Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1922, Albert Kresch moved with his family to New York in the 1930s. He began studying figure drawing at the Brooklyn Museum, but soon enrolled in the Hans Hofmann School. There he met Leland Bell, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Nell Blaine, Judith Rothschild, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Virginia Admiral among other artists of note. These friendships proved a source of inspiration throughout much of his life.
Kresch’s earliest works were abstract, but in 1948 when he was running a summer school in Rockport, MA he began to paint outdoors and produce works that were prophetic of his later landscapes. From that point he gradually became a painter of landscape and still life, working usually in oil on canvas. Typically he created unpopulated landscape scenes, many of which depicted areas in Maine, Nova Scotia, the Catskills, and New Mexico. Using pure primary colors he created horizontal bands of color, and often used unusual juxtapositions of hues that he built up with a thick impasto. His panoramic views, usually small in size, but monumental in statement, translated predominantly into abstract statements that focused on rhythm and the dialogue between color and content, and contained little to no detail.
Described as euphoric and poetic, Kresch’s work truly captured a site’s character, its weather and the mood it evoked in him. Through the contrast between dark surroundings and undiluted color, he succeeded in creating an internal glow in his works. Furthermore, he was able to intensify his colors by building up layer upon layer of paint to produce a light-refracting texture. Often painting in the hours between twilight and dusk, landscape became his stage setting, rather than his subject, in which he dramatized the instance of a change in the quality or slant of light. Kresch’s still lifes are quite different from his landscapes. In densely packed compositions composed of bright secondary colors like orange, violet and green, Kresch reinforced forms with heavy black outlines, and created a play between straight edges and curves.
Kresch received a BA from Brooklyn College in 1943, and an MA from New York University in 1951. He held teaching positions at Brooklyn College, Queens College, Pratt Institute, Hampton Institute, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 1954 he won a Fulbright Fellowship to Europe, aided in part by a letter of recommendation from his friend Willem de Kooning.
