ART-PRESENTATION: Richard Pousette-Dart,Works 1940-1992

Richard Pousette-Dart is the forgotten man of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, which transformed American art in the post-war years. It is often assumed that Jackson Pollock was the first Abstract Expressionist artist to start working at a very large scale in 1943. However, Richard Pousette-Dart had already completed his painting “Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental” (1941-42), making it arguably one of the Movement’s first monumental canvasses.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Richard Pousette-Dart: Works 1940-1992” at Pace Gallery in London, span Pousette-Dart’s career, features a selection of 14 paintings dating from 1943 to 1992, as well as works on paper from the 1940s exhibited for the first time. The works on view illuminate the artist’s development from his early work through his later paintings. His paintings display his painterly gifts in a wide range of techniques using brush, palette knife and paint squeezed directly from the tube. The uniqueness of each work illustrates the painter’s claim that, “every painting is a new experience and departure into the unknown”. Born on 8/6/1916, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a musician-poet mother and an artist-writer father, Richard Pousette-Dart began to paint from the early age of 8. He spent his childhood in Valhalla, New York, and then briefly attended Bard College in the Hudson River Valley, New York, in 1936. When he was 20 years old, Pousette-Dart moved to New York to pursue a career as an artist. Just one year later, in 1937, he became an assistant to sculptor Paul Manship and subsequently worked as a secretary in Lynn Morgan’s photography studio until 1939. The latter appointment instilled a passion for photography that would remain with the artist even after he chose painting as his primary medium. In 1941 the Artists’ Gallery, New York, hosted Poussette-Dart’s first solo exhibition, and soon after he was showing his work at many of the galleries that supported the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Between 1941 and 1942, Pousette-Dart painted what many consider to be the first grand-scale work in Abstract Expressionism, “Symphony No.1, The Transcendental”. Several of his large-scale works from this period have a dark tenor, as in “Crucifixion, Comprehension of the Atom” (1944), where he grapples with the themes of nuclear war and human suffering. Extremely attuned to formal issues, Pousette-Dart developed his pantheon of animal forms into an extensive array of squiggles, triangles, ovaloids, and cell-like shapes, a vocabulary that would come to characterize his organic, gestural dynamism for years to come. During this generative period in New York, Pousette-Dart showed at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery (1947) and at the Betty Parsons Gallery (1948). Pousette-Dart quarried many of the same sources, including Surrealism and Jungian psychology, as his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters, and his early efforts are similarly indebted to the work of Pablo Picasso and the art of non-Western cultures in their use of totemic forms, emphatic color, and pronounced gestural brushwork. Richard Pousette-Dart was the youngest member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists; the artist, along with several of his important contemporaries, took part in the formative meeting of Studio 35 and is included in the iconic Irascibles* photograph by Nina Leen that appeared in Time Life Magazine (24/11/1950) In 1951, Pousette-Dart moved with his young family to Rockland County where a small artistic community had formed. This meant that although he was an influential member of the New York school his remove allowed him to continue to develop and maintain a unique methodology and style. The artist’s relative longevity provided him the time to expand upon his earlier work, developing a mature body of work rooted in his mysticism, symbolism, and spiritual beliefs. From the 1960s on, Pousette-Dart began creating paintings with “points” of paint rather than gestural lines and strokes. Some canvases are built up with heavy impasto and display a strong physicality, while other paintings are more thinly layered and more focused on colour and light. Later works such as “Presence”, “Blue Amaranth” and “Imploding Black” appear at first glance to be monochromatic visual fields, however, wide spectrums of colur emerge subtly through the points of white. While famous in his day, Pousette-Dart’s legacy has faded more than that of some of his Abstract Expressionist peers. This is explained in part by the independent quality of his work, being neither expressionist nor fully abstract, it tends to be left out of canonical accounts of the New York School. Pousette-Dart also lacked the notoriety and brooding mien of other contemporaries. He was a vegetarian and spiritualist who avoided alcohol and depression, and thus does not fit the stereotype of the suffering artist that others embodied.

*The Irascibles was the label given to a group of American Abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum’s exhibition “American Painting Today – 1950” and boycotting the accompanying competition. The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph, that appeared in Life magazine, gave them notoriety, popularised the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the movement. The Irascibles are: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and Hedda Sterne

Info: Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, Duration: 18/1-20/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com