IN Milton Resnick's living quarters, a spare cube built over a soaring, two-story studio space in a former synagogue on Eldridge Street in Manhattan, the monastic iron bed, as narrow as a child's cot, is unmade, a tangle of sheets at the headboard. But on a garment rack in a closet, worn tweed jackets hang expectantly. There's a cane next to the bed, and in the paint-flecked mini-studio, the walls are covered with bright, kinetic paintings, pencil sketches on lined Manila paper and photographs. You could imagine that Mr. Resnick, the irascible ''painter's painter'' Roberta Smith described as ''the last Abstract Expressionist'' in the obituary she wrote for The New York Times when the artist died almost eight years ago, had just wandered out for coffee. A calendar propped open on a chair declares it to be February 2004, the month before Mr. Resnick took his life at 87. On a bookshelf, above the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe, is a fairly recent photograph of Mr. Resnick and his wife, the artist Pat Passlof. They are grinning like conspirators, two pairs of expressive eyebrows aloft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]