Milton Resnick

Milton Resnick (1917-2004) was one of the last surviving members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists, and among the most distinctive painters of the New York School. Born in Bratslav, Russia (present-day Ukraine), Resnick emigrated to the United States as a young child and grew up in Brooklyn, eventually pursuing his artistic training at the American Artists School and the Pratt Institute during the 1930s. His artistic career would be interrupted by military service during the Second World War, but his return to New York placed him at the very heart of the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement.

Resnick belonged to the celebrated 8th Street Club, the legendary gathering place that functioned as the intellectual and social heart of the New York School. He worked in close contact with Willem de Kooning, Philip Pavia, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, and others during the late 1940s and early 1950s, sharing in the daily conversations and studio visits that shaped the movement's identity. He was also an energetic storyteller throughout his life, relating anecdotes about those he knew, including de Kooning, Kline, Arshile Gorky, and Pollock, which have become important firsthand documents of the New York School's formative years.

Resnick's mature paintings developed a distinctive vocabulary all his own. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the following decades, he produced increasingly dense, heavily impasted abstract fields in which paint was piled onto the canvas with extraordinary physical presence. His late monumental canvases, some of them approaching mural scale, are among the most physically loaded paintings ever produced by an American artist, transforming abstract painting into something that occupies real sculptural space. He was married to the painter Pat Passlof, and the two shared a long artistic life together in a former synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that they had converted into studios and living quarters.

A major abstract painter in his own right, although the youngest of the first-generation Abstract Expressionist artists, Resnick is celebrated for his mystical, densely worked abstract paintings. His works are held in the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other significant collections. The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation continues to preserve and promote his legacy from the couple's Lower East Side building today.