The Brooklyn Rail

Richard Pousette-Dart: Geometry of Summer at Pace Gallery consists of seventeen works executed between 1974 and 1992 at his studio in Rockland County, New York. Circumscribed to a period during which the artist was particularly concerned with art critic Clive Bell’s concept of “significant form,” articulated in the classic text, Art (1914), this body of paintings broadly engages with variable geometric elements. These range from fascicle- and impasto-studded stadia shapes and prismatic, limned arcs to motley rectangles placed within one another. There are also a host of isochromatic arrangements that coalesce within the encircled or threaded elements. Sometimes these are punctuated by conch and shell forms or numbers that figure into an internal pattern. Works like Imploding Cosmos (1992); Presence, Meditation (1974–81); Blue Starr, Stell (1991–92); and Into the Universe Golden (1979–80) make use of systematized, atomic dots that are reminiscent of Shinobu Ishihara’s color plates.

Given their vivacious palette, impressive command of unity, and commanding size, this suite is visually sensuous—enthralling, even. In the most effective works, Pousette-Dart does not hew toward perfect symmetry—a temptation that is at odds with the perfectionist principles undergirding and informing Bell’s “significant form.” Bell is not only part of a tradition of formalist-perfectionist aesthetics, but represents its zenith. According to aesthetic perfectionism, broadly speaking, there is a concept that is clarified in some representational arrangement; within the ambit of visual art, this concept can be represented or delivered via sensation. The perfectionist canon’s inaugural text is generally considered to be the British empiricist, Lord Shaftesbury’s 1709 The Moralists, which argues that beauty functions as the “outward form” of objects; that is, it depicts “Figures […] in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety,” rendering the Platonic concept of “form” in a representational manner.

Subsequently, the Scottish empiricist and Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson, in his 1726 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, prefigures Bell by arguing that genuine aesthetic pleasure does not belong to the associations one forms in their mind when they view some physical stimuli. Rather, he argues it is detected by a special (aesthetic) sense. This sui generis sense is distinct from strictures of ordinary sensory experience. Hutcheson contends that qualities internal to a painting’s purely formal content arouse this response, since it is “founded on a Conformity, or a kind of Unity between the Original and the Copy.” The reference to an “Original” here indicates that aesthetic beauty reflects the designer’s wisdom and, thereby, its ultimate cause: God. According to Hutcheson, then, a portrait is not beautiful due to any contingencies concerning the subject matter (e.g., who it depicts or any fact about them), but because it reflects God’s perfection.

This exegesis is of critical importance to appreciate not only Bell’s thinking but also Pousette-Dart’s ethereal and cosmological art-historical pursuits. That Pousette-Dart is so inclined is evinced in titles like Rising Light (1987–90) and Into the Universe Golden (1979–80), both of which indicate that Pousette-Dart takes his mark-making and its use of refractive breaks to reflect some kind of ethereal, extra-worldly entity. This is only compounded by the sources of emanation that riddle these paintings, including the flaxen orb placed in the center of Into the Universe Golden; the pearlescent sphere in Cosmic, Yellow [Sun Meditation] (1981); or the quadrated, alabaster rectangle incised into the center of Reverberating Square (1985–86). Pousette-Dart’s own remarks only lend further credence to his thorough-going concerns with representing an order of nature. In 1947, he remarked, “I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe.” In an entry from one of his personal notebooks, he writes that “the greater the art, the more religious.” Just as his early works, like Crucifixion, Comprehension of the Atom (1944), made direct reference to religious motifs, we find the mature artist similarly oriented, though he subtilizes this theme by delineating it in geometric terms.

If Pousette-Dart’s geometric posits are but representations which, in enjoying unity-amidst-diversity, point outwards—towards what is beyond the painting’s surface qualities—then he may genuinely be at odds with Bell’s self-contained formalism. As Noël Carroll writes in his chapter on Bell’s Art in his 2022 study, Classics in Western Philosophy of Art, “Bell’s view, in contrast to Plato, is that visual art is not essentially a matter of imitation; instead, art is about form, that is formal structure.” For Bell, the object of aesthetic experience consists in an artwork’s forms. Although these forms indicate a kind of finality that we can sensually track through emotion-experiences, they are not linguistically identifiable or reducible to particular structural features. Thus, to reduce, say, the aesthetic qualities of Pousette-Dart’s Alpha Forming (1992) to the swarm of slit shapes that pulse in a scabrous swell of rust, cobalt, and amber would be unwarranted. Bell writes that “[…] when an artist—a real artist—looks at objects (the contents of a room, for instance), he perceives them as pure forms in certain relation to each other.” The “real artist” then transmits this to the would-be percipient. Lossless transmission is part and parcel of Bell’s “aesthetic hypothesis,” according to which what the artwork represents is wholly irrelevant. All that stands to make an aesthetic difference is the arrangement of lines and forms, which are phenomenologically received.

At times, Pousette-Dart’s own remarks demonstrate he adheres to this “aesthetic hypothesis.” During a recorded 1950 “Artists’ Session” conversation at Studio 35, Adolph Gottlieb proposes the abandonment of linguistically-freighted titles for purely numerical identification. Pousette-Dart responds that “I think if we could agree on numbers it would be a tremendous thing. In music they don’t have this dilemma. It would force people to just look at the object and try to find their own experience.” Here, Pousette-Dart is not championing that numbers should displace titles because they point beyond themselves and signify a counting system. Rather, because they involve less in the way of possible interpretation, numbers could more effectively precipitate viewers into phenomenologically engaging with the work’s surface form(s).

However, in his occasional introduction of certain natural-organic homologies, Pousette-Dart cannot help but represent. His vacuums of light stand in for God and his commingling skeins, which gather into rings and conches, embody the order of nature. Working in this mode, one cannot help but think that Pousette-Dart is more so Hutcheson’s disciple than he is Bell’s, but he just as quickly depurates the canvas of natural-celestial signifiers. Works like Confluent Spacial (1980–91)—where outlined crimson and navy quadrilaterals are scored through with compounded, chalky streaks blotted by unfamiliar shapes—abrogate any claims to representation. It is here that Pousette-Dart, at his most Bell-ian, is also at his strongest.