Richard Pousette-Dart

With the exhibition Poetry of Light the Museum Frieder Burda is celebrating one of the great pioneers of Abstract Expressionism: the painter, sculptor, and photographer Richard Pousette-Dart. To date, the exhibition is the largest and most extensive show dedicated to this key player of American post-war abstraction at a museum outside the United States. On display are paintings, sculptures, objects, drawings, and photographs from more than six decades of creative activity – amongst them numerous works from private collections, which are not usually accessible to the general public. Amongst the 137 loans culled from 17 international collections are large-scale masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism, which have been made available by the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Alongside colleagues such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Pousette-Dart played a prominent role in the formation of the New York School, which ushered in the international triumph of free abstraction in the 1940s. Like many artists in the wider orbit of Abstract Expressionism, he extensively dealt with themes such as myth, archaism, and spirituality. Early works bear witness to his keen interest in European painting of the interwar period. From the 1960s onwards, he turned to large-format all-over compositions – colorful and often highly textured compositions, which typically confront their viewers with the immersive power of an environment.

A key influence on Pousette-Dart’s early development was the progressive cultural and intellectual environment facilitated by his parents. His mother, Flora, was a poet and writer who was a vociferous champion of feminism and whose political activism reached from fierce advocacy for equality of the sexes to an engagement for welfare and socialism. Meanwhile, Pousette-Dart’s father, Nathaniel, was himself an artist and encouraged his son’s experimentation with drawing and painting at an early age. As editor of the journal Art and Artists of Today, Nathaniel was a staunch champion of the freedom of artistic expression at a time when totalitarian systems in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union increasingly sought to relegate the role of art to that of a propagandist instrument. Nathaniel’s insistence on the artistic need for self-expression chimed with the cultural climate of late 1930s and early 1940s New York – a time of radical change, which would soon witness the burgeoning formation of the Abstract Expressionist avant-garde.

Pousette-Dart‘s connection to this influential movement in American post-war painting was underpinned by his participation at the groundbreaking 9th Street Art Exhibition, which took place in New York in 1951. That same year, Pousette-Dart appeared in Nina Leen’s now iconic portrait photograph The Irascibles, which was published in Life magazine and immortalized the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters. Although Pousette-Dart’s contribution to post-war painting is primarily seen in terms of his early and important role in the early history of Abstract Expressionism, the artist categorically rejected any thinking in terms of “isms”. He regularly recorded his ideas on art in countless small notebooks and summarized many of these in a speech, he gave for students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1951.

In this major artist‘s statement, Pousette-Dart emphasized the importance of creative self- expression and spoke of painting as a field that is intimately connected to an intuitive exploration of the invisible and unknown:

“The artist must beware of all schools, isms, creeds, or entanglements which would tend to make him other than himself,” he maintained, further noting, “He must stand alone, free and open in all directions for exits and entrances, and yet with all freedom, he must be solid and real in the substance of his form.”

While many of Pousette-Dart’s colleagues became known for immediately recognizable signature styles – Barnett Newman for his “zip” paintings or Jackson Pollock for his “drippings” – Pousette-Dart’s career was marked by constant experimentation with diverse modes of pictorial expression and spilled from painting toward media including sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography. A constancy in Pousette-Dart’s oeuvre was his life-long fascination with the expressive qualities of light: light as glimmer and sheen, light as iridescent reflection, or light as a cosmic force related to the release of unbounded energy and the power of illumination. Such an interest particularly comes to the fore in the numerous late compositions, in which he seemed to mirror the awe-inspiring beauty of the nighty sky – but also in compositions, for which he drew inspiration from the magnificent sheen of medieval meta work or Gothic stained-glass windows. The visual appeal of reflective surfaces also underpins the many brass objects, he created throughout his lengthy career: handcrafted items that blur the distinction between avant-garde sculpture and modern jewelry design and which further provide a lexicon of elemental forms that frequently reappear in the artist’s painted compositions.

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