Milton Resnick: Boards 1981–1984

M I LTON R ESN ICK MILTON RESNICK BOARDS CHEIM & READ

CHEIM & READ

BOAR DS

M I LTON R ESN ICK BOAR DS 1981–1984

ESSAY BY GEOFFREY DORFMAN CHEIM & READ 2018

not forgetting clouds go away you know the sky for a heretic is clouded I leave it to you does art tell anything has this babble become uncertain it was sad in the old time loft the bohemian a counter no one remembers arranged an elaborate front but it was paint that broke through pigment defeated the will and from that inspired beginning the dishonest self was dislocated to hang on a twisted wire —Milton Resnick, 19851 Milton Resnick’s early years were marked by a series of disruptions.

At six he and his relatives escaped from Russia, shepherded across the Moldova River in the dead of night. Ten years later, at the age of sixteen, he defied his father and left the shelter of family to become an artist.

Somehow he managed to survive in the teeth of the Great Depression, a story in itself. At twenty-three he was conscripted into the army, and when America entered the war a year later, he was to remain a soldier for its full duration. He had taken some art books with him to read in boot camp but, when Pearl Harbor was attacked he threw them away.

By the time Milton Resnick completed the boards that comprise this exhibition he was a seasoned veteran artist, with almost a half century of accumulated work behind him, nearly all of it painted in a highly abstract idiom. The oldest of his abstract paintings that we know of rests in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was painted at the tail end of 1945, the year he returned from the war.

Were we to journey back to that point in time we would have found him undernourished, with dental problems and a splintered nervous system, trying to reconnect with the world that he knew before the war.

Milton was determined to resume his life as an artist as if nothing had happened in the intervening years. But of course it had. He had made it through the Normandy Invasion, survived the Battles of Aachen and Hßrtgen Forest, and was subsequently—almost a decade older than the new recruits—rotated by his superiors out of action. He fainted during debriefing and spent several weeks in convalescence. It was a merciful and fortuitous extraction; some six days later the Germans broke through the Ardennes thirty miles south, and the Battle of the Bulge was on. For years afterward he would involuntarily shake when a car backfired.

Henceforth he would be a committed abstract painter, but from the get-go he rejected the clear lines, sudden juxtapositions, high

contrasts and keyed-up colors that had imprinted Modern Art in the public mind. He didn’t have any confidence in that reality. For him, abstract or nonobjective painting was to become a riff on a particularly resistant strain of 19th-century anarchical impulses. He never regarded Modernism as a wholesale rejection of the Romanticism it had summarily replaced. Over the following six decades, Milton Resnick would paint countless pictures devoid of image, bereft of shape or division, impervious to language, packed with boundless incident and inchoate feeling, and latterly so relentlessly realized that their size and weight often required several men to lift them. Led to such an extremity by travail, ambition, and the dynamics of his own artistic development, Milton tied absurdity to necessity in a Daedalian knot that became his life’s story.

Looking back on his life, he encapsulated it in the proverbial nutshell: “panic” and “fate.” The first arrived unbidden. Engaged in an unfathomable and—as far as society was concerned—absurd activity, surviving on a shoestring, he wasn’t going to overcome sensations of panic, but he could try to accept it as an artistic necessity. Adopting a fatalistic philosophy so that it could be, in a sense, reduced to a job requirement, acted as a sort of inoculation against depression,

inebriation and indolence. Bottoming out—or as he called it, “falling into the pit” —was common enough to be considered ordinary, but he believed that if you could somehow balance panic with the sense of fate, you were an artist. If not, you would never be able to separate yourself from the world. “You’ll always need someone to tell you you’re wonderful.”

By 1981 he was sixty-four years old and had recently completed the last of three ambitious series of paintings: Planets, Elephants, and Straws in the Wind. They comprised altogether about thirty large paintings that marked the summit of his accomplishments. Having recently purchased a three-roll mill and a pony mixer with which to manufacture his own oil colors, he could finally free himself from dependency on the art store.

He also had a band of young artists to make artists’ oil paint for him (as well as themselves). Access to unlimited resources would feed his attempt at becoming, metaphorically speaking, his own universe.

I visited him at his building—a defunct synagogue on Eldridge Street in lower Manhattan—shortly after the boards had arrived. At least 140 of them were stacked in the first-floor studio. (The grand studio on the second floor was reserved for the big pictures, a few of them reaching eighteen feet in length.) These boards, all 40 x 30 inches, were

a half-inch thick, wax impregnated, and corrugated in a honeycomb configuration that made them as stiff as a piece of wood. He explained that he was looking for a sturdy and substantial support that did not require primer, was impervious to rot, and light in weight. He wanted to make lots of paintings and he wanted to work quickly.

As Resnick recalled to me, he was moving so fast at the tail end of the 1950s that he felt something had been left behind. He couldn’t say what it was, but he wanted to mine these old abandoned veins with the insight accumulated over the intervening decades. Many of the paintings created over that span—the ones that his reputation will stand on—had been worked on incrementally. Their realization had been protracted and painful. Over the years his volatile nature had been harnessed to a fanatical will by patience, so that nothing would be left over. A picture could sometimes take months. But these boards would be different.

They were to serve a purpose; a means of testing whether he finally understood something about what he had been doing all this time. If his suspicions were correct, they should arrive much more rapidly, perhaps in three—maybe even as little as two—working sessions. After all, he had often painted that quickly in the heady days of 10th Street. It wasn’t altogether foreign to him.

As Resnick sought to explain it, the first session meant transferring the paint to the surface, spreading and animating it so as to gain the necessary complexity. Emotion could emerge as a possibility only from an inchoate matrix, a disarray of elements. To myself—the youthful listener—his description suggested priming a charge. Then, a day or two later he would adjust the paint—with some fresh pigment added and some of the old scraped off—but only to reach a point where the entirety could hold itself in arrest. Milton identified this tension as a “place,” and although this place corresponded to the physical surface, it was not identical to it. Despite the intense physicality of the pigment, painting for him always remained a matter of mind, for it was the mind that created an entirety, not the stuff itself. The material was a necessary consequence, like the barely glowing embers of a doused fire. The reader of these words might dismiss this as “mystique,” or not; it depends on the individual. But as far as Resnick was concerned, providing an electrical jolt that would hold the elements in suspension was now the only job left for the artist. He would raise and splay his hand rigidly as an illustrative gesture. This tension was the only necessary part of art left; it both contained the emotion and presented it. The two were identical in his mind, and it was also important that once a picture arrived, he not touch it up afterward, or refine it further. They were to remain rough,

summary works created largely for his own regard and purpose. I would say that this is evident in the facture and effect.

Nevertheless he saw fit to title a number of them, and the names he chose—Straw, Burned O, Scow,2 and Bark—seem to loosely suggest detritus.

A scow is a flat-bottom boat that hauls ore, sand, or refuse; straw and bark suggest loose extraneous material, and Burned O summons up some kind of scorched emptiness that no longer serves any purpose. Altogether they perhaps do provide a measure of entry into his state of mind.

In the latter half of the 1980s Milton Resnick would begin to introduce figurative elements into his work. He would pursue that direction for the last twenty years of his life. Therefore these boards—along with canvases from this same period—constitute his final essays (or forays) into the form of “the blank,” a strain of thought that prizes non-thought. They may be regarded as points of arrival after a decades-long mystical journey.

—Geoffrey Dorfman January issue of Artforum magazine, 1986.

Resnick substituted a K for a C in his spelling of Scow. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Skow as a variant with another—now obsolete—meaning: “Strips of wood for wattle-work, barrelstaves, fixing thatch, etc.” Whether the artist knew this, or simply misspelled it we cannot say. In the same ad hoc spirit, Resnick abbreviated Burned O to read as BRND O. The gallery has decided to hold to the abbreviation.

1 2

1. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

2. Untitled 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

3. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

4. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

5. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

6. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

7. Skow 1981 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

8. BRND O 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

9. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

10. BRND O 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

11. BRND O 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

12. BRND O 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

13. Untitled 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

14. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

15. Untitled 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

16. Untitled 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

17. Straw 1982 oil on panel 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

18. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

19. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

20. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

21. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

22. Straw 18 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

23. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

24. Straw 15 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

25. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

26. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

27. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

28. Straw 40 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

29. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

30. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

31. Straw 1982 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

32. Untitled 1983 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

33. Untitled 1983 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

34. Untitled 1983 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

35. Untitled 1983 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

36. Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

37. Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

38. Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

39. Untitled 1 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

40. Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

41. Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

42. Untitled 4 c.1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

43. Straw c. 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

44. Untitled c. 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm

Milton Resnick was born in Bratslav, Ukraine, in 1917 and immigrated to the United States in 1922 as his family escaped the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. He studied commercial art at Pratt Institute and transferred to the American Artists School to focus on painting. After a brief stint in the Works Progress Administration Art Project, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, engaging in fierce combat in the European Theater of World War II. Following his discharge, he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris under the GI Bill. Considered the youngest member of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, Resnick maintained friendships with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and married the painter Pat Passlof (1928–2011) in 1961.

Resnick’s work is represented in many American and international collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Malmö Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, among many others. Recent exhibitions include a large survey at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, New Jersey (2014), and at Cheim & Read, New York (2008 and 2011).

We extend our sincere thanks to the Tr ustees of the Milton Resnic k and Pat Passlof Foundation:Geoffrey Dorfman, Stephanie E. Heilbor n, Tracey Jones, Nathan Ker nan and Foundation Director, Susan Reynolds.

Frontispiece: Untitled 1984 oil on board 40 x 30 in 101.6 x 76.2 cm Previous page: Ar thur Mones. Milton Resnic k, 1979, gelatin silver photog raph, Collection Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wayne and Stephanie Mones at the request of their father, Ar thur Mones, 2000.89.60. ŠEstate of Ar thur Mones.

M I LTON R E S N ICK BOAR DS 1981–1984 Desig n Joh n Chei m E ssay G eof f rey Dor f ma n Ed itor El len Robi nson

Photog raphy Br ian Buc kley. Cover por trait John Lloyd Taylor.

Pr inted by Graphicom. ISBN 978–1–944316–11–2.

P ubl ished on t he occ a sion of t he Chei m & Read ex h ibit ion Milton Resnick: Boards, Febr uar y 22–Marc h 31, 2018

M I LTON R ESN ICK MILTON RESNICK BOARDS CHEIM & READ

CHEIM & READ

BOAR DS