Pousette-Dart, Richard Warren

(b. 8 June 1916 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; d. 25 October 1992 in New York City), one of the original participants in the development of abstract expressionism, whose work demonstrated his belief in the spiritual nature of art.

Pousette-Dart was one of three children of Nathaniel Pousette, a painter who supported his family through publications on art and editorial work for the Distinguished American Artists series, and Flora Louise Dart, a poet and musician. His parents combined their names upon their marriage as a gesture of equality. In 1918 they moved to suburban Valhalla in Westchester County, New York, where their home became a gathering place for artists, writers, and musicians. From this diverse cultural milieu Pousette-Dart understood art and life to be inseparable. He decided early on to be an artist, spending much time in his father’s studio. However, his philosophical beliefs about the nature of art seem to have been grounded more on his mother’s observations.

Pousette-Dart began drawing by the age of eight. By ten he had filled a notebook with drawings, which he later described as abstractions. He graduated in 1935 from the Scarborough School, a private school in Scarborough-on-Hudson, New York, and in 1936 entered Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He left during his first year and moved to Manhattan in 1937. Pousette-Dart assisted Paul Manship, a sculptor and friend of his father’s, while he painted and sculpted on his own in the evenings. The next year he worked in a photographic studio as secretary and bookkeeper. Two brief marriages in 1938—to Blanche Grady, a dancer, and then to Lydia Modia, an artist—ended in annulment. In 1939 Pousette-Dart left his job to devote himself to his art. He visited the American Museum of Natural History as often as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because his interests were diverse, from medieval stained glass to Native American artifacts. During this period he would write down his thoughts in notebooks, a practice he continued throughout his life. Even at this early date Pousette-Dart could be found using allusive, metaphorical language in his observations on art.

The Artists’ Gallery in New York City held Pousette-Dart’s first solo exhibition in 1941, followed by three more at the Willard Gallery in 1943, 1945, and 1946. At his first Willard show he met a poet, Evelyn Gracey, whom he married on 2 June 1946. They lived on East Fifty-sixth Street, near the East River. The couple had two children. At this time Pousette-Dart became associated with a disparate group of fiercely independent painters who, despite great variation in style, nonetheless shared many of the same aesthetic and cultural concerns. Critics dubbed them abstract expressionists. Although Pousette-Dart stayed away from the raucous socializing and fights, he participated in the group shows and events. His work was included in Peggy Guggenheim’s now famous group exhibition in 1944 at her gallery, Art of This Century, notable for being one of the first public displays of this new trend. He was also included in Howard Putzel’s 1945 exhibition, A Problem for Critics. In 1947 Guggenheim gave Pousette-Dart a solo exhibition. Her gallery space was large enough to display his seminal work Symphony Number 1, The Transcendental (1942). Measuring 90 feet by 120 feet, this work is noteworthy for being the first large-scale abstract expressionist painting. In 1948 Pousette-Dart moved to the perceptive modern art dealer, Betty Parsons, who gave him a solo show that year and nearly annually thereafter, his final one in 1967.

In April 1950 Pousette-Dart joined his colleagues for the three-day, roundtable discussions held at Studio 35, a pivotal moment in the history of abstract expressionism in that they attempted to define their commonalities of purpose and establish their differences from mainstream abstractionists. Pousette-Dart and the others shared an interest in mythic, ideographic, and biomorphic imagery drawn from myriad sources, including African and Native American art forms and their own unconscious as a means to communicate larger cultural truths about society. They also sought an authenticity of form and expression stemming from personal experience. “The authenticity of painting,” stated Pousette-Dart in his 1951 talk at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “lies in the pure form and inner life which springs from the artist’s realization and experience.” He added, “We must go to [paintings] and look at them, and within them find reflected our own experience.”

The following month Pousette-Dart and the other abstract expressionists signed an open letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquisition policy that favored mainstream American modernists. The resulting publicity culminated in a now famous group portrait called “The Irascibles” that was published in the 15 January 1951 issue of Life magazine. Pousette-Dart’s stance in this photograph, positioned at the edge of the group, presaged his decision later that year to move his family to Eagle Valley Road in Sloatsburg, New York. In 1954 they moved to Christmas Hill Road in Monsey, New York, followed by a move in 1958 to Suffern, New York. Although he later maintained a small apartment in Manhattan, Pousette-Dart kept his home and studio in Suffern for the rest of his life, because he preferred to work apart from the pressures of the New York City art scene.

In his paintings from the 1940s Pousette-Dart employed a cubist infrastructure (a kind of grid) out of which his forms—circles, fishes, eyes, amoebae-like shapes, eggs—would emerge as shifting, translucent forms. His process was slow—as many as forty layers of oil paint—which made for compositions controlled more by intellect than by the unconscious. “Layering,” as he wrote in one of his notebooks, “is an analogy to life itself.” During the next decade, he began to use color more expressively and spread his forms across the canvas. By the 1960s Pousette-Dart had reduced his imagery to circular, holistic forms set in fields of color, evoking a sense of the cosmos. Although Pousette-Dart’s outward style changed, his basic intent—his quest for the transcendent in art—remained the same.

Throughout his life Pousette-Dart remained connected to the New York art scene. He received many awards, starting with a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship. He also taught in various New York schools, first at the New School for Social Research (1959–1961), followed by the School of Visual Arts (1964), Columbia University (1968–1969), and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville (1970–1974). In 1980 he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York City, which he continued until his death. Bard College, which had awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 1965, made him the Milton Avery Distinguished Professor of Arts in 1983. In 1974 he joined the Andrew Crispo Gallery, moving in 1980 to the Marisa del Re Gallery.

Pousette-Dart also had many museum exhibitions. The Whitney Museum of American Art held his first retrospective in 1963, followed by a solo show in 1974. The Museum of Modern Art organized an extensive traveling exhibition of his work in 1969. Late in life he was honored with two retrospectives, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art in 1986 and the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1990. The latter museum commissioned bronze doors from Pousette-Dart for the facade of its new pavilion, which were installed in time for the opening of his retrospective. On 25 October 1992, six months after the four-venue Indianapolis show closed, Pousette-Dart died of colon cancer at his apartment in New York City.

Pousette-Dart remained a fierce individualist, who so firmly believed in his artistic vision that he worked in isolation to keep it free of commercialism. His paintings were for him a portal, communicating to the viewer the spiritual nature of the universe. In his statement for the Whitney’s 1958 show, Nature in Abstraction, Pousette-Dart wrote, “A work of art for me is a window, a touchstone or doorway to every other human being. It is my contact and union with the universe.” He added, “Art transcends, transforms nature, creates a nature beyond nature, a supra nature, a thing in itself—its own nature, answering the deep need of man’s imaginative and aesthetic being.”

Pousette-Dart’s notebooks are in his estate. The following exhibition catalogues are particularly useful: Sam Hunter, ed., Transcending Abstraction: Richard Pousette-Dart, Paintings 1939–1985 (1986); Robert Hobbs and Joanne Kuebler, Richard Pousette-Dart (1990); and Lowery Stokes Sims, Richard Pousette-Dart (1997). Two general sources on abstract expressionism containing useful discussions of Pousette-Dart are Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (1991), and April Kingsley, The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art (1992). For the bronze doors, see Stephen Polcari and David Finn, The Portal (1998). A significant article is Gail Levin, “Richard Pousette-Dart’s Emergence as an Abstract Expressionist,” Arts Magazine 54 (Mar. 1980): 125-129. An unpublished interview of Richard and Evelyn Pousette-Dart, conducted by Stephen Polcari on 9 March 1992, is in the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. An obituary is in the New York Times (27 Oct. 1992).

Leigh Bullard Weisblat