Richard Pousette-Dart

In 1918 the Pousette-Dart family moved to Valhalla, New York. Nathaniel became a commercial art director at the J. Walter Thompson Company and edited the Distinguished American Artists publication series on Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, John Singer-Sargent, Abbott H. Thayer, and J.A.M. Whistler.

Flora Pousette-Dart organized music and poetry salons and maintained an interest in alternative religious movements such as Theosophy; Nathaniel Pousette-Dart collected non-Western works of art and during the mid-1930s published the magazines Art of Today and Art and Artists of Today that advanced modernist American art. Encouraged by his parents, Richard began painting at the age of eight, and in 1928 he and Nathaniel appeared in the New York Times drawing one another’s portraits.

For his senior class magazine, The Beechwood Tree, he contributed the essay “I Have Been Called a Dreamer,” a foundational statement for his lifelong commitment to pacifism. That year, he enrolled at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, but left during his first semester to pursue art independently. At Bard, Pousette-Dart manned a telephone switchboard, signaling his strong interest and aptitude towards mechanical objects and electronics. Throughout his life, Pousette-Dart built and operated ham radios, and modified clocks, watches and cameras in a quest to understand “how things work.”

A dramatic portrait of 1939 shows John D. Graham, whose book System and Dialectics of Art (1937) emphasizes myth and primitivism as avenues to the exploration of the unconscious mind, influencing many young New York abstractionists. During this period, Pousette-Dart worked briefly as an assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship, then as a secretary in the Manhattan photographic retouching studio of Lynn T. Morgan. The latter appointment proved transformative, as Pousette-Dart’s later dot or dab paintings are deeply indebted to his experience scrutinizing composite points of light through the photographic process.

Deeply interested in French-born British sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s advocacy for non-classical models of figurative abstraction, Pousette-Dart created a series of modest-sized carvings in marble and ebony, as well as the bronze cast Woman Bird Group, 1939. Embracing Native American and African influences, as well as European cubism and surrealism, Pousette-Dart’s work during this period – including hundreds of richly colored works on paper – frequently explores the power of formal relationships through the massing of planes.

These pocket-sized works exemplify the art critic Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form” – shapes and organic symbols found in nature that are universally recognized for their aesthetic qualities. Ultimately, these forms reappeared as elemental imagery within Pousette-Dart’s paintings throughout his career, combined and layered into interlocking units that interact as a complex visual vocabulary.

During this decade he lived and worked on East 22nd Street in New York City, and by 1941 had relocated to East 56th Street, maintaining a studio overlooking the Queensborough Bridge on nearby 59th Street.

Other paintings from this period, including Desert, reveal that Pousette-Dart was already moving decisively towards large-scale, complex arrangements of elemental imagery that place him as an early innovator among leading mid-century American abstractionists.

Monumental in size and densely painted in more than 40 layers, the work is organized upon an uneven grid containing circles, teardrops, ovals, arcs, diamonds, and crosses—forms celebrated in Pousette-Dart’s brass sculptures. The title of the painting suggests an orchestral balance of harmony and counterpoint—Pousette-Dart was a passionate admirer of the works of Bach—and alludes directly to the transcendental qualities of spiritual unity and wholeness.

During this period, Pousette-Dart worked across media that included painting, drawing, hand-cut brasses and collage, experimenting widely with pigments and approaches to materials, including incorporating sand and small objects into paintings, layering materials to produce dense, textured surfaces, and scraping and scoring both paintings and works on paper. His painting was shown in dialogue with works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and others during this critical phase for the maturation for American abstract painting.

Crucifixion, Comprehension of the Atom of 1944, featured in this exhibition, reveals Pousette-Dart’s rapid maturation as an artist. The painting invokes, on one hand, the tragic devastation of war, which Pousette-Dart railed against as a conscientious objector; on the other, the dynamism of new frontiers in science and the expanding American psyche that propelled modern art forward immediately after World War II.

Showcasing his own darkroom experiments and printing, many of these photographs utilize double-exposure, layering and other techniques to create ethereal and sometimes painterly effects. Around this time, Saul Leiter moved to New York to study painting with Pousette-Dart, and ultimately choose to pursue photography due to his teacher’s influence.

The following year, MoMA acquired Number 11: A Presence. The theme and title “Presence” remained a recurring interest for Pousette-Dart, and Presence paintings often feature a dominant visual field with diffuse transitions to surrounding imagery, mirroring the divide between the conscious and unconscious, and the physical and immaterial worlds.

He attended meetings at the informal Greenwich Village school “Subjects of the Artist,” organized by William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, and made important intellectual contributions during a three-day closed conference now known as “Studio 35.” In 1950, Pousette-Dart joined in signing an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art rejecting the exhibition American Painting Today – 1950. This boycott received coverage in Life magazine that featured the now-iconic photograph by Nina Leen known as “The Irascibles." In October of 1951, Look magazine published a photo essay on Pousette-Dart titled “Spontaneous Kaleidoscopes” that featured his painting, sculpture and brasses, as well as poetry.

Although the move was precipitated by the impending demolition of the apartment building in which they lived, Richard Pousette-Dart quickly embraced his new rural surrounds and larger studio, and that year he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to assert himself more comprehensively as an artist. In his one-man exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery of September–October of 1951 he exhibited, a series of sculptures created from steel wire, sheet metal and found objects alongside his paintings. Working across mediums, imagery became concentrated into apparition-like centralized forms, leading toward the creation of large-scale paintings that feature a single or dominant shape.

Disinclined in general towards institutionalized religion, Pousette-Dart read excerpts from his studio notebooks, positing: “Art is always mystical in its final meaning; it is structure which stands up by the presence and significance of its own meaning. It is a thing within itself, mirroring different things to different minds, stemming from and in accord with every work of art ever created; a thing of awe and wonder whose meaning is the measure of man’s estate in earth.”

This recognition, in turn, garnered demand for his photographic work, and during the following years he completed commissions for Condé Nast and other publishers, especially Charm magazine. Preferring to concentrate on subjects within the arts, his portraits include those of choreographer Bob Fosse and jazz luminaries, such as Thad Jones and The Modern Art Quartet.

Employing variably drawn line and occasional applications of tints of color, the White Paintings achieve both depth and an effect of ethereal luminosity. As Pousette-Dart described the White Paintings: “Sometimes it seems as if I just paint one painting, from a white canvas through an experience of colors and lines and then back to white again, yet always enriched, nothing is ever lost…, a final experience of white on white having traveled through and through, like an area of ground wherein much dancing has occurred. Sometimes I feel my paintings exist not on canvas but in space, like musical progressions..."

The label Byzantine also applies, linking effects achieved on canvas to the shimmering qualities of mosaics. The monumental Blood Wedding, first exhibited at the Whitney Annual of 1958, recalls both the diverse themes and approaches of Pousette-Dart’s earlier abstract expressionist painting and marked a move towards simplified fields of color built from dabs of pigment that defined the artist’s paintings from 1960 onward. Nearly sculptural in density, Blood Wedding plots the interplay of line and form in concert with intense luminosity that radiates through multiple layers of rich and brilliant oil pigment.

The nearby Ramapo Mountains, abundant foliage and expansive skies quickly informed his imagery, not as illustrations, but as highly sensitive recordings of harmonious forces. Meditation on the Drifting Stars, for example, is an abstract celestial landscape that conveys expanding and converging cross-sections of seeming infinitude. In such works, Pousette-Dart applied thousands of points of paint to surfaces with the tip of a brush, equivalent to the particles that constitute light. Likening this praxis to his early experience retouching photographs, the artist noted: “all form is made up of so many points of light and everything has a molecular structure… I’m concerned with form and the nature of light, and I find that I can achieve variations in form through many touches of the brush in a way that I can’t with a single stroke of the brush.”

Both exhibitions presented recent works created through small touches of contrasting color that foreground a pulsating effect and place emphasis on the process of seeing as they engender a consciousness of interconnectedness and perception of over-all unity. In works like Transcendent Presence and Sky Presence, Morning, Pousette-Dart noted his process of “tuning;” achieving an asymmetrical balance that makes all parts of the canvas vibrate in unity and resonate over a temporal duration, like a musical composition.

Believing in individual expression over traditional art training, he posited to his students: “mandatory skills are destructive to the inspiration of true, original, creative thinking and feeling,” advocating instead that all artists should strive to “get on the thread of their own beings.” During this period, he traveled to Europe for the first time, including an extended working trip to Antibes, France. In 1974, he completed a mural commission for the North Bronx Central Hospital, Presence Healing Circles, deeply motivated by the healing powers of abstract art within a public setting.

The hieratic black and white motifs are a dramatic shift from allover color fields of vibrating light in earlier paintings, yet the limited palette displays an extraordinary range of tonalities. Works such as Circles, One Spiral concentrate smaller component shapes into an array by use of a highly textured application of acrylic. Burning Black Circle integrates gravel, wood chips, leaves and sticks into a composition that is simultaneously a burst and circle, extending painterly approaches to imagery into three-dimensions.

Working with master printer Sylvia Roth at the Rockland Foundation in Nyack, New York, he approached etching through traditional means – hand-sanding plates, preparing surfaces with hard ball ground and smoke, and incising plates with diamond needles. He printed on German paper with a hand-operated press. For a large number of etchings, Pousette-Dart further added and reworked imagery through the addition of acrylic, gouache and charbonnel ink, creating unique and often colorful impressions.

He received the inaugural Distinguished Lifetime in Art award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, his 1981 exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart: Presences: Black and White was acclaimed by critic Hilton Kramer in The New York Times as best exhibition of the year, and he was invited to exhibit in the main pavilion by the International Committee of the 40th Venice Biennale. During the decade he taught painting at the Art Students League, New York and was appointed the Milton Avery Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arts at Bard College. An inveterate experimenter with non-traditional forms of paint and materials, he expanded his decades-long interest in collage to include heavily-textured constructions that integrate found and everyday objects into painted assemblages. Combining materials as wide-ranging as string, metal washers, discarded paper cups, Styrofoam and children’s plastic toys, these assemblages combine the practices of painting and sculpture that are the backbone of his lifelong studio practice.

For the show, the Museum commissioned a monumental bronze door by Pousette-Dart, Cathedral, cast at Tallix Foundry and based on a painting of the same name. At 10 feet by 10 feet, Cathedral continues to adorn the pavilion designed by the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes at the renamed Newfields. Between 1991 and 1992, Richard Pousette-Dart traveled to the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia; and The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. On October 25, 1992, Richard Pousette-Dart died in New York City after a prolonged battle with cancer.