One of the younger members of the New York School painters, Richard Pousette-Dart is also credited with having produced the group’s first large-scale abstract painting, Symphony No. 1: The Transcendental, which he created from 1941 to 1942.(i) This precocious artist was born in 1916 in St. Paul, Minnesota and raised in Valhalla, New York by parents who nurtured and supported his interests in the arts. Pousette-Dart grew up surrounded by books and a family art collection that included works from Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas. In 1936, he dropped out of Bard College and moved to New York City to become a full-time artist. In 1941, despite his lack of formal training, Pousette-Dart had his first solo exhibition at the Artist’s Gallery. Throughout the 1940s, Pousette-Dart exhibited at the Willard Gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery; he was a member of the Club—the group of artists, writers, and art dealers who would meet in an apartment at 39 East 8th Street; he frequented Studio 35 and the Cedar Bar; and in 1951, he was one of the “Irascibles” made famous by Nina Leen’s Life photograph. Even after he and his wife moved to Rockland County, Pousette-Dart did not withdraw from the New York City art world entirely. He taught classes at the New School for Social Research, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, and the Art Students League.

Pousette-Dart’s mastery of a variety of visual styles may have actually helped to marginalize the artist within standard, period-driven approaches to art history. However, he exhibited steadily throughout his life. In 1963, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a mid-career retrospective; in 1969, the Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling exhibition of his work; and in 1986, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida included the painting featured here in its show Transcending Abstraction: Richard Pousette-Dart, Paintings 1939-1985. Five years after his death in 1992, public interest in Pousette-Dart’s work was renewed when the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a survey of his career organized by Lowery Stokes Sims and accompanied by a catalogue.

Influenced by surrealism, the psychological studies of Freud and Jung, African art, and Native American art from the Pacific Northwest, Pousette-Dart referred to his paintings as “presences” and “implosions of color” rather than abstractions, a reflection of his belief that all art, even figural painting, was abstract to some degree. A deeply spiritual painter, he pursued the transcendental in art not only in abstract forms, but also in the very way he applied paint. In his textured works, thick impasto and solid brushstrokes shimmer with light and color, conveying his belief that “the spiritual doesn’t have to do with the lack of the material . . . if there is a heaven, it is the wonderful working of this world.”(ii)

With its impressive scale (75 x 56 inches), the richly textured Two Women (1962) is a bold presence that balances the weight of heavy oil impasto with delicate curving lines suggestive of the rounded contours of idealized female forms. A brief glance at this painting is enough to register only its most superficial aspects—a rough, built-up surface executed in shades of brown and white, punctuated by arching black lines that loosely correspond to heads, breasts, and hips, possibly calling up loose associations to the prominent breasts of de Kooning’s women. But look a little longer, and you begin to notice that the painting’s shapes owe more to surrealism than they do to Pousette-Dart’s contemporaries. The abstract “women” of the painting’s title are comprised of organic forms and swirling lines; they dance rather than menace. Like its women, the painting’s colors also contain more than is immediately perceptible. Flecks of pink, blue, lavender, ochre, gray, yellow, and orange punctuate the field of quiet earth tones, enticing us to stay, study, stare, before moving on.

While images are a constant presence in our everyday lives, there is a difference between living inside an atmosphere steeped in visual culture and actually seeing an image. In a world where sixty seconds in front of a painting may seem like a long time even for an art-lover in a major museum, Pousette-Dart reminds us of the adventure that accompanies exploring a visual object in depth. The more we look at this work, the more it rewards us for our patience. In addition to its ever-shifting color palette, the painting’s alluring texture transforms it into a dynamic landscape of sharp peaks, creamy brushstrokes, and lush, controlled drips. Impasto appeals to more than our eyes, making the fact that we can look at but not touch art achingly frustrating. Two Women is a deeply sensual experience not for the content promised in the title, but because the painting’s real subject is the subject of all abstract expressionism—the physical act of painting. Large-scale abstraction in a postmodern era has long lost the shock value that accompanies the new; what makes Pousette-Dart’s painting so revolutionary today is its power to command our attention—its gentle ability to rekindle the passion for looking and seeing that motivates so many of us to walk through the doors of art museums and galleries every day. If painting was a transcendental act for the artist, looking can be one for his viewers.

(i) Hilton Kramer, “Young Pousette-Dart, A Precocious Master, Stood on Frontier,” New York Observer, October 5, 2003. http://www.observer.com/node/48148 (accessed February 2009).

(ii) Richard Pousette-Dart, personal communication with Jackson Rushing, February 17, 1986. Quoted in Rushing, “Review: Pousette-Dart’s Spirit-Object,” Art Journal vol. 50, no. 2 (Summer, 1991), 73.