Milton Resnick

Milton Resnick was in some ways the quintessential Abstract Expressionist painter, yet he pushed beyond that visual language to create works of sublime beauty which defy classification and continue to astonish. The trajectory of his career was unusual. One of the original group of Abstract Expressionists working in downtown New York in the 1930s and 1940s, Resnick would become a well-known figure during the movement’s heyday in the 1950s. In the 1960s his work expanded, both literally and imagistically, into extremely large, lyrical canvases filled with air and color, Over the following decades Resnick developed an obsession with the material of paint itself, which led to the thickly painted, imagelss canvses for which he is best known. In the last decade of his long life, Resnick introduced quasi-allegorical figures into his work in seeming contradiction to all he had previously said and bel9ieved about painting. He arrived at this position, as he arrived at every previous one, through a permanent condition of doubt and self-questioning. “I wore out every conclusion I could come to,” he said.

Nathan Kernan, “Milton Resnick: Paintings 1937-1987,” 2018.