Pat Passlof

The working life of Pat Passlof (1928-2011) can be seen as paradigmatic for an artist of her generation. Her early education as a painter was a combination of study at the experimental Black Mountain College, NC, and private study with her mentor Willem de Kooning in New York. More formal training at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, followed. Back in New York, the young Passlof was part of the vital downtown New York art world where the necessity of abstraction and the role of art as a revelation of the unseen were passionately debated at places like the Cedar Tavern and The Club and works made in response to this aesthetic climate were exhibited at cooperative galleries on Tenth Street. It’s a textbook account of the life of a gifted, aspiring vanguard painter of the period. That the vanguard painter was a dedicated, ambitious woman in a male dominated art world makes the story even more relevant today. Yet Passlof’s work requires no special pleading. It reflects the aesthetic desiderata of her time, her dialogue with the work of her husband Milton Resnick, and her own independence of mind.

Karen Wilkin, March 2019