Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992)

Although he had no formal artistic training--in part, because of an adolescent aversion to academic education in general--the painter was encouraged in creative pursuits by his father, painter and writer Nathaniel Pousette, and his mother, poet Flora Louise Dart. At the age of twenty, he left his home in Saint Paul and moved to New York City to work as an assistant to the artist Paul Manship. Borrowing a great deal from the early efforts of the Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s, Pousette-Dart soon developed a painting technique and style that focused on the artist’s direct experience with materials and discouraged the use of preparatory sketches. Unlike some of his colleagues, such as Jackson Pollock, who eventually pursued a more gestural and impulsive way of working, Pousette-Dart achieved a remarkable understanding of paint materials that would remain intertwined with a technique that is long, laborious, and calculated. Early on, the artist began using other substances, like sand, and myriad unusual instruments, such as razor blades and sandpaper, to alter the surface texture of his works and thereby achieve innovative qualities of visual radiance.

In the 1950s, Pousette-Dart adopted an allover compositional scheme that incorporated increasingly regularized brushstrokes encompassing the entire canvas. By the mid-1950s, he had shifted away from the representation of large, rather discrete shapes toward the rendering of individualized units of color that are depicted in tightly packed configurations. In addition, he chose to de-emphasize the linear elements of his work by downplaying the importance of outlines surrounding each of his pictorial elements. The artist became preoccupied with methodically overpainting his pictures. His repeated modulations and adjustments of the thick impasto produced an effect of physical weight or palpability. In contrast to the efforts of many of his American peers, he made formal changes in a refined manner and layered his canvases carefully to attain a delicacy of form and a paramount sense of surface coherence. By the 1960s, Pousette-Dart had prioritized the dematerialization of figural elements: his former reliance upon biomorphic imagery became overshadowed by an obsession with a Pointillist method of applying small dabs of color that would continue to occupy his creative enterprise. But compared to Georges Seurat, who endeavored to reference the visual world with his clusters of tiny brushstrokes, Pousette-Dart strove to instill a range of generalized states of feeling and spiritual beliefs.

“Blue Presence”, 1970

Oil on board, 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)

Signed and dated (on reverse): Pousette-Dart / 1970

General Purchase Fund (1971.25)

“Blue Presence” exhibits the distinctive and luminous interplay of textures and light-generating color fields that has had a significant effect upon a variety of abstract modes of painting since the 1970s. What distinguishes Pousette-Dart’s artistic project from other, similar efforts is his intensified focus upon the complexities of paint surfaces and his highly developed sense of color harmonies coordinated to convey emotional and spiritual content. (1)

When “Blue Presence” was produced, the artist was executing two basic types of compositions, each possessing different visual dynamics and poetic implications. Works belonging to the Hieroglyph series include an assortment of relatively naturalistic symbols incorporated into an allover setting that allows the viewer’s eye to wander across the canvas without fixating on a distinct point or specified area. “Blue Presence” is one of a second--arguably more intense--group of paintings that contain an elliptical or circular shape that rivets the beholder’s eye to a particular portion of the work. In the New Britain picture, the dominant circular image appears to be radiating outward as if it were the painterly equivalent of a celestial or cosmic event. The work is composed of particles of paint that decrease slightly in size toward the center of the canvas. The sublime overtones are a consequence of the complex surface aspects and the powerful physical impact that occurs when the viewer’s field of vision is completely saturated with tiny radiant strokes of blue and green. (2) The circular form, in all its simplicity, might be interpreted as exemplifying a condition of heavenly perfection or, perhaps, as a psychological statement of wholeness that has been projected out of the artists’ integrated psyche. Regardless of the multitudes of possible readings, after an initial glance at Pousette-Dart’s work, the beholder is left with an aftereffect of solitude and well-being.

DA

Bibliography:

John Gordon, “Richard Pousette-Dart”, exhib. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1963); Sam Hunter, ed., “Transcending Abstraction: Richard Pousette-Dart: Paintings”, 1939-1985, exhib. cat. (Fort Lauderdale: Museum of Art, 1986); Robert Hobbs and Joanne Kuebler, eds., “Richard Pousette-Dart”, exhib. cat. (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1990); W. Jackson Rushing, “Pousette-Dart’s Spirit-Object,” Art Journal 50 (summer 1991): 72-75; Lowery Stokes Sims and Stephen Polcari, “Richard Pousette-Dart”, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).

Notes:

1. Monte, “Richard Pousette-Dart”, pp. 5-10; and Joanne Keubler, “Concerning Pousette-Dart,” in Hobbs and Keubler, Richard Pousette-Dart, pp. 54-62.

2. Hunter, ed., “Transcending Abstraction”, p. 30; and Hobbs and Kuebler, eds., Richard Pousette-Dart, pp. 154-60.