Provenance

The Artist
Obelisk Gallery, Inc., Boston, MA Private collection, Pennsylvania
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, 2021

Description

The quest to convey spirituality through the materiality of painting established Richard Pousette-Dart as a significant force in the development of modern art. A founding member of the New York School, his paintings–rich, profound and substantive–reflect an impassioned commitment to questions concerning mysticism, spiritualism, mythology, meditative realms, the cosmos, and universal truths of nature. In the mid-1960s into the 1970s, Pousette-Dart painted with a clear focus on all-over abstraction and direct paint application. Rather than finding the
hard edge or soft edge in painting, he sought to achieve what has been referred to as the “living edge” or the “trembling edge.” Pousette-Dart first used glyphs or hieroglyph shapes as early as 1939, experimenting with hybrid images of birds, fish and animals that conjoin and remind the viewer of the interconnectedness of all beings.
Pousette-Dart once wrote: “Painting is form which springs from passionate realization and penetrating experience. It is an affirmation of life. It is Presence. It is Transcendental Being." The heavily impastoed, animated surface of this present work "Small Cathedral"–created with acrylic on linen–asserts its materiality, the "presence" of the picture. The paint is so thickly applied that the painting borders on sculptural relief. The totemic and biomorphic forms in this painting are characteristic of his rich vocabulary of symbols and patterns. Like many early Modernists, Pousette-Dart was influenced by the aesthetics of native art through his frequent trips to the American Museum of Natural History. Rather than regarding the spiritual and the material as two antithetical principles, Pousette-Dart understood that the material could in fact be an expression of the spiritual. His desire to unite these supposed opposites propelled him to create harmonious composition using a black and white palette, whose stark contrast served to intensify the visual drama.
Born on June 8, 1916, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Pousette-Dart grew up in a culturally rich environment in Valhalla, New York, where his family moved in 1918. His father, Nathaniel Pousette, was a painter and writer on art, and his mother, Flora Louise Dart, was a musician and poet. From childhood, they fostered their son’s interest in art, philosophy, music, and literature. In particular, his father’s ideas about “a romantic, intuitive basis for artistic creation” and his mother’s belief in the spiritual nature of art had a profound influence on Pousette-Dart’s aesthetic theories and his artistic practice (1). Encouraged by his parents, he moved to Manhattan in 1937. To support himself, he first served as assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship, his father’s friend, and then worked as a secretary in a photographic studio. In 1939, he quit his job and devoted himself fully to painting and sculpture.
During the 1940s, Pousette-Dart was active in the avant-garde New York art world; he became one of the youngest members of the emerging group of Abstract Expressionists. He had his first solo show at the Artist’s Gallery in 1941 and subsequently exhibited at Willard Gallery along with Mark Tobey in 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1944, and at the Betty Parsons Gallery (regularly from 1948 to 1967), where Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko also showed their work. Pousette-Dart also participated in discussions about abstraction at the legendary Studio 35, a meeting place for Abstract Expressionist artists, including William Baziotes, David Hare, Robert Motherwell and Rothko, and in the activities of the Eighth Street Club, founded by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Ad Reinhardt among others. He also socialized with Abstract Expressionist painters at the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place and at the 59th Street Automat.
In 1951, Pousette-Dart moved to Rockland County, New York, where he lived with his wife, the poet Evelyn Gracey, until his death in 1992. This self-imposed isolation from the New York art world enabled him to distance himself from the Abstract Expressionist movement and helped him to develop the unique character of his imagery. However, he maintained a connection with the next generation of artists by teaching at a variety of schools in and around New York City, including the New School for Social Research, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, the Arts Students League, Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College. His works can be found in the

collection of many major museums in the United States, including the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
1. Pousette-Dart, quoted in Joanne Kuebler, “Concerning Pousette-Dart,” in Robert Hobbs and Joanne Kuebler, Richard Pousette-Dart (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 62.