989 we see him playing with imagistic art: two dark, blue and flesh-colored figurative forms occupy the middle of the painting. However, they could equally be read as abstractions in the midst of a highly original, sharply idiosyncratic black ground. One seeks, mostly unsuccessfully, an outlet enabling escape from the gravitas of the picture, which offers a relentless surface and small room for egress. The painting’s bleak mood would be repeated again and again in the late paintings Resnick made.

Likely the most pertinent fact about Resnick is his emotional intensity. But even as his pictures communicate his drift into depression, you can see him working hard on a tangible surface that remains a statement about art rather than a personal treatment of his psychology. The paintings, both early and late, are so consistently high in their achievement, they must be seen as representative of a major artist.

One hesitates to ascribe too much of a psychological reading on seeing a body of work by a man whose tragic end is difficult to accept; however, such an interpretation might well describe the general tenor of his output, difficult as it is. 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. Resnick lived his artistic life under the shadow of more famous painters, but that fact should not be allowed to diminish his ambition and his reach. Indeed, his accomplishments are not to be denied; his paintings expand the spectrum of the Abstract Expressionists who used paint as a physical entity, artists such as Pollock and de Kooning. In the thicket of his surfaces, we see the AbEx demand that we look at paint simply as paint, so that the surface is neither given to narration nor to intellectual content. It is what it is. At the same time, we do not do justice to Resnick if we walk away from some sense of a personal presence in his pictures. 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.

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