••• ART




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Richard Pousette-Dart
Knoedler Gallery
October 2003


Richard Pousette-Dart, "Untitled" (1930s), ink and wash on paper. Courtesy Knoedler Gallery.
Richard Pousette-Dart’s "Mythic Heads and Forms," abstract paintings which span the decade of the 1930s, with their elliptical organization of thick black lines that forcefully yet almost imperceptibly shift space, have an immediate impact, in the sense of both sureness and conviction. While these works have the look of the thirties, with biomorphic forms and weight through built up surfaces, I sensed that their presence on the New York scene had contributed to the prevalent ambitions of abstract American artists. Striving to encompass and move forward from Picasso, Miro, Klee, or Kandinsky. they approached the "world of objects," to unlock hermetic harmonies of the unconscious and of primitive art from sources as diverse as Northwest American Indian art, Byzantine icons, and Oceanic and African art.

These works, painted during his twenties, were exhibited together in 1941 at the Artist’s Gallery, a non-profit space sponsored by Meyer Schapiro and James Johnson Sweeney. Pousette-Dart was a precocious artist. Having grown up in St. Louis, he was immersed in the milieu of his painter father, and the poetry and theosophical ideas of his mother. By the forties, Pousette-Dart was ready to spring as part of the modernist canon— think of his inclusion in the famous photo of the Irascibles, alongside Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Gottlieb, and Reinhardt. But Pousette-Dart’s studio work led him to conclusions that both bound and distinguished his mature style from that of his peers. As John Yau succinctly states in the catalogue essay, they all strove "for an impersonal truth" and the dissolving of the "I" into a larger stream of consciousness. Yet Pousette-Dart celebrated a state of endless luminosity and variety within nature’s fecundity, against the backdrop of Pollock’s gestural drips or Reinhahardt’s "ultimate" painting.

From his writings, we know that he thought a great deal about nature as a "principle of creation refracted against human experience." He personified it through such abstract forms as lines which he described as "perfect edges of god thrilling all selves." His thinking on symbolism could be expressed thus: "…a place where silence moves without motion… and the epitome of nature/real as every weed, tree man and flower." These notes begin to articulate the qualitative distinctions he made about the conjunction of line and symbol, which drive his mythical portraits of the Greek gods— "Persephone," "Zeus," or "Flora," or the complex and varied "Bird Woman," all of which are in the current show. And they begin to define the later luminous pointillist-geometric works of his mature oeuvre.

Like an early Greek thinker, Pousette-Dart’s idealism was informed by a materialist belief that the substances of nature’s endless changes are unified by an originally powerful form. By the time I left the gallery I felt charged with an aliveness— a belly full of something intangible, yet real.
—Rachel Youens

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(718) 230-2100 in the 2nd Floor Auditorium

Tuesday, Sept. 13 from 7 till 9
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The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards:

1st place: Best article about Immigrant Issues or Racial Justice--Gabriel Thompson, "One Immigrant's Journey" (September 2004).

1st place: Best article about the Arts*--Amy Zimmer, "The Brownsville Rec. Center" (April 04)

2nd place: Best article about the Arts--Brian Carreira, "Harlem Arts: A Faux Renaissance" (Dec 03/Jan 04).

2nd place: Best editorial or commentary--T. Hamm, "The Issue is Free Speech" (Dec 03/Jan 04).

3rd Place: Best Investigative News Story--Marjory Garrison, "Minimum Matter of Survival" (May 04)

Honorable mention: Best Investigative News Story--Williams Cole, "Housing vs. the RNC" (June 04).

Honorable mention: Best Original Feature--Yvette Walton, "My Life in the NYPD" (Dec 03/Jan 04).
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