Abraham Walkowitz (Siberia, b. 1878) and Milton Resnick (Ukraine, b. 1917), each of whom had a small retrospective in New York City, are incidentally linked by their respective embrace of Modernism and their common ethnic background. Born within twenty years apart, each immigrated to New York City at an early age. Walkowitz, who immigrated during the early teens of the twentieth century, was one of a handful of Americans to embrace Modernism. After his studies at the National Academy of Design, he travelled to Paris to attend the Academy Julien when the city was a hotbed for the avant garde styles. Resnick’s coming of age began after his discharge from the United States Army when he studied in Paris after WWII under the GI Bill, making contact with artists such as Brancusi, and later participating in the formation of Abstract Expressionist styles. While fairly little is known of Walkowitz, Resnick had a deeply wrought philosophy of art. What they hold in common is the spirit of aesthetic adventure to see things new fused with social consciousness that was grounded by an awareness of their Eastern European roots, paralleled by the dramatic potential of America.

Abraham Walkowitz’ studies and drawings at Figureworks Gallery in Williamsburg comprised eight years of work, from 1900-1908 (from just prior to his first exhibition at Alfred Stiegletz’ 291 Gallery in 1908). Walkowitz was part of a group of young artists Stieglitz exhibited - like John Marin and Marsden Hartley - who likewise had travelled to Paris and returned to follow the artistic events in Europe, with each showing four years later in the Armory Show. As a whole, all of Walkowitz’ drawings have a freshness in which the face of the paper speaks through his direct yet abstract mark making. Included are roughly two thematic categories of high and low themes: the dream work of avant garde Paris pursued through lyrical, linear studies of movement. Based on dances by Isadora Duncan, they suggest her free flowing motion through Walkowitz’ use of continuous “automatic” line. The selection of drawings here is only a small sampling of the many hundreds that Walkowitz completed in which Duncan’s figure dematerialises into loosely woven strands of single, lyrically looping lines. Sketchbook in scale, optimistic and youthful in spirit, they reflect the influence of Rodin whose studio Walkowitz had visited, and whose figure studies were shown at 291 in 1908. The relationship of dance to painting was also a topic that was written about in Stiegletz’ magazine Camera Work, where the adaptation of the “aesthetic rules of painting” to photography was theorized. This publication created a milieu that must have encouraged Walkowitz’ experiments in translating temporal movements of Duncan’s body as quickly as the camera could capture reflective light.

Walkowitz’ portraits of people on the streets of New York portray groups of figures who face the viewer and reflect both a collective memory of Eastern Europe and his own immigrant experiences. Painted with a thick brushwork of open mark making, they fuse an expressionist touch that is reminiscent of Prendergast’s intimate, Nabi-like vision. Likewise, when Walkowitz became part of Stieglitz’ inner circle, he introduced Stieglitz to his poor yet articulately fervent friends from the Lower East Side.

Although Stieglitz had pioneered Gallery 291 through his conviction that the artist was a lone visionary, and that his own mission was to combat the sluggishness of the “common herd,” Walkowitz’ circle of friends, who had joined the fight for social justice during the 1913 Paterson workers’ strike, as well as his introduction of Stieglitz to the Proletarian magazine, The Masses, expanded the gallerist’s awareness.

Mor Pipman combed through approximately 1,000 of Milton Resnick’s paintings titled, X Spaces, O Spaces, and Keys, made from 2001 to 2004 to curate a show of thirty paintings on paper, and reflecting Resnick’s vision in its most mature phase. Exhibiting Resnick’s Late Works at the New York Studio School is fitting because Resnick was an admired and influential teacher there. If moderately scaled, these works are grand in their synthesis of his thinking about the role and task of the artist.

Resnick, like other abstract painters, pinpointed the relational moments between himself and his canvas as a problematic of discovery; so that the act of making acquired a slippage and a loss that was simultaneously a recognition of some kind of knowledge. His writings, especially, Talks, which he gave during the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflected on the nature of knowledge that inferred a Biblical state of falling from grace with painful acts of gain. One of his many quotes states that the process of painting (should) acquire, “a density that is not entirely internal… alongside the ability to absorb and release something (that) allows a… sense (of) ascendency.”

With warm tonalities that range from deep browns and oranges to efflorescent yellows, roughened blacks and searing whites, Resnick’s Late Works emanate from the wall with a motionless presence like hot embers. In walking from piece to piece there is a mathematical, if organic, serial formation of symbolically loaded forms, yet the works infer a cultural presence that is distinctly different from the more specifically symbolic role of the Cross. In many, the same image is organized through devices that emphasize thin layers of the picture plane, giving rise to subtle and rich shifts of coloristic and textural effects, and paradoxically create a floating “space”. Other paintings contain frames within frames of emerging variations of the X forms, crosses and diamonds that cumulatively and individually shift from iconic stillness to pivots of activity, and which playfully explore simile-like ambiguities.

Resnick was known for rejecting “image” in favor of finding a greater reality. He embraced Gorky’s discovery that in putting a line somewhere other than where he thought it should go, he made pictorial structures that floated and suspended his own impulses, thus defying the shallower layers of his intentions. This idea became Resnick’s contradistinction to de Kooning’s more purely optical insight that in painting, “content was a glimpse.” Resnick, in his Talk Two, given in 1969, rather, was in favor of “content” as a “fall”.1 He further described the artist as one who, because his labor is useless - yet his product a result of work, “carries the pain of a leaking pail.” In this context, the crucible form of these works becomes more an analogue of the “severe tests” of finding beauty through an artist’s initiation into art’s state of uselessness in a practical world.

Related Links
http://www.figureworks.com/
http://www.nyss.org/

1 Geofrey Dorfman, Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School (New York, Midmarch Press, 2003)

Rachel Youens is a painter and critic who lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Portrait, 1908
    ink
    4" x 3-1/2"



Isadora Duncan Abstract, c.1918
    ink
    7" x 6"


Isadora Duncan Abstract, 1918
    ink
    7" x 5"


Portrait, 1908
    ink
   4" x 3-1/2"

Untitled, 2002
acrylic and ink on canvas
30-1/2 x 22-1/2 inches
Estate of Milton Resnick


Space, 2001
acrylic and ink on canvas
30-1/2 x 22-1/2 inches
Estate of Milton Resnick


X-Space, 2001
acrylic and ink on canvas
40 x 26 inches
Estate of Milton Resnick


Key, 2003
acrylic and ink on canvas
30-1/2 x 22-1/2 inches
Estate of Milton Resnick