Milton Resnick was one of the last survivors of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists.
He belonged to the 8th Street Club and worked in close contact with Willem de Kooning, Philip Pavia, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline and others during the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He was also an energetic storyteller, relating anecdotes about those he knew, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock.
Resnick’s paintings are held in the Smithsonian, The National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. A major abstract painter in his own right, although the youngest of the Abstract Expressionist artists, Resnick is celebrated for his mystical abstract paintings.
This painting is “about” the paint and working with and against the paint, the texture, and the layers.
As Geoffrey Dorfman notes, the leading historian on Resnick and the author of Milton Resnick: Painter in the Age of Painting, “His abstractions were tied to the idea of peripheral vision. They’re epic proportion but intimate at the same time. They’re mystical experiences, the best ones.” His works from the late 1950’s which includes our example Untitled, 1960 are considered to be amongst his more mature pictures. The personification of the angst-ridden solitary bohemian artist Resnick could be volatile and acerbic. Art movements held no interest for him. His sole focus and primary commitment were to paint.
In this picture Resnick makes use of rapidly applied Impressionistic brush strokes built up to almost an encrusted surface which revealed his underlying respect for Cezanne and Monet and which earned him the moniker of an Abstract Impressionist. The resulting composition, although devoid of any subject matter, is painterly and vividly colored in its execution, a nod to the lessons he learned at the Hans Hofmann School of Painting. Untitled, 1960 succeeds in enveloping the viewer with its feeling of expansiveness that is simultaneously lyrical and frenzied. Our example is amongst those pictures executed in the 1940’s and 1950’s which earned Milton Resnick respect as an artist.