The Brooklyn Rail

This survey, organized by the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden with the artist’s foundation in Suffern, New York, explores all facets of a sorely underappreciated painter, sculptor, and photographer. Born in 1916 to a poet mother and artist father who merged their last names in an early strike for marital equality, Richard Pousette-Dart was largely self-taught. Inheriting a wide range of artistic and philosophical interests from his parents, he used 1930s New York as a classroom to launch a career existing both inside and outside of Abstract Expressionism. His work—full of astral imagery, shimmering colors, and totemic forms—represents an ever-evolving vision of abstraction guided by humanist principles.

Although a member of the Irascibles, eighteen painters who challenged the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s narrow understanding of postwar art, Pousette-Dart charted his own course. Unlike Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and the other AbEx luminaries in the group, he was largely uninterested in Sturm und Drang as subject or style. Instead, he pursued delight and metamorphosis, in both his work and ruminations in the hundreds of studio notebook-diaries he maintained until his death in 1992. In a 1951 speech, he described painting as an endless revelation: “Art for me is the heavens forever opening up, like asymmetrical, unpredictable, spontaneous kaleidoscopes. It is magic, it is joy, it is gardens of surprise and miracle.”

The American transcendentalists were Pousette-Dart’s lodestars. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he sought to discover nature’s deepest truths and to be true to himself. The early painting Beneath the Sea (1939), a maze of colorful biomorphic forms resembling giant diatoms, calls to mind the first efforts of Pollock and Rothko in their investigations of Surrealist automatism and “all-overness.” Yet its interlocking forms and primordial imagery presage the syncopated rhythms and macro-micro viewpoints that would find full flower in later works.

In the late thirties, he began making an ongoing series of small cut-out sculptures from thick brass plates. Displayed in a vitrine, these “brasses” depict highly stylized human and animal forms and all manner of talismanic shapes. They are a repository for many of the glyph-like forms in his paintings.

By the mid-forties, it was clear that Pousette-Dart was pursuing more infolding and numinous perspectives than his peers. Crucifixion, Comprehension of the Atom (1944) is a prime example of what scholar Lucy Kent later called his “spiritual aestheticism.” In it, a schematic cross (or is it an ankh?) intertwines with areas of heavy impasto, bubbles of glowing color, and sgraffito lines. This work’s oscilloscopic curves, along with the spiky yellow arabesques in mid-century works like Icarus (1951), call to mind similar marks by Stanley William Hayter, Wolfgang Paalen, Gabor Peterdi, and other channelers of Cold War anxiety. Yet Pousette-Dart, a pacifist and conscientious objector, was not especially haunted by the threat of nuclear war. He was fascinated by the universe’s energy flows in everything from electronic circuitry to the orbits of protons and neutrons.

Similarly, Pousette-Dart’s sculptures reach beyond familiar matter and forms. Made of twisting lattices of painted wire containing found and shaped metal objects, Arc of the Bird (Wire Sculpture #6) and Creature of Clouds (both 1951) suggest disconcerting wrinkles in the space-time continuum. The artist’s photographic portraits from the forties and fifties also suggest new models of consciousness for a post-Einsteinian age. Full of haunting double exposures, they suggest era and distance-spanning affinities. A portrait of Barnett Newman from 1948, for example, superimposes his head over one of pre-Columbian figurative carvings he loved.

By the late fifties, with his Gothic and Byzantine paintings, Pousette-Dart broke through to an entirely distinctive style. Filled with bright colors and imbricated patterns, these works suggest stained-glass windows or glittering mosaics. Illumination Vertical (1958) consists of cascades of jewel-colored shapes that make the most outré Coogi sweater look drab. The play of light, commemorated by the exhibition title and expressed in saturated colors and variegated brushwork, became the artist’s prime subject and preferred means to work on “the living edge,” the liminal space he saw “between the conscious and subconscious, a balance between expanding and contracting, between silence and sound.”

It is not always easy to love Pousette-Dart’s paintings. Easy grace notes in color or composition are rare, and the edges within his compositions are often scumbled or jagged. The more time you spend with his work, however, the more you realize that its occasional wooliness is part of its great generosity. Pousette-Dart invites you to look over his shoulder as he paints. Black and White Fugue (1979–80), a slow-moving horizontal image made from thousands of tiny dollops of the titular colors squeezed directly from the tube, plus a few dozen underlying dabs of cobalt blue that give it a subliminal crackle, is intensely alluring. It pulls you into its maker’s creative sensorium, giving you direct access to his improvisatory and searching process.

Poetry of Light crescendos in several large, predominantly blue paintings in which paint is laid down in thick dabs that call to mind an abstract pointillism. The horizontal Night Landscape (1969–71) and circular Lost in the Beginning of Infinity (1991) are engulfing examples of Pousette-Dart’s belief that “Paintings are a presence, and they are best known by the spirit they leave with us after we have left them.” Moving in to take in their details and out to perceive their designs, neither of which ever seems fully fixed, one is reminded of being immersed in a landscape and in time, of walking into sparkling water on a sunny day or lying under a glowing sky after dusk. Immersing yourself in this artist’s extraordinary visual energies through this sumptuous survey leaves an abiding and uplifting impression.