Press Release | Richard Pousette-Dart | March 2008

Richard Pousette-Dart
March 6 - 29, 2008

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) was a founding member of the New York School. Active in New York from the early 1940s, Pousette-Dart made essential contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Between 1941 and 1942 he was the first Abstract Expressionist to paint large-scale canvases, which anticipated Jackson Pollock's breakthrough to mural-scale work in 1943. During this period Pousette-Dart's images typically presented abstract symbols in thickly layered, roughly applied paint in dark tones. These were among the first pictorial statements of what came to be known as "action painting."

Few artists were ever brought up with as little resistance to the idea of art as a career as Richard Pousette-Dart. With an artist for a father and a poet for a mother, he was encouraged to believe that art was the highest spiritual value. It is no wonder then that so much of this great 20th Century painter’s work has such a feeling of universality and transcendence.

Pousette-Dart found inspiration for his work in African, Oceanic and Native American art, Jungian and Freudian theories as well as European modernism. Picasso and Klee were especially strong influences. All these themes emerge at one time or another in his distinctive pointillistic stipling. Light seems to be the principle “subject” of his art. Brilliant bold color, radiance and high energy structure this ardent journey to the cosmos.

Pousette-Dart was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1951), a Ford Foundation Grant (1959), and an Individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1967). Bard College awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1965, and in 1981 the Tiffany Foundation granted him the Distinguished Lifetime in Art Award. In addition to teaching at Bard College, where he was the Milton Avery Distinguished Professor of Arts in 1983, Pousette-Dart taught at The New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and the School for Visual Arts. Richard Pousette-Dart continued to work until his death in 1992.

Pousette-Dart has had one person shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art and his works are included in the permanent collections of all the major international museums.