March 31, 2017:
MILTON RESNICK at 100: A Centenary View
A remembrance and a showing of a new film, “Milton Resnick Paints a Picture.”
Disorder but completeness, a total anarchy and at the same time a universal truth. — MR
Friday, March 31, 2017, 8:00 pm
Behind the Door
219 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Admission: $10 at the door
Please reserve: vpropera@gmail.com
The painter Milton Resnick (1917-2004) would have been 100 this year. He was born in Ukraine, and fled the pogroms with his family when he was five years old, eventually settling in Brooklyn, where he lived until he left home as a teenager after his father forbade him to be an artist. In the 1930s he was on the WPA artist project, and in 1940 he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army through all of World War II. After returning to New York in September 1945, Resnick immediately began painting abstractions, thereby cementing his historical position as a member of the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists. He was a founding member of the Artists’ Club of the 1950s. A larger than life personality, a poet, raconteur and philosopher, he might have become one of the towering figures of 20th century painting, had he cared to embrace the public. A museum devoted to his legacy is scheduled to open this year in his studio, a defunct synagogue in Chinatown, NYC.
The evening will feature “Milton Resnick Paints a Picture,” a short film of him painting and discussing his views on art and society, followed by a projection of paintings painted over eight separate decades.
Our host will be painter and writer Geoffrey Dorfman, secretary and trustee of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation. His awards include an NEA Grant and the National Academy’s Henry Ward Ranger Prize in Painting. He contributed to Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: the Muriel Kallis Newman Collection (The Metropolitan and Yale University, 2007). He has written for Artforum and Stagebill and authored Out Of the Picture; Milton Resnick and the New York School (Midmarch Arts Press, 2003).
___________________________