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The Surprise of Pousette-Dart
| Article
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19280 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
484 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
The biggest surprise of the current art season has been the touring retrospective of Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, organized by Joanne Kuebler of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It is surprising not only for the marvelous quality of the paintings, but also for the fact that this is the first really definitive account we have ever had of this painter. It is surprising that it took a midwestern museum to organize a show of this important New York School painter, a show that no New York museum was interested in taking.
In certain important respects Pousette-Dart's art falls outside the run of Abstract Expressionist painting. Though he has embraced the improvisational approach to painting and the interest in the unconscious as a source of imagery--both central tenets of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic--he is neither a gesture painter (working with wide sweeps of his arm) nor an artist partial to broad areas of saturated color.
Meaty Pointillism
In fact, his paintings are thick, tapestrylike things in which imagery evolves through successive layerings of line and color. And, since the 1960s, Pousette-Dart has adopted a kind of meaty pointillism, in which the imagery is constructed out of a regularized, all-over surface weave of small globs of color.
Pousette-Dart's early paintings--those roughly from the 1930s through 1950--rehearse the familiar Abstract Expressionist apprenticeship of drawing on Picasso, Surrealism, primitive art, and Jungian symbolism to arrive at a dark, even apocalyptic, imagery. What Pousette-Dart brought of his own to this total immersion in the hot tub of the collective unconscious was an abiding dependence on Cubist structure and a more than passing response to Indian art of the Pacific Northwest.
But his work also has something else absent from that of his fellows. From very early on, paint is called on to generate an interior light as well as define form. By about 1950, in fact, archetypal imagery has been immolated in an ethereal luminescence. In the extraordinary "white paintings" of the early 1950s, a tracery of faint pencil lines on a white ground suggests form dissolved in a glow of light. By the sixties it has become an amorphous, radiant haze, minutely articulated by points of color, and occasionally ordered around the generalized shape of a circle or square.
What this means is
...
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