Arts & Entertainment
Milton Resnick
Red Man, 1957; •
oil on canvas.
Painter
V I
llery hosts
exhibit of
'Alorks by the
Nev; Yor
rhoors M
Resnick.
Suzanne Chessler
Special to the Jewish News
ilton Resnick came to own two
abandoned synagogues in New
York, but religious attachment
to houses of worship had nothing to do
with the purchases.
Resnick essentially lived art, and in his
later years, spotted the first space as appro-
priate to house his work and himself. He
bought the second as a similar center for
his wife, painter Pat Passlof.
In the book Out of the Picture:
Milton Resnick in the New York
School (Midmarch Arts Press; $35; 2003),
Geoffrey Dorfman describes the unfolding
of Resnick's talents, recognized long after
his family left the dangers of Ukraine in
the 1920s.
The author, an artist who knew Resnick
personally over many years, also wrote the
catalogue essay to go along with a small
exhibit of Resnick's works to be on view
Sept. 30-Nov. 25 at the David Klein Gallery
in Birmingham.
"Milton Resnick: Back on 10th Street,"
which features paintings. done by the late
artist between 1957 and 1959, showcases
work from a transitional period before the
move into the synagogue on Eldridge Street
on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
"Milton's paintings are very forceful, and
they represent abstract painting at the very
highest level," Dorfman says of the artist
who, in great pain and crippled, committed
suicide two years ago at age 86. "They're
very emotional.
. "Milton painted for 60 years, and these
are from a period when he's moving away
from the kind of painting associated with
abstract expressionists toward something
that became his calling card: the all-over
picture.
"The paint itself, rather than the manip-
ulations of an expressionist nature, carries
the burden of the emotional statements."
The painting WG, for instance, uses fluid
masses that never seem to attain solidity
and suggests forms never separated from
a continuum of matter. Red Man offers a
chain of forms energized by strokes of red
and yellow.
A Painter's Painter on page 46
September 28 2006
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