Joel Resnicoff

Resnicoff's reputation would continue to grow well after his death. In his 2019 book "One Day: the Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America," Pulitzer-prize winning author Gene Weingarten would write about Resnicoff's death, but also praise his talent and his work: "Resnicoff worked within the genre pioneered by Andy Warhol--the collision of fine art and commercial art, which both artists considered a distinction without a difference. Resnicoff's work had balloony, cartoony echoes of Roy Lichtenstein and perspective-bending elements of Picasso, and certainly the impromptu feel of Keith Haring.... The truth is, the far more famous Haring was not nearly as inventive or versatile as Resnicoff."

However his work was described, a strong sense of humor was always evident—others referred to "his comic style," and he himself described his work as "joy, love, and humor"—but friends knew his life had more than its share of suffering and tragedy. He was diagnosed as HIV+ in 1984, very early on during the onset of what would become the AIDS pandemic that would take the lives of many of his friends and fellow artists, before his own death, on December 28, 1986.

In 1985, Resnicoff began working with Esprit, and in 1986, two summer seasons of clothing, including brightly colored shirts and scarves, featured his designs—with his signature on each item. Using an unusual approach, the company commissioned Resnicoff to paint a series of "oversize summery murals," which Esprit then used as a basis for its "sassy...bold, and colorful" fabric designs. In fact, Resnicoff's artwork for the summer designs were so successful that he was invited to repeat his collaboration with Esprit for an additional season, but by then he had to decline the invitation due to his failing health. In addition to his work with Espirit, Resnicoff also designed a series of Tee-Hee Shirts—pullovers and sweatshirts, and "cooking apparel"—aprons, gloves, and pot-holders, illustrated with whimsical characters similar to those on his Resnicards illustrations.

In the early 1980s, his unusual displays for windows in such major New York department stores as Macy's and Bloomingdale's caught the attention of both the public and the press, with an article in the New York Post reporting that his 1983 Macy's window display literally "stopped traffic" on 34th St. The windows were part of Macy's campaign to publicize Resnicoff's new shop in its New York location. His work was not limited to any one store or chain of stores, and although his link to Macy's would continue for a number of years, his artwork was also used by Bloomingdale's in a number of ways, including a series of brightly colored beach towels, marketed as "Camp Bloomie's." In addition to artwork that appeared on apparel and accessories, he created and illustrated a series of postcards and greeting cards, called ResniCards, that gently poked fun at New York City, its residents, and its tourists. In these cards, he contrasted often overweight women with the ultra-slim figures in the fashion world that he regularly used in his own illustrations. As one reviewer put it, his cards featured "pachiderm-sized dames in tacky-wacky get-ups...shattering la mode" He could poke fun at New York and New Yorkers because his love for both the city and its city-dwellers was well known. When asked to describe New York in three words, he wrote, energy, variety, and creativity.

At that time, he was already one of only a handful of illustrators and artists to be included in a collection that included such well-known names as Andy Warhol, but he was recognized as early as 1972, shortly after his start at Women's Wear Daily, as an "upcoming illustrator," who "manages to avoid the look alike syndrome of fashion illustration with models that are always more than elongated clothes hangers.... He has created his own coterie of now Gibson Girls, who manage to combine both innocence and the decadent langour of fin de siecle illustration. Five years before his death, in an article that appeared in the inaugural edition of the magazine, Hit Parade, the artist and writer, Francis Toohey, predicted that, "in years to come, Resnicoff's art might be likened to the advertising triumphs of Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec or to the graphic abandon of advertising during its artsy heyday of the 30s."

Joel Hirsch Resnicoff (October 23, 1948 – December 28, 1986) was an American artist and fashion illustrator, who incorporated expressionistic art into commercial fashion illustrations, stating his belief that "commercial art is the art of the century." His work did not fit easily into any one category, and "the figures in his amusing illustrations defy stereotype and are posed in unexpected ways." Those figures reflected a mixture of cultures, with viewers seeing something familiar to their own background, mixed with something more distant: a combination of the "girl next door," and "the girl on the other side of the world." So, for example, a Japanese work describes "the influence of black African sculptures," mixed with a more Japanese look characterized by "lips like cherry blossom petals, and almond-shaped eyes." His work captured the new impact of multiculturalism on art and the "standards of beauty" of the seventies, and along with artists such as Andy Warhol helped "blur the line between commercial art and fine art."