Pat Passlof

1928-2011

Pat Passlof, wife of artist Milton Resnick (1917-2004) was an abstract expressionist painter who employed dramatically different styles often at the same time. Her abstract works could show some slight figuration painted in heavy earth colors with distinct brushstrokes visible or else she painted in a rococo like gestural abstraction with luminous colors and layering. Passlof and Resnick worked  in similar directions over the course of their careers. While Resnick worked at a much larger scale, Passlof experimented with new forms.

Pat Passlof – while an undergraduate at New York’s Queens College – was influenced by Willem de Kooning with whom she studied at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 and then privately for several years in New York City. Passlof completed her degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, which enabled her to teach. She taught at colleges around New York City for many years. 

During the 1950s, Passlof – along with other artists – exhibited in cooperative galleries in Manhattan on East Tenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Her approach to painting at that time contained quasi-figurative elements as in her 68-inch-square oil “Promenade for a Bachelor,” which has a repetitive birdlike shape made in loose gestural patches. She relied on the constant repetitive movements of her brush, that left each stroke distinct. Two years later in 1960 her “Mark’s House” was another large canvas where big outlined geometric shapes were unified by white brushstrokes. 

At the same time she painted “Promenade” and “Mark’s House” she also painted “Stove.” This work measured 77 by 69 inches and showed a cloud like blue mass with vibrant orange, yellow, and violet seen from under the cerulean paint.  

In the 1960s, Passlof was influenced by the late works of Claude Monet along with her husband and other abstract painters. She embraced Monet’s expanse of shallow, continuous space, and this technique became her focus for the next two decades. Her 1967 “Mulberry” is a narrow painting with blossom-like patches of orange, red, and pink. Her 1971-72 “Keeping Still Mountain” is a darker, landscape-inspired work  whose field has sequences of short curving lines. Into the 1980s she was still making abstractions as in her “Isosceles” which has a myriad of discrete and separate marks.

In the 1990s, Passlof was painting representational forms of people, horses, centaurs, etc. Her use of many brushstroke marks became grounds for these figures. Her husband also followed suit in his works. However, by the late 1990s, Passlof was using painterly grids and patterns. They included paintings that had muscular strokes as well as painting that had delicate strokes, such as “Bear” where single white bars moved across a brown field. 

From 1999 to 2000, she created a series of paintings which were inspired by American authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Allen Ginsberg. Her 1999 “Hawthorne” was a painting of variously  configured white bands separated by dark lines. Near the end of her life, Passlof allowed more organic forms to dominate as in her 2010 “Melon 2” and in one of her very last paintings where figures emerged from a dark field.

The Millton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation opened in 2018 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and is devoted to showing the work of both artists. Her work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. 

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