Pat Passlof: Memories of Tenth Street, 1948–63 by Eric Firestone Gallery

Shape Shifter: Pat Passlof, 1948–63

by Molly Warnock

Consider the lower left-hand corner of What Is Rome, 1960 (pl. 16), a superb mid-size painting in the present exhibition. There, rendered in the same shade of glowing cadmium orange that billows about the field as a whole, is a near-perfect isosceles triangle. The ruled right edge, immediately abutting a sliver of azure blue, was likely masked. The lower boundary, by contrast, wavers slightly, having been brushed freehand just above and roughly parallel to a bundle of oblique green brushstrokes; the latter are crossed in turn by elongated orange drips flowing both down and up, suggesting the canvas was rotated 180 degrees at least once in the course of its making. The shape’s left edge is by far the subtlest, but it clearly continues beneath the white brushstroke cropping the form’s lower corner: there is an oblique skip in the latter, no more than a hairsbreadth. All of this can be easy to miss, in contrast with the wealth of incident more readily offered to our gaze: the bold blue structures in the lower right, also triangular in form, securing the ground plane; the intimations of landscape in the lower left, with its green lines and arboreal gestures; the arcing stripes of blue, red, and ocher that suggest something like a fragment of rainbow just left of center; the long paint trickles that now evoke a summer shower. . . . Once seen, however, the barely perceptible triangle tugs at the mind. It cannot be an accident, but is it meaningful? And if so, how?

Pat Passlof’s work is tremendously varied. This is true at all stages of her more than six-decade-long career, but nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the germinal period covered by this show: the roughly fifteen years after her first encounter with Willem de Kooning’s work and, shortly thereafter, with the man himself. 1 By Passlof’s own account, these events—the elder painter’s spring 1948 solo début at Charles Egan Gallery, followed by their meeting that summer at Black Mountain College—precipitated her move to New York’s Tenth Street, where she attended events at The Club, helped to found the co-operative March Gallery in 1957, and developed enduring relationships

Pat Passlof with Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, c. 1955. Copyright Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

with other painters in the neighborhood’s highly active art community, marrying New York School painter Milton Resnick in 1962. Produced in this heady environment by an artist in her twenties and early thirties, the works gathered here largely baffle attempts to identify a signature style or linear developmental process. Palette, handling, and format vary considerably from one example to the next; compositions oscillate between representational and seemingly abstract elements. Even so, one might detect a certain constant. At a time when artists increasingly embraced the allover field, and many suppressed drawing altogether in favor of impersonal expanses of color, 2 Passlof’s work reveals the continued—if at times subterranean—pull of the discrete shape.

This aspect of Passlof’s early art has not escaped notice. Writing in Art News in March 1961, on the occasion of the painter’s unique solo exhibition at the Green Gallery, the critic Valerie Peterson had this to say: “Her works develop backwards—the earliest from a circumscribed shape, then to a concentration on the stroke that impelled the shape, finally back further to where this shape is only fitfully remembered—yet never completely nullified; intrusive enough to annoy the color’s complacent abandon with echoes of obligations.” 3 The penultimate line in a review running seven sentences in all, Peterson’s astute yet sibylline observation raises more questions than it answers. Among them: What obligations echo in Passlof’s paintings? And how, exactly, are they grounded in shape?

Exhibition Poster for the Pat Passlof solo exhibition at March Gallery, New York, 1959. Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Pat Passlof in her studio on Tenth Street, c. 1958. Photo by Jesse Fernandez, copyright Estate of Jesse Fernandez.

Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

But first, what kinds of shapes are we talking about? At one end of the spectrum, as What Is Rome attests, are geometric forms. Many of the squares, trapezoids, and assorted polygons that appear in Passlof’s paintings are rooted in the cubist grid. 4 The underlying authority of that scaffolding is at times declared, as in an untitled painting of 1957 (pl. 4) revealing a smattering of firm, black horizontal and vertical line segments; often, however, it is largely obscured, as in the concurrent Theater (pl. 10), in which a lone brown square with heavy contours nonetheless appears perfectly aligned with the painting’s edges. Other compositions, such as an untitled abstraction of 1952 (pl. 9), recall Kandinsky’s freer dispersal of shapes in his paintings of the 1920s and ’30s. Triangles are especially recurrent, and appear

to have a privileged status already in Passlof’s early works; in the 1952 picture, as in another untitled work of 1955 (pl. 13), an isosceles has been drawn with striking precision. 5 It is a choice worth pausing over. A figure often associated with stability and balance, as in the famously pyramidal compositions of the Italian Renaissance, the triangle, turned on one point, might equally suggest a more precarious poise. Did Passlof, like Kandinsky, understand it as a singularly affecting form, indeed a living being in its own right?

Passlof’s grid also has room for more biomorphic shapes, however. De Kooning’s work of the later 1940s is the avowed model, as an untitled painting of 1950 makes

Pat Passlof in her studio on Tenth Street, c. 1958. Photo by Jesse Fernandez, copyright Estate of Jesse Fernandez.

Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

clear (pl. 1). The flowing, M-like line that appears to the right of center echoes the curved and lobed shapes in his black paintings in particular, as do the humped white forms in her compositions of the later ’50s. Yet where de Kooning digests these fleshy elements into ever more angular fragments, Passlof builds them back into creaturely silhouettes all her own: for example, the orphaned zoomorph, somewhere between a turtle and a snail, that appears to the right of center in AS- Brown, 1959 (pl. 6); or the asymmetrical, blue-gray being in Cherokee, also 1959 (pl. 22); or the ferocious yet comical beast with a C-shaped head, seemingly all mouth, that enters a third painting from that same year (pl. 14) from the bottom left, and appears on the verge of devouring a sketchily indicated square. Or, indeed, the two ungainly entities, each at least partially outlined in red, to the lower right in Mint, 1960 (pl. 21). In each case, the depicted shape is under intense

Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof at Le Métro, c. 1962–63.

opposite : Pat Passlof in her studio on Forsyth Street, 1964. Photo by Jack Lloyd Taylor. Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

pressure. It is by turns stranded amid an onrush of formless mud, barred by a series of pale brushstrokes, eroded by rivulets that transgress its bounds, and scribbled over with gestures that wed it to the larger pictorial fabric. Yet it equally evinces a surprisingly resistant, even obdurate quality. Something similar happens in Passlof’s contemporaneous paintings in a more geometric mode—for example, Dice, 1959 (pl. 15), or Mark’s House, 1960 (pl. 7). Even so, the peculiar pathos of her suggestively sentient shapes shows us, I think, something more of what is at stake for Passlof: the discreteness and finitude proper to bodies, however fantastically reimagined.

And yet, however important the role of the discrete form, Peterson is not wrong in her 1961 review to suggest that Passlof’s exploration of shape is very

nearly superseded—at least in certain pictures—by an exploration of “the stroke that impelled the shape.” (Indeed, the immediately preceding examples confirm this claim.) The push and pull between shape and stroke is already fully evident in her mid-1950s works that incorporate black drawing: the lines indicate but rarely fully enclose shapes. Adjacent color areas mingle at their increasingly brushy edges, and the differently hued zones themselves begin to open up, bristling with individual gestures.

Yet it is just here, significantly, that we see the emergence of a new kind of zoomorphic figuration, one in which creaturely forms appear to coalesce from the very act of sweeping the surface with paint—or indeed, to recapture gesture as shape. Already in 1956 and 1957, two pictures move in this direction: in March Bird

(pl. 2), the title figure is economically described with spare black strokes; while in an untitled canvas, another avian head, now with a prominent beak (pl. 3), emerges from a flurry of broad white strokes, the handling in marked contrast to that of the carefully delineated blue trapezoid at the painting’s center. 6 In one slightly later composition, the nearly square Yellow Landing, 1958 (pl. 5), a series of long vertical brushstrokes in chestnut brown cohere into a small, deer-like animal with a bowed head. The form does not register as premeditated, but it has clearly been reinforced: brown lines trace the contours of the head and ear. As if by reverberation, the woolly area of gray- and blue-tinged white on the painting’s right, composed of thickly encrusted pigment worked over with looping, cursive gestures, also assumes a sentient air. Two black spots become eyes; a large, green- and blackedged triangle suggests an ear. Interlocking at the

picture’s heart, the two forms metaphorize the meeting of its lateral halves. Perhaps the most complex example, however, is AS- Brown, the painting with the turtle-snail hybrid staring down the muddy swell. Juxtaposed with the cubist rubble arranged around the painting’s edges and heaped in the lower left, that casual tumble of sludge appears the ideal emblem for the unshaped. And yet, just here, the picture holds another possibility in reserve. To the upper left are the partial outlines of another animal, perhaps a dog or a horse: two upright triangular ears, two longish marks that could be eyes, a cluster of repeating Ws that read as mouth- or muzzle-like, and two forelegs. Where the white shape stands out immediately, this creature is slow, taking time to come into view. Reminiscent in that respect of the stealth isosceles in What Is Rome, it too creates a powerful latency effect, as if the entire field were brimming with potential shapes—or as Peterson would have it, the echoes of shapes. (Is that a hind leg one sees near the central axis?)

Can the stroke itself be a shape? Passlof toys with the question in her paintings of the later ’50s and early ’60s, nowhere more explicitly than in a group of pictures art critics have typically related to her contemporaneous interest in Monet, shared by Resnick. 7 Examples in this exhibition include the ambitious Ile Fra, 1960 (pl. 19)—a painting praised in Peterson’s review as a “world-sized panorama . . . luxurious with beauty”—as well as Rittie, also 1960 (pl. 25), and two untitled paintings of 1961 and 1962, the first with deep blue and pale orange gestures within a mint-green field (pl. 18), the second primarily in shades of dark blue, rust, and purple (pl. 26). Woven from highly visible gestures in relatively thin paint, the compositions reveal an extraordinary variety of modes of handling: small, spot-like patches; horizontal and vertical sweeps; condensed, cursive squiggles; sharp, angular Vs; and small loops or horseshoe-like traces. It appears that Passlof is trying to invest the individual brushstroke with its own formal identity, a sense of having been precisely shaped in its own right.

Invitation for Pat Passlof solo exhibition at Feiner Gallery, New York, c. 1962–63. Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Here and there, however, the pull of her established repertory proves irresistible: the strokes close upon themselves or collaborate to form miniature triangles and diamonds, circles and pointed ellipses. Even more telling, perhaps, the paintings are underwritten by shape in another way: through the grouping of gestures in like-colored clusters. In Ile Fra, the irregular areas of predominantly violet, powder blue, and olive green gestures, among other monotonal zones, recall the amoeboid forms in the earliest painting in this show, a 1948 abstraction with pink and red areas (pl. 8).

Miss Julia, 1961 (pl. 24), formalizes the tendency in a geometric mode. Retaining and extrapolating upon the freer handling at work in Ile Fra even as it resuscitates the grid with sudden explicitness, it reaffirms shape as an organizing principle.

It is, however, a very different picture that brings us back most directly to Peterson’s reference to color and its obligations. Purple Drawing, 1960 (pl. 20), is the sole monochrome in the present show, its small linen support given over entirely to the title color. Or not quite entirely: the exposed cloth plays an important role throughout the picture, peeking out between Passlof’s feathery gestures and around the edges. Dark purple brushstrokes and fine graphite lines further stress, by way of reiteration, the limits of the support. To the left of center, meanwhile, one finds the outline of another triangle, the brushstroke that forms its right-most edge sweeping down from the painting’s upper register. Finally, Passlof seems to have run a dry brush over the whole, effectively creating a new order of drawing—one borne uniquely by the pattern of bristle traces—atop the otherwise discontinuous purple areas. There is no fantasy here of color cut free from things, unleashed into what Peterson calls “complacent abandon”; it has been worked in every particular. Patently bound to a specific, clearly delimited surface with its own material properties, Purple Drawing ’s color both describes and belongs to shapes: the triangle it contains, the rectangle it occupies.

And what of the shape with which we began? The camouflaged isosceles in the lower left of What Is Rome is not a symbolic key; it unlocks no otherwise concealed meaning. Rather, it serves as a subtle metonym for the painter’s commitment to shaping as such—as well as a memorable reminder that things can hide, and therefore be discovered, in plain view; that the shape of our experience is always shifting. Carefully molded by human hands, Passlof’s triangle tethers color to the world, in a landscape with weight and weather.

Notes

1. Pat Passlof, “1948,” Art Journal 48, no. 3 (1989): 229. For more on Passlof’s early years, her relationship with de Kooning, and her embedment within the Tenth Street scene, see in particular Karen Wilkin, Pat Passlof: The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain (New York: Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, 2019); Raphael Rubinstein, Pat Passlof: Paintings from the 1950s (New York: Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 2014); and Eleanor Heartney, Pat Passlof: Selections 1948–2011 (Asheville, NC: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2012).

2. The concept of impersonality plays a key role in the critical discourse around Color Field painting, in which the technique of staining, in particular, was understood as a means of effacing traces of the artist’s hand. See for example Michael Fried, “Morris Louis” (1965), reprinted in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72. Howard Singerman provides a comprehensive overview of the broader pull of ideas of impersonality throughout this period in “NonCompositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 125–50.

3. Valerie Peterson, “Patricia Passlof,” Art News 60, no. 1 (March 1961): 14.

4. Karen Wilkin has noted the importance of the grid in Passlof’s work. See in particular, Wilkin, “The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain,” in Pat Passlof: The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain, 13.

5. Isosceles, it is worth noting, is also the title of a 1980 painting by Passlof—one that, paradoxically, appears in reproduction as among her most allover. (I have not seen this work in person.)

6. As Raphael Rubinstein has noted, Passlof in the 1950s produced a number of paintings “on avian themes.” He includes in this group Cassowary, 1954; March Bird, 1956 (on view in the present exhibition); Score for a Bird, 1956; and Promenade for a Bachelor, 1958. See Rubinstein, “An Interstice of Time: Pat Passlof in the 1950s,” in Pat Passlof: Paintings from the 1950s, np. If my reading is right, this untitled painting could be added to his list.

7. This reception begins in 1961, with Donald Judd’s Arts Magazine review of the Green Gallery show. See Judd, “Pat Passlof,” reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/ New York: New York University Press, 2005), 34.

MARCH BIRD 1956

38 X 38 INCHES

OIL ON LINEN

37 X 44 INCHES

OIL ON LINEN

ON PAPER MOUNTED TO LINEN 29 X 33 INCHES

OIL ON PAPER MOUNTED TO WOOD 22 X 30 INCHES

YELLOW LANDING 1958

OIL

BROWN 1959 OIL ON LINEN 50 X 58 INCHES

MARK’S HOUSE 1960

OIL ON LINEN

70 X 81 INCHES

11 X 15½ INCHES

X 17 INCHES

UNTITLED 1958

ON PAPER MOUNTED TO LINEN

X 20 INCHES

X 16 INCHES

ON PAPER MOUNTED TO LINEN 18 X 24 INCHES

UNTITLED 1959

OIL ON PAPER MOUNTED TO LINEN

19 X 24 INCHES

UNTITLED 1961

OIL ON PAPER MOUNTED TO LINEN

22 ½ X 17 INCHES

INCHES

OIL ON LINEN

X 36 INCHES

Pat Passlof b. Brunswick, GA, 1928; d. New York City, 2011

EDUCATION

1946–48 Queens College, New York, NY

1948 Black Mountain College, Ashville, NC, studying under: Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, M. C. Richards, Merce Cunningham, and Willem de Kooning

1948–50 Private study with Willem de Kooning, New York, NY

1951 BFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI

TEACHING

1983–2010 College of Staten Island, CUNY, Staten Island, NY

1972–83 Richmond College, CUNY, Staten Island, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021 Memories of Tenth Street: Paintings by Pat Passlof, 1948–63 , Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

2020 Pat Passlof: Fifty Years on Paper, New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture; Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY

2019–20 Pat Passlof: The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain , Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY

2014 Pat Passlof: Paintings from the 1950s , Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

2012 Pat Passlof: Selections 1948–2011 , Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC

Pat Passlof: Selections 1948–2011, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC

2011 Recent Paintings: 2005–2011 , Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

2005 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

2002 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

2001 College of Staten Island/CUNY, Staten Island, NY

2000 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

1998 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

1996 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

1993 Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

1978 Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

1974 Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

1973 Forrest Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

1963 Feiner Gallery, New York, NY

1963 Globe Gallery, New York, NY

1962 Feiner Gallery, New York, NY

1962 Globe Gallery, New York, NY

1961 Green Gallery, New York, NY

1959 March Gallery, New York, NY

1952 Circle Gallery, Detroit, MI

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2021 Women in the Arts Foundation 71–21: Celebrate Five Decades of WIA Women In the Arts Foundation, Inc. 50th Anniversary Exhibition , Ceres Gallery, New York, NY

13 American Artists, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

2017 Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction , MoMA, New York, NY, organized by Starr Figura and Sarah Hermanson Meister with Hillary Reder

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 , Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY, curated by Melissa Rachleff

2012–13 To be a Lady: forty-five women in the arts , 1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, curated by Jason Andrew

2011 Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY, curated by Robert S. Mattison and Loretta Howard

Color Study, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC

2009 Club Without Walls , Butler’s Fine Art, East Hampton, NY

2008–9 The Shape of Imagination: Women of Black Mountain College , Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC

2006 Greetings from Black Mountain College , Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, curated by Robert Godfrey

The 181st Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art , National Academy of Design Museum, New York, NY

2004 Ground—Field—Surface , Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY

A Bend in the Road: Paintings and Works on Paper by Jake Berthot, Philip Guston, Bill Jensen, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick, and Myron Stout, Maier Museum of Art, RandolphMacon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, VA, curated by Kathy and Jim Muehlemann

Summer Color, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

2002 Black Mountain College, An American Adventure , Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, curated by Vincent Katz

Painting: A Passionate Response, The Painting Center, New York, NY, curated by Michael Walls

177th Annual, National Academy of Design Museum, New York, NY

2001 Artist Couples , Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, NY

2000 Intuitive Abstraction , Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, curated by Nancy Einreinhofer

American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture , New York, NY

Generation II: A Survey of Women Artists at the Millennium , A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1999 Rivington Gallery, New York, NY

Material Abstraction , Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY

1997–98 Crossing the Threshold , Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, New York, NY, traveling exhibition curated by Bernice Steinbaum

1997 American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, NY

1994 Spellbound , Blondies Contemporary Art, New York, NY

1993 Figuration ’93 , 55 Mercer Street Gallery, New York, NY

1992 Paths to Discovery—The New York School: Works on Paper from the 1950s and 1960s , Sidney Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College/CUNY, New York, NY, curated by Ellen Russotto

1991–92 Figure Variations , Kathryn Sermas Gallery, New York, NY

1991 Selection: The New York School, Works on Paper from the 1950s and 1960s , Elston Fine Arts, New York, NY

The Nude: Drawings by New York School Artists circa 1930–1950, Twining Gallery, New York, NY

1989 Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, NY

1988 Envoys, New York Studio School, NY

1987 New York-Beijing, Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA, traveled to Hong Kong Arts Festival, Shanghai Art Museum, and Beijing Art Museum

1986 Art from the City University of New York: Approaches to Abstraction, Shanghai, China

Portraits , Sorkin Gallery, New York, NY

1985 Naked Paint , Newhouse Gallery, Snug Harbor, NY

Survival of the Fittest , Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

The Gathering of the Avant-Garde: The Lower East Side 1950–1970 , Kenkeleba House Gallery, New York, NY

1984 Art Galaxy, New York, NY

1 + 1 = 2 , Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York

1984–86 Synergy Artists , Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, traveling exhibition

1983 Paint as Image , Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ

Abstract Painting 1960–1969 , P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, curated by Richard Bellamy

Paint as Image , Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, NY

1982 Print Show, Ingber Gallery, New York, NY

Artists’ Choice , Gruenebaum Gallery, New York, NY

Synergy Artists 1 + 1 = 3 , Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, New York, NY

1977 Tenth Street Days: The Co-Ops of the 50s , Pleiades Gallery, New York, NY

Tenth Street Now, Landmark Gallery, New York, NY

1976–77 Works on Paper from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection , Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY

Works on Paper from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection , Wichita Falls Museum and Art Center, Wichita Falls, KS

Four Painters: Oversize Paintings , University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY

1975–76 Color, Light and Image—An International Invitational , Interart Center, New York, NY

1975 Works on Paper, Women in the Arts Foundation, Inc., Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

1974 Works on Paper from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection , Summit Art Center, Summit, NJ

Works by Women from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection , Weatherspoon Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; traveled to Kresge Art Center Gallery, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

1973 Women Choose Women , Women in the Arts, New York Cultural Center, New York, NY

1970 Roswell Museum, Roswell, NM

1963 Contemporary Artists , Riverside Museum, New York, NY

1962 Feiner Gallery, New York, NY

1961 Gallery Group Show, Green Gallery, New York, NY

1960 Reuben Gallery, New York, NY

Schweig Gallery, St. Louis, MO

The Women: Tops in Art, Dord Fitz Gallery, Amarillo, TX

1958 The 1958 Bicentennial International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA

March Gallery, New York, NY

1957 March Gallery, New York, NY

PERMANENT COLLECTION S

Birla Museum, Kolkata, India

CIBA- GEIGY Collection, Ardsley, New York

Corcoran Legacy Collection, American University Museum, Washington, D.C.

Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina

Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina

Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Virginia

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roswell Museum, Roswell, New Mexico

Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank everyone at Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation and Susan Reynolds, Executive Director of the Foundation, for entrusting us to put together this significant exhibition of Pat Passlof’s early work. Without their support and scholarship this exhibition would not have been possible.

Thank you to Molly Warnock for her thoughtful and insightful words on Passlof’s work and life in the catalog essay.

Thank you as well to those who participated in the exhibition’s accompanying panel discussion, “What I’m After Is Magic?”: Geoffrey Dorfman, Trustee, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, and Milton Resnick Biographer; Ying Li, artist and close friend of Pat Passlof; David Loncle, artist, writer, and publisher of Pat Passlof, To Whom the Shoe Fits: Letters to Young Painters; Craig Manister, artist, educator, and former student and friend of Pat Passlof; and Karen Wilkin, Atelier Head of Art History, the New York Studio School, and curator of The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain: Pat Passlof, Paintings, 1949–2011. It was a pleasure to hear you share your thoughts and memories of Passlof and her career.

I would like to thank my staff for their continued commitment to scholarship and research. It has been an honor to reintroduce this historic body of work by this significant American artist.

Eric Firestone

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

PAT PASSLOF: MEMORIES OF TENTH STREET, 1948–63

November 10, 2021–January 22, 2022 on view at Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

ISBN: 978-0-578-39398-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905043

Cover: Ile Fra , detail, 1960, see pl. 19

Frontispiece: Pat Passlof in her studio on 10th Street, c. 1958.

Photo by Jesse Fernandez. Copyright Estate of Jesse Fernandez. Courtesy Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Reproduction of contents prohibited

Published by Eric Firestone Press

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street, 4th floor New York, NY 10012

646-998-3727

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

631-604-2386

ericfirestonegallery.com

Principal: Eric Firestone

Director of Research: Jennifer Samet

Project Management: Kara Winters

Principal Photography: Jenny Gorman

Copyeditor: Natalie Haddad

Design: Russell Hassell, New York

Printing: Puritan Capital, New Hampshire