The weekend of September 15/16 sees the official opening of the restored former residence of Milton Resnick as the home of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation. This historic synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has in fact been open, in preview mode, since July with an inaugural show of Resnick’s painting from 1937 to 1987. The building restoration, overseen by Ryall Sheridan Architects, was made possible by the sale of Passlof’s nearby studio-home, coincidentally another former synagogue. Passlof will be the subject of the Foundation’s second exhibition, in 2019. To welcome the Foundation to New York’s cultural life, artcritical offers this selection from our archives of coverage of Resnick and Passlof over the years.

July 11th, 2014
Man Out of Time: Milton Resnick at Mana Contemporary
by Jonathan Goodman

October 10th, 2011
Maelstrom Gathering Energy: Milton Resnick in the Seventies and Eighties
by Eric Sutphin

June 15th, 2008
Milton Resnick at Cheim & Read
by David Cohen

March 1st, 2005
Milton Resnick (1917-2004)
by Geoffrey Dorfman

May 1st, 2004
Out of the Picture – Milton Resnick and the New York School
by Joseph Walentini

November 15th, 2011
Pat Passlof, 1928-2011
by David Cohen

The post The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation Opens Its Doors appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Man Out of Time: Milton Resnick at Mana Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

The world has lost a truly remarkable painter in Pat Passlof, who died on Sunday on the eve of a new exhibition of her work. Equally it has lost a very special human being.  A kindly curmudgeon, old school in the depth of her solidarity with others and the forthrightness of criticism when it needed to be expressed, Passlof was utterly indefatigable in her generosity, whether as a teacher, a widow, a Tai Chi companion, or indeed a painter.  We sometimes forget how generous painting can be because the making of it has such antisocial requirements.  In Passlof’s case, generosity comes across in the way her images are constituted equally of integrity and finesse: brimful of beauty, but uncompromising in rigor and resolution.  Her art and life were a yin and yang balance of opposites.

Pat Passlof was born in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1928.  She sought out the tutelage of Willem de Kooning, enrolling at Black Mountain College expressly to study with him, then presenting herself as a private student and assistant in his studio back in New York.  It was through de Kooning that she met her husband Milton Resnick.  One of the contradictions of Pat’s life was that she could be devoted to Milton’s art and ideas – and later his legacy – to the self-effacement of her own artistic achievements while also being a pioneer in the feminist art movement.  With Sylvia Sleigh and Ce Roser, Passlof was one of the originating artists in the landmark feminist exhibition, “Women Choosing Women,” organized by Lucy Lippard at the New York Cultural Center in 1973.

When, as gallery director of the New York Studio School, I approached Pat with the idea of doing a show of her work I was steered instead in the direction of Milton’s last works which the School was incredibly privileged to present (the guest curator was Mor Pipman) but it was a source of regret not to have shown Pat’s figure drawings, along with Milton’s, which had been my original preference.  The artists went back to drawing from the figure late in pioneering careers as abstract painters, with startling results.

I was able, however, to express my feelings for Passlof’s mature abstract paintings in a catalog essay for the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in 2005.  My concluding paragraphs are offered here by way of tribute:

However much her gestures and textures are emotionally articulate, and her surfaces are rich and resonant, Passlof is not an expressionist in the traditional sense of emoting through paint, of the brush being some kind of a geyser to her soul. Patterning, in particular, militates against any kind of self-satisfied ejaculatory mark.  And yet, equally, she is no slave of systems: grids, patterns, and repetitions have nothing to do with the formalist’s color field or the minimalist addiction to the serial.  Her painting is an assured, fluent balance of gesture and composition.

The grid has the effect of decelerating gesture, passifying it through deliberation, context, ordering.  It also, of course, slows down the way we absorb these images, although ironically, in the very act of doing so, it forces us to savor interconnection and wholeness—that’s to say, has us take in the image as a unity

The great formal achievement of these lush, resonant paintings is that they set up a rapprochment between expressivity and decoration without allowing one to compromise the other.  Gesture is a conduit for energy, and keeps the surfaces lively, while pattern aligns emotion to a spiritually enlarging conception of form.

Passlof died after a lengthy battle with cancer, in her 83rd year. Her funeral service will be held at the Boe Fook Funeral Home on Canal Street (entrance 5 Ludlow Street) on Friday, November 18 at 10 AM.

And her exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery opens Saturday, November 19, 3-6 pm at 529 West 20th Street, and continues through December 23.

 

The post Pat Passlof, 1928-2011 appeared first on artcritical.

Milton Resnick: The Elephant in the Room places a spotlight on paintings from the 1970s and ‘80s that show Resnick in some of his purest painting moments.  These large-scale, near monochrome, intensely physical, assertive paintings yield infinite depth to the patient viewer.  In a recent article in Art in America magazine the painter David Reed recounts his years under Resnick’s tutelage, quoting the first generation Abstract Expressionist as saying “it’s over for us, something else must be done. We didn’t make it, learn from our failure”. Resnick lamented the death of Jackson Pollock and the waning camaraderie surrounding the movement with an air of defiance and determination to pull from the rubble a pure vision emptied of “isms” and the trappings of taste.

As Cheim and Read’s show makes clear, Resnick’s efforts at attaining an art free from form and style was dirty and laborious business. These deeply emotional canvases present bewilderingly dense surfaces in which energy feels trapped, pulsing beneath craggy mountains and cavernous pools of oil paint.  Defying the grand gestures of Resnick’s earlier work, seen in the 2008 show at the same gallery, Resnick has used the build up and excavation of his repetitive surfaces as his vehicle towards a kind of painfully earthbound painting imbued with palpable reverence to the medium.  Accounts of Resnick’s personality reveal something of a curmudgeon, the kind of teacher who would smear flawed areas of his students’ work, although usually at the service of the painting.  He promoted the obliteration of image and the liberation of paint, to “let the paint do the talking.”

Lightness of touch is gone, as loose handling is eschewed in favor of dutifully executed, plaster-like finishes.  The canvases are not all callused, however, as some are almost even in surface, allowing their smoky color to become velvety. Untitled (1988)recalls Swan (1961), the massive action painting that dominated the 2008 exhibition.  Smaller than most works in the current show, the 1988 work present a cool, lunar surface is in a state of unrest.  The painting is neutral in overall color though remnants of vibrant color defy total austerity.  There is a sense of a slow, forceful swirling motion, like a maelstrom gathering energy. Resnick’s tenet that a painting should incur all energy but not release it is perhaps most evident in this work.

Pure force is contained within the crusty blistered surfaces as they try to resist Resnick’s rage and ecstasy.  The endless depths of paint lead to a confrontational and impenetrable impasto that confronts and compels the viewer.  With even the most archaic form is purged and any reference to external influence is ostensibly denied.

Straws (1982) seems like a glimpse back to the 1960s and a foreshadowing of the 1990s. The paint is splattered in a repetitively downward gesture over a characteristically blistered surface.  The surface is broken into three primary colors: teal, rust and earth green.  Resnick provides more breathing room in this particular work, one of several early 1980’s paintings with this title. Cosmological blue light glows below the encrusted surface.  This painting is all emotion, anguish and heaviness.  The stoic flat surfaces of the prior decades begin to yield to modulated color.  Amorphous masses of earth color float in an amniotic greenish blue like zygotes of the archaic figures that would materialize in the next decade.

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.  This seemingly willful suppression of gesture and color yields the anxiety and tension that animates this phase of Resnick’s career, anticipating twenty further years of painterly evolution.

The post Maelstrom Gathering Energy: Milton Resnick in the Seventies and Eighties appeared first on artcritical.

Joe Fyfe, a painter known for his stark, almost belligerently informal abstraction, is also a critic and curator (and a contributing editor at artcritical).  In “Le Tableau,” a geographically and historically wide-angled summer group exhibition at Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery that he has organized, Fyfe pugnaciously shakes by its horns the francophobia of the American critical establishment. The show pairs contemporary practitioners from both sides of the pond known for their almost semiotic interrogations of a painting’s support with 1950s and ‘60s “tachistes,” as the French liked to call their abstract expressionists: Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, and that quietly lyrical genius of sumptuous tones, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff. These guys were big names at the time. But while they continue to command a loyal collector base in France, where they are often found in the concluding room of regional fine art museums, they are completely marginal to the official history of post war art promoted in the United States. Such “old masters” rub shoulders with Paris-friendly yanks such as Joan Mitchell, who resided in the city of lights for much of her time, and Milton Resnick. The result of Fyfe’s revisionist experiment is, quite apart from its critical or historical validity, both a tactile and a visual orgy of raw textures, smeared impastos, and punctured supports. Until September 3, 547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-242-7727.

A version of this article, accompanied by a work of Serge Poliakoff’s, appeared at the New York Sun, June 28, 2010

The post Orgy in the Raw: Joe Fyfe’s “Le Tableau” at Cheim & Read appeared first on artcritical.

A late starter or a painter ahead of his time? An earnest also-ran or a prickly, enigmatic genius? Too sensual or too hermetic? Milton Resnick was a first generation abstract expressionist fated — in his lifetime, at least — to elude the canon of that defining 20th Century American art movement.

And the legacy of this artist, who died in 2004, is still up for grabs, although if any show will persuade waiverers of his sumptuous lyricism and high purpose, it is the stunning display of work from the period 1959-63 at Cheim & Read. This is the first show at this gallery since it assumed representation of his estate earlier this year.

That Resnick knew everyone yet went against the grain is a contradiction that makes sense of the heady, romantic, existentialist milieu of which he was so indicative a figure. Born in the Ukraine in 1917, he fled the Russian Civil War as a child with his family, heading to Brooklyn via Cuba, and was thrown out of his father’s house when he determined to become a painter. A strikingly handsome man, eloquent, poetic, tortuously self-questioning yet fiercely critical and didactic, he could have been the hero out of a Russian novel.

His career was certainly prone to bad luck — he was too poor to keep any of his Depression-era paintings; military service kept him out of New York in what were breakthrough years for his peers; he lost everything from his productive, postwar period in Paris; a dishonest dealer nixed his first solo show, which was to have been around the same time as his intimate friend Willem de Kooning’s. That his debut had to wait until 1955 made him look, on paper, like a second generation AbExer rather than the pioneer he actually was.

In a way, however, the artist’s attitude towards the art scene was as decisive as any career quirks. He was genuinely more concerned with authentic discovery than producing a look, conforming to the ethics of “action painting” while dismissing the term and the intentions of the critic who coined it, Harold Rosenberg. That neither his personality nor stance lent themselves to critical champions accounts for, perhaps, though does not excuse, his exclusion from “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” now at the Jewish Museum.

Resnick was equally ambivalent about “abstract expressionism” even while titling a 1959 canvas “Abstract Expression.” When commercial and institutional success started to gather round his circle he left New York for a teaching stint in California. It was indeed only in the 1960s and ’70s that Resnick discovered his characteristic idiom in near-monochrome, all-over, often very dark, heavily impastoed cavases — formal qualities that again distanced him from the gestural and figural origins of abstract expressionism.

The Cheim & Read show hones in upon a crucial, transitional phase in Resnick’s development, a frenetic prelude to the contained energies of his mature style, the latter signaled by his seminal “Wedding” (1962), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum. His work from 1945, when he was demobilized, through the next 10 years, struggled to find their way around the influence of Arshile Gorky and de Kooning, though they are forceful, gutsy, muscular, sometimes wilfully awkward. “Burning Bush” (1959) is key work, lent by the Museum of Modern Art to this show, that signals a distinctive touch and attitude. It is a swirling, romantic composition, physically and chromatically dense. The surface is turbulent but seems built up from slow, determined agitations rather than grandiloquent gestures.

This painterliness is at once a departure from his peers and a reminder of the heritage of European easel painting from Rembrandt to Soutine, figures who often come to mind in Resnick’s late work with its return to primitive, schematic representation. The sumptuous distress of “Burning Bush” is also strongly redolent of the resurgent expressionism of the 1980s, of painters like Per Kirkeby, John Walker and Thérèse Oulton.

Resnick’s agitated brush indicates both his radicalism and his conservatism in relation to his AbEx peers — conservative because a sensuality and an awareness of the nuance of painterliness ground him within European tradition. Agitation has the effect of complicating the picture surface and undermining big, macho markmaking and trademark composition building. In a funny way it relates to the fiddly, fussy “noodling” of Jasper Johns at the same historic moment, without that artist’s deconstructive intent. Similarly, when Resnick moved into monochrome in a landmark paintings, the monumental, 17-1/2-foot wide greenish-white “New Bride” (1963) now in the Smithsonian (reproduced in the catalog though not in the show, and discussed by Nathan Kernan in his perceptive essay there) his handling looked like, though occupying a different painting culture, work by Robert Ryman from around the same time.

“AS.2” (1959), a six-and-a-half foot square canvas, is made from fiercely scribbled brushmarks of varying bright colors, thickness and degrees of wet or dry. The white of the primed canvas shows through these loose, almost autonomous marks, but there is more of a sense of texture than line in these nervous, frenetic marks. There is an unusually strong sense of landscape structure to this image, and its voluptuous stress, like that of “Tilt to the Land” of the same year, recalls late work by Pierre Bonnard.

The gallery is dominated by a truly monumental canvas, “Swan” (1961), that is a bewildering fusion of detail and whole, built from a lexicon of jolts, dabs, drips and swirls that sweep across a canvas almost 23 feet wide. Its energy is in tune with the agitated painterliness of the 1959 canvases with which it shares the show, but its all-overness and near monochrome, dispatched in purplish blues and near-blacks on a forcefully represented white ground, anticipate the impasto of the mature works that would soon follow.

“Swan” bears comparison with Henri Michaux, whose work Resnick might have known during his Paris period, and Wols, Resnick’s German painter friend there, much more than it does the obvious point of reference, Jackson Pollock. This is because although there are calligraphic and notational elements to some of the marks in this amazing painting, line is not granted autonomy or presented in a dichotomy with the ground. As was said of Pollock, so could be said of this work by Resnick, that it is “energy made visible.”

There is a weird sense of a form searing its way through the canvas, from left to right, an accumulation of atomic energy boiling up the space it penetrates, making it a Monet for the nuclear age. It almost becomes tempting to read the image in cartoon-like graphic terms, or like a Futurist depiction of movement, despite its resolute abstraction. Doing so helps bridge the divide between this romantic abstractionist and a Pop artist like James Rosenquist (no stranger he to scale, decenteredness, and distilled energy). This surprising admirer of Resnick’s said of him, in 1982, that “His work is fierce, poetic, and full of energy. In fact, he’s one of those who’s turned energy into an ethical human value.”

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 29, 2008 under the heading “Milton Resnick Was an AbEx Pioneer”

The post Milton Resnick at Cheim & Read appeared first on artcritical.

These remarks were delivered by Geoffrey Dorfman at a memorial for Milton Resnick held at St. Marks in the Bowerie on March 12, 2005. Other speakers on that occasion were Ed Rudolph, David Reed, Todd Granzow (ready by Jim Young) John Ittner, Nathan Kernan, Sherman Drexler, Jerome Rothenberg (read by Mark Weiss), Bob Hauge, Pat Passlof, Jake Berthot, Vija Celmins, Ray Spillenger, Sandy Brooke, Frances Barth, Gigi Meyer, and Bob Tannen, with Ralph Martin acting as master of ceremonies. The “booklet” to which Mr. Dorfman refers is a 112 page anthology of remarks and tributes to Resnick from some of the many people touched by his personality, teaching and work.

When initially helping Pat (Passlof) to put this booklet together, which as you can see has become a real book, I was amazed by how much everyone else had to say that squares with my own memories, how emotional it all is, how genuine, and that’s made me feel this less as a personal loss. I feel closer to the people here through Milton’s death, and the consequent collection of memories which would have never flown together as long as he breathed, make it seem we all share quite a lot, really — whether we acknowledge it or not, and one of the things we share is this man.

***

The first thing that occurs to me is Milton’s contradictions, a magus and a hard ass, a loner and a giver, a powder keg with a sense of irony, a mistruster of words who used them well, a thinker without a formal education, a sensualist in the form of an ascetic, an anarchist and a war veteran, and these opposites began to resolve themselves the more you knew him, the more Milton became himself in front of you..

The music that has been playing is from Kovantschina by Moussorgsky. It was some of of Milton’s favorite music. He liked Russian music; Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Scriabin. Fierce, passionate music, much, but not all of it Russian, as he was.

I never heard any music in his studio. There were no diversions in the studio – the cocoon, the house of art, the place where it happened. Everything else was everything else, ie. beside the point. He perceived rhythm as he did sex and booze, as a societal seduction of the senses and therefore a diversion from the true concern of an artist, with a capital A. When Milton started to teach, and that’s one of the real contradictions, because if he didn’t have to, he would not have taught, and therefore he probably would not have met many of you, or me for that matter, – but when he began to teach regularly in the 1960’s and 70’s he heard the rock music constantly in the halls and studios, sensed the heightened stimulation, the hormones raging, the war threatening, the drugs beckoning, the unease of the those who were not children anymore, but not really men and women either. And he saw art getting marginalized.

Because he had gone through the experience of his own generation, and witnessed the premature termination of their aspirations in a haze of smoke, and drink, he cautioned young artists. Because he realized, and indeed – never stopped talking about – the anxiety of making art; that you were involved in an activity that may have no end, where your every acquisition was provisional and probably discardable, and where the more you proceeded, the less fit you were for anything else: the less fit you were to run a business, the less fit you were to work for anyone else, the less fit you were to be a parent, the less fit you were to lead, the less fit you were to follow, and even the less fit you were to teach!

Like Balzac’s Frenhoffer, who said that “too much knowledge leads to a negation,” you began to get the uneasy feeling that the innocent love of art that came to you as a child was developing into something serious, and the energy was a nervous energy, and you began to have the uneasy premonition that you were actually gambling with your life. You’d feel this when the picture began to appear. The excitement provoked the thought of an exit, to take a walk, to turn on some music, maybe eat, get a cup of coffee, seek out conversation – anything to alleviate the confrontation. And it was this anxiety that permeated every stroke of the brush on your canvas, that made you seek relief and diversion, and turned you away from your task.

Your task, as Milton saw it, was to do something wonderful, to maybe become something wonderful, because that might be a necessary precondition for the former, and that by these means you would either live forever or, of course, go on with your pathetic self-deception. And no amount of rejection or acceptance by the world was going to change that. That’s where he came in, where his wisdom came in. And it didn’t hurt that here was this wonderful, fierce person imparting it. He would tell you his Reznikoff story, how in the late 1920’s Gorky had met Mischa on the street and told him he was too scared to return to his studio. Would Mischa accompany him back? He was too frightened to look at what he had done by himself. And on his easel was a little picture with some apples. And in this story you would recognize your own thoughts, or at least find a place for them in the experience of another. And that was what art was, perhaps. That what we are on to may seem personal, perhaps at times even private, but that we are not doing that. That important art does not do that. And implicit in this idea of, for lack of a better word, we can call ‘the universal,’ we become a community, even though for the most part we rarely, if ever, act as one. Perhaps we are acting as one today.

Milton tilted towards the universal, something prelapsarian, a place without time, but unlike Eden, perilous, perhaps a presentiment of death, impartial but with its own specificity. He was onto this before he painted those paintings that he later became known for. I quote from a talk he gave at NYU in 1960; a time when he was leaving behind some of the buccaneer aspects of Abstract Expressionism. ” I think it’s more exciting to know what’s on the other side of the moon. If excitement isn’t necessarily a part of art, then that’s all right too. I can imagine an art that would have an innocuous surface where you don’t see anything at all of interest; you wouldn’t dream of looking at it with any idea that it could knock you over or have any power or anything, and then slowly you can begin to read into it all kinds of wonderful, imaginative things that you can see in it, and that could be a very marvelous form of art. I don’t know who does it. I think most artists in the last fifty years have been impressed more by art that has a way of attracting you to it to begin with; whether it lasts for very long or not doesn’t matter. There are some artists who feel it’s just the first look that counts and then, after that, you’re bound to lose interest anyway. But there are those of us that think art ought to be more complicated.”

I think I’m on pretty safe ground in arguing that Milton is already starting to have a presentiment of the art that he will come to make; the kind of artist and man that he will become; his way and also his role. I use the word, ‘role’ because he played a part in the world of art that the art-world refuses to acknowledge. And his role may be easier to write out of the script in death than in life. I’m not only talking about critics, but artists as well, and institutions, certainly. Even the Studio School, where he taught at its inception, was uncomfortable with him. When students didn’t buy into the incessant drawing and erasing, the linear dissection of everyday space into a sort of planar construct, or even better, when students had no ability to draw at all, he’d say, “I’ll take him, or her!” Milton felt painting was not about structure, that painting occurred prior to that, and that trying to cram irrelevant knowledge into a beginner’s head created a ball of wool that would only have to be unraveled later anyway. He maintained that the function of a school was not medicinal,it shouldn’t alleviate pain but rather inject the pain of art into you, and show you why the pain was necessary. He’d say, “I come to you like a snake.” He was against mastery his whole life, and he was against the whole idea of ‘the master,” and especially the aura of the master. And there was a faculty meeting at the Studio School of which he was not made aware, and he was tossed out. And although he never talked about it, he never forgot it either. I’m bringing this up because Milton was, as someone wrote in this booklet, the ‘outsider’s outsider.” And he would allude to that. He’d say, “Counterculture? They don’t know what counterculture really is.” And he understood that there were consequences to that, and he took a philosophical position about that; he knew there was a necessary price to pay. But, like I said, he didn’t forget. And even there I think there’s a lesson to be learned. There’s price to pay for your beliefs, and perhaps it’s a necessary price, but although you accept it, you don’t have to feel good about it or that it’s okay. Because it’s not okay.

I think of Milton as a painter first and always, but also as a teacher, and that is the greatest contradiction, or maybe irony, of all. Because he certainly wasn’t a natural. As his friend Yektai wrote so eloquently, “Whenever I brought a problem to Resnick, he always made it vaster.” He wasn’t a teacher in the sense that he had knowledge to impart. He didn’t think of painting as knowledge at all but, as he put it, the “unhinging of your soul from your sight.” Of course to understand that Resnickism you had to know what he meant by ‘soul,’ not the Christian soul, but rather that sense of opposites which Hegel pondered so ponderously, and which Milton perceived intuitively. Milton believed that the act of painting would give you what you needed, not reading about it, or listening to ”some idiot talking about what he doesn’t know either.” And he would serve as an example, as an example in extremis, a logical extension of what was required for art to live today. And he would serve as this example, play this part for which he was endowed by nature with such intelligence and courage, and that’s what I mean by ‘role.’

And now the man is gone, and that position, that ‘ever fixed point’, by which I don’t mean the work, but the stance itself, the artistic stance of the serious person, is also gone. And so it now falls to us, to the people in this room who know what I’m talking about because they’ve had some of the experiences I’m talking about, to serve as models, to the extent our temperament and development may allow, for the few that come after us who still see a blank surface and some colors as an invitation to work.

The post Milton Resnick (1917-2004) appeared first on artcritical.

February 17 to May 7, 2005

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is housed in a nationally land marked building on 8th Street – a maze-like architectural wonder that combines four Victorian townhouses, mews carriage houses, and Art Deco frontage – which has always been a dynamic center for intellectual adventure. It began as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio, then became the original home of the Whitney Museum. In the late 1960s, artists and philosophers (including Buckminster Fuller, Meyer Schapiro, and Morton Feldman) gathered there around the Studio School’s founder, Mercedes Matter. And these days, current Dean Graham Nickson leads an Evening Lecture series, which has brought hundreds of leading art critics, thinkers, and artists to the school.

On the occasion of the school’s 40th anniversary, I was asked to curate an exhibition about its history. As an art historian, my research centers around a generation of New York-based, painterly figurative artists, many of whom taught at or were even founding faculty members of the school. The exhibition, “The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” whose first part opens today, will examine the institution’s history, via the work of approximately 100 faculty members and alumni.

The school was founded in 1964, after Mercedes Matter published a harsh critique in Art News of the state of current art education. She criticized art schools for their fragmented, busy curriculum, and for teaching students about “what is going on” in the art world but never actually “how to draw.” Matter taught at Pratt at the time, and a group of her students prevailed upon her to start a new school based on the ideas she outlined in print. The students then took an active role in locating a space – originally a loft at Bleecker and Broadway – constructing worktables and modeling platforms, and even paying the rent. The school moved to its current home in 1967 (a move made possible through a student who died young and left her inheritance to the school).

Although the school has always emphasized working from life, and many teachers avoided discussions of content, the divide between abstraction and representation was indeed fluid and dynamic. A teacher like Nicolas Carone (who taught for nearly 25 years and has been hugely influential within the school) claims an ideal art to be “abstraction with content.” Charles Cajori’s “Seated Figure”(exhibited in part one) hovers at the edge of abstraction and sets the tone for the conversation around these issues. Esteban Vicente, the noted abstractionist, was also a founding faculty member.

Drop by the school this week, and you will note in the galleries work by these artists, as well as Leland Bell, Alex Katz, George McNeil, and Matter – all dating from the period – a quick course in early faculty aesthetics. In those days, Studio School students learned “plastic values”: the creation of form on a two-dimensional space. The object, whether the still life or the figure, was basically an armature – an excuse – for organizing forms in space. This teaching was based on that of Hans Hofmann, who had his own school on 8th Street in the 1940s and 1950s, and with whom many Studio School teachers, such as Matter, Carone, and McNeil, had themselves studied.

In the 1970s, a generation of influential abstract artists began to emerge from the school, including Andrea Belag, Emily Cheng, and Christopher Wool. Faculty included rigorous abstractionists Milton Resnick and Jack Tworkov. Philip Guston – another founding faculty member – was a particularly powerful influence at the school (he was making his own transition from abstraction into more personal imagery at this time). He encouraged his students to develop their own personal vision. Steven Sloman, a student of Guston’s in the 1960s, became a teacher in the 1970s.

The 1980s were a time of transition. Sculptor Bruce Gagnier became dean for several years and was followed briefly by painter and future MoMA curator Robert Storr. Mr. Gagnier brought in a new group of teachers. Ophrah Shemesh embodied the cultural mix of the 1980s: Her paintings take on sexuality and the body and have a European, neo-Expressionist feel. Ross Bleckner taught at the school and curated an important exhibition there, “From Organism to Architecture.” The mystically inclined monochromist Frederic Matys Thursz, a faculty member who did not believe in drawing, provided a very different kind of guidance than the founding teachers. This period seemed to open up the school to influences that were swirling around at the time outside its doors.

In 1989, Graham Nickson became dean. Mr. Nickson, who is British, brought to the Studio School the influence of his own training at the Camberwell School of Art, where he had studied with Euan Uglow, who in turn worked under William Coldstream at the Slade. The tradition developed by Coldstream is based on intense observation, working from life, and employing an exacting system of measurement to scale down what the artist sees be fore him onto the page. The influence of Coldstream, Uglow, and the Slade – brought via Mr. Nickson and other British teachers he has employed – is a new element in the mix of teaching ideologies at the school.

Mr. Nickson pioneered the Drawing Marathon, an extraordinarily intense two-week, full-day course of study, which he has taken around the world. British emigre students have included such figures as Matthew Ritchie and Cecily Brown. The latter purportedly once complained that the charcoal smudged Studio School students didn’t understand her dressing up to attend parties, yet her work displays an undeniable Studio School painterly panache.

Although Mr. Nickson’s own style of large-scale, complex, psychologically suggestive figural painting has certainly made its mark at the school, there still is no single “Studio School” vision. More recently, teachers have included Rosemarie Beck, Paul Resika, and British artists Carole Robb and Garth Evans; works in the final show of this series will include these artists as well as John Walker’s muscular abstraction, a seemingly alchemical abstraction by Bill Jensen, and densely painted, evocative works by Jake Berthot, Eric Holzman, and John Lees.

Teaching and painting are the two principal legacies of the school – and in most cases, the artists selected for this exhibition are actively practicing, exhibiting, and often teaching, not only at the Studio School but also around New York City, nationally, and internationally. The common denominator, in the face of diverse artistic output, is an extended tradition of seriousness and innovation; a willingness to utilize the timeless languages of painting, drawing, and sculpture; an engagement with art of the past; an appetite for intellectual adventure, and a devotion to sustained studio practice.

This is what distinguishes and marks the New York Studio School.

The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, Part 1 (1964-1971)

“The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” will be held in four separate parts, between today and May 7. The installations move chronologically through the decades of the school’s history, combining the work of faculty and students and presenting a glimpse into four periods of the School’s history. Many of the selected works date from the periods represented, but others are more recent. Grounds for these decisions were aesthetic as well as historical: to convey both a sense of the educational system at the time, as well as communicate the possibilities for what an artist who trained there might become.

Part one (1964-71), opening today, includes the work of founding and early faculty members, as well as founding and early students. Themes presented in this show include a group of works about the body, in the entrance halls to the school, such as George Spaventa’s “Walking Woman” bronze; cutout figures by Mark Zimetbaum; Carl Plansky’s self-portrait, naked in work boots; feminist works by Marjorie Kramer and Irene Peslikis; Judy Rifka’s post-September 11 skeleton meditation, and Chuck O’Connor’s 1968 classic Studio School style nude.

In the galleries, works by Charles Cajori, Gretna Campbell, Louis Finkelstein, Sidney Geist, and Alex Katz set the tone for discussions around abstraction and figuration, planar form, and active drawing; while heads by Earl Kerkam and Nicolas Carone examine the soulful possibilities of Studio School aesthetics.

Selecting the works for this exhibition was fascinating: it very much contradicted the idea of a unified “Studio School style.” It was my own “marathon,” a la Mr. Nickson, of research, interviews, studio and gallery visits. But this is only the beginning of the story.

this article originally appeared in the New York Sun, February 17, 2005

The post The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School appeared first on artcritical.

Out of the Picture – Milton Resnick and the New York School
Transcribed, compiled & edited by Geoffrey Dorfman
Midmarch Arts Press, 2003, 314 pages

Milton Resnick committed suicide on the 12th of March. Up until then he was one of an ever-diminishing group of living individuals such as Philip Pavia, Robert Richenberg and Paul Jenkins that comprised the New York School (A.K.A. the Abstract Expressionists). The artists he knew ranged from notables such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline to (now) obscure artists like Max Schnitzler and the sculptor Ernest Guteman. Geoffrey Dorfman, also an abstract painter, began working on this tour de force book in 1979. The result is a comprehensive readable volume that addresses Resnick and the New York School together and individually.

Reading this book might be compared to taking a river trip. The introduction provides a capable landing from which to launch your virtual canoe. Once underway you’re quickly immersed in the buoyant light rapids of the ‘Resnick Interviews’. The current begins to slow with reproductions of Resnick paintings ranging from the late 50s to 2000. Shortly thereafter the waters run very still and deep with a series of Resnick’s talks at the Studio School from 1968 to 1972. Subsequently you are swept up in the torrents again with the 1966 Resnick/Leo Steinberg panel discussion which quickly streams into the dénouement of the book Resnick/Ad Reinhardt debate: “Attack”, from 1960 that drops you over a waterfall. But you bubble back up to the surface with Pat Passlof’s remembrance (Milton Resnick’s wife and also a painter).

The interviews provide some early history on Resnick such as how he took up fine art due to the advice of a teacher and the encouragement of a friend. However, upon learning of it, his father presented him with a “not under my roof” ultimatum. This incident is a foreshadowing of Resnick’s often defiant, go-it-alone, temperament (hence the title ‘Out of the Picture’) because he chose to leave home and struggled for years to live and make art. For the next seventy plus pages Resnick and Dorfman engross you in a personal view of the New York Art world beginning in the 1930s. A subtext for the conversation is an engaging macro-perspective of the ‘New York School’ from its inception to its heyday.

Resnick’s account follows a number of interesting pathways such as the fact that early on he lived with de Kooning’s eventual wife, Elaine (and ironically de Kooning was with Pat Passlof). Or consider Resnick’s relationship with Pollock who at one point he invited to ‘Step outside’ at the Cedar Bar after an initial provocation. But he was also there (along with de Kooning) to steer a nervous Pollock clear of the bars while taking a break during the opening of his 1949 show. Resnick was one of the few individuals alive who was qualified to assess Pollock. He does so by pointing out Pollock’s weaknesses; but from a sympathetic viewpoint and ultimately, with respect for his intelligence and abilities. Resnick’s recollections relieve Pollock of his ‘Art god’ adornment while also countering his ‘piss-in-the-fireplace’ notoriety. This cutting through art historical analysis and sensationalist hubris is far more interesting in revealing Pollock as an individual rather than as cardboard cut-out.

The Studio School talks provide a fascinating view of Resnick’s forceful ideas regarding art, art making and artists. However, those ideas are presented with a refreshing undertone of uncertainty. Transcribed from tapes they possess a wonderful ‘off the cuff’ quality punctuated by humor and occasional audience discord. But they go right to the core of Resnick’s beliefs and demand a concentrated reading.

There are portions of the talks that don’t completely make sense such as Resnick’s assault on music. At one point he says, “.if you know anything about painting, you hate music.” further pointing out that music is poisonous. Is this just provocation, an attack on another medium or an absolutist’s statement? It’s not clear and when pressed by the audience his explanation is still not entirely satisfactory. At other times when challenged, Resnick defends his position by referring to his accumulated knowledge and experience over his questioners. This is weak and as a reader I was yearning to ask my own follow-up questions. But these are isolated criticisms. For the most part Resnick delightfully meanders through his subject matter in what amounts to a captivating journey through a wilderness of ideas.

The two panel discussions present the opportunity to see Resnick among his contemporaries; especially the ‘Attack!’ panel that took place January 1st, 1960. Chaired by Resnick and Ad Reinhardt ‘confrontational’ just begins to describe the event. The transcript offers an absorbing demarcation of the sea change that occurred when commercial success in the art world collided with the New York School artists’ decades long commitment and suffering for their idealism and integrity. Attack! represents one of the last documented gatherings of artists whose passionately fueled collective sensibility and veracity was something worth arguing and even fighting over. (Harold Rosenberg, immediately after hearing himself quoted by Resnick, was angered enough to get up and leave and de Kooning nearly got into a fist fight at one point). Shortly thereafter the art world moved on to embrace, indeed celebrate, the obtuse detached commercialism of Pop Art and the once intimate New York art community began to come apart.

Pat Passlof’s remembrance provides an excellent post-script. Presented in the same spirit as the interviews it brings a divergent view of the period plus a different personal take on Resnick. Passlof represents the younger generation of artists from that time and from her we learn of how the first contemporary art galleries sprouted up on East 10th street beginning with the cooperative Tanager gallery. There was also occasional friction between the younger and older artists. At one point, Passlof and others had been given permission to use ‘The Club’facilities for an alternative version of the Friday meetings on an off night. (The Club was the formal organization of the New York School that met weekly to discuss art and ideas). However, this was eventually revoked by the older artists in what appears to be fear of competition. One of the most touching accounts is Passlof’s portrayal of Franz Kline; of his character as well as being a character and of him tearfully breaking the news to everyone at Cedar Bar of the illness that eventually took his life.

Overall this book functions very well on a couple of significant levels. You get to know Milton Resnick the artist as an indisputable member of the New York School who was nevertheless separate from it – an individualist’s individual. Also you are treated to an intimate viewpoint as inseparable from a greater historical perspective; in short, a first person account of the birth and culmination of an authentically American art form.

With any visual artist, but especially for one of this magnitude, I wanted to see a lot more of his art. Still, the 16 reproductions of Resnick’s paintings present an adequate survey of his work. The period photographs sprinkled lightly throughout the content add context without distraction. The brilliant inclusion of maps indicating where artist’s studios once were also recreates a sense of place. At the completion of this book you walk away with a genuine sense of knowing Milton Resnick both personally and professionally. The downside is the sharp poignant edge this adds to his tragic death.

The post Out of the Picture – Milton Resnick and the New York School appeared first on artcritical.