Milton Resnick: Earth, Elephant, New Bride brings together three of Resnick’s most significant mid-career paintings—New Bride (1963) on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Earth (1976) on loan from MoMA, and Elephant (1979)—for the first time. Though Resnick was a dedicated abstractionist rather than a landscape painter, these works establish their own microcosmic dimensions of reality: acting as overall steady-state textures just as they present entire worlds in and of themselves.
Resnick painted New Bride on Spruce Street, only a few blocks from the Foundation. This single painting represented a sea change in Resnick’s career: the artist himself describes its composition as “no strokes anymore, just paint.” He completed it a few years after his 1961 marriage to fellow Abstract Expressionist Pat Passlof. Though it appears white for all intents and purposes, closer inspection of its surface reveals subtle tonal variations produced by Resnick’s obsessive layering process (it was originally blue).
Earth and Elephant, on the other hand, are both rendered in his more typical dark palette. Shown in conversation, these three landmark paintings evoke the cyclical struggle between form and emptiness (positive and negative, sunlight and shadow, life and death) that dominated Resnick’s post-war environment.
Milton Resnick: Earth, Elephant, New Bride is located on the second floor of the Foundation. An exhibition catalogue including an essay by Geoffrey Dorfman—painter, critic, friend of Milton Resnick, and Vice President of the Foundation board—is available to purchase on site and on the Foundation’s website.
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation