TitleStraws 14
Artist
Milton Resnick
(1917 - 2004)
Date1982
MediumOil on board
DimensionsUnframed: 40 × 29 7/8 in.
Framed: 41 × 30 3/4 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned on reverse: "Straw / M Resnick / 1982".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, January 7, 1987
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1987.6
Label TextWhile he never fully accepted the term Abstract Expressionist, Milton Resnick was part of the first generation of the New York School painters. Resnick was born in Bratslav, Ukraine and emigrated with his family to Brooklyn in 1922. He studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, for one year before continuing his art education at the American Artists School. He also worked briefly on the WPA's Federal Art Project in the mural division as an assistant. Resnick served in the army from 1940 to 1945 and was stationed in Europe and Iceland. During this time he essentially stopped painting altogether until his return to the U.S. As a close friend of Willem de Kooning, NA elect, Resnick fell under his influence and his early canvases from the late 1940s recall the colorful biomorphic abstractions of the older artist. After returning from three years in Paris, however, Resnick began to find an individual voice in his painting. As early as 1957, he was known for dense applications of paint that created an encrusted impastoed effect. While he had been a founding member of the Artists' Club and an exhibitor in the seminal 1951 Ninth Street show, by the early 1960s, Resnick had not achieved the notoriety of some of his contemporaries from the New York School. At that time the general aesthetic tenor was beginning to shift away from the expressiveness of Abstract Expressionism and toward a simplified language that would become Minimalism. Resnick's paintings, however, became much more heavily encrusted with paint and his work took a decidedly monochromatic turn about this time, laying the foundation for his paintings of the succeeding decades. The critical reception to Resnick's new style was tepid, but as one critic noted, not without merit, "many of the new paintings looks flatly uninteresting from a distance and you have to put your nose into them to get the reward of textural richness and density."
By the mid-1960s Resnick's work had become almost entirely monochromatic and encrusted with thick daubs of layered paint, a tendency that continued through the 1980s. "Straws 14" comes from a series of paintings completed during this decade that were an outgrowth of an earlier series Resnick began in the late 1970s, known as the Elephant series. The artist found himself in conversation with subsequent paintings and insisted that they told him that he was merely a straw in the wind, which ultimately led to the title of the series. Like other works in the "Straws" series, "Straws 14" is a seemingly infinite field of dark green that is deceptively colorful and interspersed with flecks of yellow, red, and brown. Works from this period have been identified as the extreme culmination of the overall effect sought after by members of the New York School.
