Pure painting: Milton Resnick talks

Geoffrey Dorfman. Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003. 315 pp., 16 color ills., 68 b/w, 6 maps. $35, $28 paper.

In his 1951 statement, "What Abstract Art Means to Me, "Willem de Kooning concludes by describing a European immigrant of leftist political leanings who ended up covering the floor of his Hoboken apartment with layers of crumbled bread. "He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face." (1) This parable distances de Kooning from his own immigrant origins, from the political crucible in which Abstract Expressionism developed and against which it had to define itself as a distinct artistic movement. That effort, its ethnic milieu, and the forms of painting that resulted from it are vividly reconstructed in Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, an oral history transcribed, compiled, and edited by Geoffrey Dorfman. The book offers an intriguing glimpse into the bohemian world of an artist who exemplifies many aesthetic and philosophical tendencies of the New York School--offering Resnick himself an opportunity to have the last word, but ultimately leaving many questions unanswered.

Dorfman's project recalls the format of the Documents of Modern Art series edited by Robert Motherwell. Here, Dorfman, who has clearly steeped himself in the milieu, opens with a "cast of characters" and a painstakingly reconstructed map of the neighborhood around Eighth Street circa 1950, with locations of artists' studios and gathering places. He has also assembled an extensive array of photographic documentation. After a brief introduction, he allows Resnick to chronicle his career in his own words in a series of interviews, covering his art-school days in the 1930s, the war years, the postwar scene in Paris and New York, and the transformations that came thereafter. At the heart of the book are five lectures on painting delivered by Resnick at the New York Studio School from 1968 to 1973, followed by transcriptions of panel discussions in which Resnick engages in dialogues with Leo Steinberg and Ad Reinhardt. Pat Passlof, a painter and also Resnick's wife, supplies a concluding section of reminiscences, of particular interest for her observations on the gallery scene in the 1950s. The book provides an eloquent overview of the period and its philosophical underpinnings.

As Dorfman remarks in the introduction, one thing is beyond dispute, that Resnick has used more oil paint than any other painter, creating densely worked canvases sometimes weighing over four hundred pounds. Beyond that, however, much about his art remains subject to fierce debate. While Dorfman supplies a historical context for Resnick's work, represented in sixteen color plates, he avoids critical commentary on the paintings and doesn't address recent scholarship. Himself a painter, Dorfman stresses his intention to keep himself out of the account; he is sympathetic to Resnick's dim view of art criticism, his belief that understanding is incompatible with art: "If you attempt a complete thing, a thing that corresponds to what is more intuitive within you ... it is a unique thing ... something liable to a judgment that is past understanding" (223). When Leo Steinberg describes it as a "style" (222), Resnick defends his impassioned but elusive way of talking--and painting--as the only way to convey an experience inaccessible to ordinary processes of naming and analyzing. By allowing Resnick's voice to advance his argument, Dorfman accepts limitations but gains rhetorical impact. Ironically, it's Resnick's own mastery of words--he's an engaging raconteur and also writes poetry--that lends this book distinction.

Dorfman does criticize what he views as the lack of an artistic community over the past half century: he regards the Artist's Club as the culminating expression of the artists' community that nurtured American art and dismisses what's followed as the triumph of art as commodity and display. "Attack," a panel discussion with Resnick and Ad Reinhardt from 1961, was transcribed from the only surviving tape recording of an Artist's Club meeting, and it reflects the artists' unease at the changes under way, even if they aren't sure whom to blame: "I'm attacking everybody," Resnick proclaims (258). Dorfman undertakes to evoke the "earlier, perhaps more naive era," in which artists dedicated to struggle in the studio were inspired by a sense of artistic freedom unparalleled in the history of art (10).

The appeal of Resnick's account is enhanced by the lure of bohemia, which he and Passlof enrich with anecdote and intertwine with aesthetics and social history. Their telling of tales seems still connected to Eastern European village life, which provides a spiritual backdrop for their struggle with modern painting. Beginning with his Jewish-Ukrainian origins, Resnick recounts the improbable development of his own artistic ambition. At the American Artists School, an offshoot of the John Reed Club, he studied with a teacher of Russian extraction and became inspired by the ideal of international art represented by the School of Paris. He recalls a sense of liberation in the work of those times, a freedom based in the realization that artists in New York could make paintings rooted in their own immediate experience. The radical impulse was not so much to be avant-garde as to become someone else: "We weren't making new art. We were making ourselves new" (20). Resnick recalls forgotten painters like Max Schnitzler, the son of a rabbi, who pioneered painting based on "pure emotion" and just paint. But by the time the critical and financial success of Jackson Pollock had established the new style, painters like Schnitzler had given up and moved on to other occupations.