Richard Pousette-Dart was a pioneering
Abstract Expressionist and a visionary of the New York School, which
was active in the 1940s and 50s. Despite significant contact with
all members of this group, Pousette-Dart chose to leave New York City
in 1951 to preserve his artistic freedom. He remained fiercely
independent throughout his career, creating transcendental paintings
of extraordinary depth and radiance. Powerful dualities—circle and
square, man and cosmos, spirit and body, light and substance—are
central to his work. He explained in a 1947 artist statement, “I
strive to express the spiritual nature of the Universe. Painting for
me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and
transcending, yet solid and real.”
Born on June 8, 1916, in Saint Paul,
Minnesota, Pousette-Dart grew up in a culturally rich environment in
Valhalla, New York, where his family moved in 1918. His father,
Nathaniel Pousette, was a painter and writer on art, and his mother,
Flora Louise Dart, was a musician and poet. From childhood, they
fostered their son’s interest in art, philosophy, music, and
literature.Although Pousette-Dart had no formal art training, he
spent considerable time as a child watching his father at the easel
and discussing painting with him. After graduating from
Scarborough-on-Hudson High School, he briefly attended Bard College
in Annandale-on-Hudson, leaving before the end of his first year to
pursue a career as an artist. Encouraged by his parents, he moved to
Manhattan in 1937. To support himself, he first served as assistant
to the sculptor Paul Manship, his father’s friend, and then worked
as a secretary in a photographic studio. In 1939, he quit his job
and devoted himself fully to painting and sculpture.
During the 1940s, Pousette-Dart was
active in the avant-garde New York art world; he became one of the
youngest members of the emerging group of Abstract Expressionists.
His early paintings reflect his interest in Cubism, biomorphic
Surrealism, Jungian and Freudian theories of the unconscious, and
African and Native American art. He had his first solo show at the
Artist’s Gallery in 1941 and subsequently exhibited at Willard
Gallery along with Mark Tobey in 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century gallery in 1944, and at the Betty Parsons Gallery
(regularly from 1948 to 1967), where Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman,
and Mark Rothko also showed their work. Pousette-Dart participated
in discussions about abstraction at the legendary Studio 35, a
meeting place for Abstract Expressionist artists, including William
Baziotes, David Hare, Robert Motherwell and Rothko, and in the
activities of the Eighth Street Club, founded by Franz Kline, Willem
de Kooning, and Ad Reinhardt among others. He also socialized with
Abstract Expressionist painters at the Cedar Street Tavern on
University Place and at the 59th Street Automat.
In 1951, Pousette-Dart moved to
Rockland County, New York, where he lived with his wife, the poet
Evelyn Gracey, until his death in 1992. This self-imposed isolation
from the New York art world enabled him to distance himself from the
Abstract Expressionist movement and helped him to develop the unique
character of his imagery. However, he maintained a connection with
the next generation of artists by teaching at a variety of schools in
and around New York City, including the New School for Social
Research, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, the Arts
Students League, Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College.The
substance of paint, often squeezed directly on board, is a crucial
aspect of Pousette-Dart’s work. Its materiality adds dimension to
the viewer’s experience of light and color. Each touch carries
distinct highlights and shadows that shift according to the position
of the viewer or the source of light. As the viewer juggles the
distinct tasks of apprehending underlying shapes and appreciating the
physicality of each tiny unit of color, the experience of seeing
becomes as important as what is seen.
Pousette-Dart’s oeuvre displays cyclical variations on themes and often resists neat categorization according to a linear, chronological progression. Although there are exceptions, early in the 1960s Pousette-Dart generally backed away from including recognizable shapes and symbols in his work, instead creating diffuse “implosions” of pointillist color. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became preoccupied with reintegrating geometric shapes.His works can be found in the collection of many major museums in the United States, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.( Ro Gallery com )
