Paul Resika

Paul Resika (b. 1928) has been an integral part of the painting life of New York for more than seventy years. A precocious talent lauded by Clement Greenberg in his teens, Resika began studying with Hans Hofmann in 1945 and within two years he was producing dazzling abstractions. Although a promising member of the new avant-garde, Resika turned his back on Hofmann's teachings and moved to Europe to seek a classical education. He hewed to this contrarian path for years, finding his way back to a modern idiom in the late 1950s and 1960s through landscape, which reconnected him to the New York art scene. Becoming bolder and bolder in his composition and paint handling, Resika eventually embraced Hofmann's precepts and filtered them through his own mature vision to achieve a unique synthesis of representation and abstraction. Since the 1980s, Resika has been celebrated for his ravishing color and his ease in playing the past against the present: Titian, Tintoretto, and Corot are his masters, but so are Picasso, Matisse, and Bonnard.