Link to Post:
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2013/01/milton-resnick-1917-2004-three-poems.html
Jerome Rothenberg writes about Milton Resnick's poetry and posts three unpublished poems by the painter.
Rothenberg also writes that "Resnick was a very visible & dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for feelings & ideas that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter" Rothenberg continues, noting that Resnick "left behind at least 16 envelopes of unpublished, often handwritten poetry with some 40 poems in each. The poems that follow (the last one in particular) were written in the desperation of his later years, when the overall brightness of his early abstractions had changed to figurative depictions of what I would take, rightly or wrongly, as the terror (still luminous) within."
Link to Post:
http://structureandimagery.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-lure-of-paris-loretta-howard-gallery.html
Paul Behnke photoblogs the recent exhibition The Lure of Paris at Loretta Howard Gallery, New York. The show highlights the lesser known influence of Paris on mid-century American artists and features work by Biala, Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Sam Francis, Shirley Goldfarb, Cleve Gray, Al Held, Shirley Jaffe, Conrad Marca-Relli, Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski, Milton Resnick, Jean-Paul Riopelle, George Sugarman, and Jack Youngerman.
Sol Ostrow writes in the catalogue: "In the 1950s, with the triumph of the New York School, the United States for the first time in history had produced visual art of international consequence. Yet, artists from the United States and from all over Europe continued to flock to Paris just as the center of the western art world was shifting to New York... Their reasons varied. Some saw it as an opportunity to be cosmopolitan or to satisfy their wanderlust; others may have imagined the Paris of Le Jazz Hot, café society, and the romance of the pre-war avant-garde, or the chance to see works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse, etc., that they knew only from black and white reproductions. In most cases the women artists had accompanied their significant others, while like the generation before them, the Afro-American artists, sought to escape the racism that was endemic in the States."
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 21, 2011
Don't miss a chance to see Milton Resnick: The Elephant in the Room at Cheim & Read (on view through October 29, 2011).
Painter Geoffrey Dorfman, author/editor of Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School and a definitive resource on Resnick, has recently posted an audio recording of Resnick speaking about painting and his work at the Englewood Library in New Jersey on October 13, 1978. The video, like Dorfman's book, can make you feel like Resnick is in the room, or like you are attending one if his lectures.
Dorfman has titled the video There's a Measure Called Recognition after Resnick's opening statement of the recording:
"There's a measure, which is called recognition. There's a measure which is called the foot, the inch, the pound, and there's a measure which is much more strong in your life, which is recognition. You recognize people. You recognize character. You recognize something that frightens you. You recognize qualities which cannot be measured except in this thing within your emotion."
Link to Post:
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/08/milton-resnick-poet-in-memory.html
Poet Jerome Rothenberg remembers his encounters with painter Milton Resnick.
"Milton's declaration, right from the start, was that he was a painter who had given up painting in favor of poetry & that he thought that I & my fellow poets should now give up poetry in favor of painting... carrying the intensity he had lavished on painting into a new medium that of words. That he did it instantly & with equivalent grace & fury astonished me, as did his natural & credible assumption of the poet’s [bardic] voice..."
Link to Post:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/milton-resnick/
Painter David Reed remembers Milton Resnick on the occasion of the exhibition Milton Resnick, The Elephant in the Room on view at Cheim & Read from September 22 - October 29, 2011.
Reed writes: "Resnick told us that we had to decide between two ways of being painters. You could either “climb the ladder of art, struggle and sacrifice to make great works,” or “get on the moving belt, just move, you and the painting which equals your brain.” It took me a long time to figure out that he disapproved of the first and approved of the second. He told us that, as younger painters, we should put on “the shirt of Abstract Expressionism.” Each of us would then have to admit, “I can’t understand this shirt. It doesn’t fit my mind.” Only that way would we get on the moving belt."
Link to Post:
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=59
A must read article by painter David Reed.
Reed remembers his time at the New York Studio School and the effect Philip Guston's painting and teaching had on him and his work. Reed gives a fascinating first-hand account of Guston's critiques at the Studio School and the ideas he was wrestling with in his transition from abstraction to figuative painting. Guson spoke of "tradition as something that was removing us from our own lives and the world in which we lived."
Milton Resnick, who also taught at the Studio School at the time "used to describe the method and difficulties of an artist changing his or her work [as] 'soul-beating.' He said that some artists could 'beat their own souls,' but some could not, and needed someone else to do the beating for them, a friend or an enemy.
The article also details the influence of Piero della Francesca's fresco painting had on Guston's figurative work.
