Richard Pousette-Dart

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992, the first West Coast museum retrospective of works on paper by American artist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992). Co-organized by LACMA, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), and the Cincinnati Art Museum, the exhibition includes over fifty works on paper, representing the full range of Pousette-Dart’s career from the 1940s to the 1990s.

A first generation abstract expressionist and founding member of what is known as the New York School, Pousette-Dart was the youngest of this loosely-knit group that included modern art titans, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and American transcendental thought, Pousette-Dart never separated his art from his deeply felt sense of the spiritual.

Painter, sculptor, photographer, and prolific draftsman, Pousette-Dart created works on paper throughout his life in diverse media, including watercolor, ink, oil, acrylic, and graphite—works that were daring experimentations and ones he considered to be complete and independent works of art. Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992 features a small, but comprehensive, selection of his finest drawings, paintings on paper, and painted prints that examine the important role the medium played in his life’s work.

Pousette-Dart’s works from the 1940s and 1950s, such as Blue Transition (1942–43) and Golden Eye (1945–46), are characterized by a dense assortment of concentric circles, eye and egg shapes, squiggles and crescents, and constellations in a palette of rich colors, often bound by an underlying, organizing grid. While the organic forms are reminiscent of totemic Pacific Northwest, Oceanic, and African art and demonstrate the influence of Surrealism, the grid references mid-twentieth century developments in abstraction—in particular, the decentralized, all-over picture plane with no firm point of focus. By the late 1950s, the grid disappears and Pousette-Dart begins to apply paint in dots, often directly from the tube, in a manner reminiscent of French artist Georges Seurat’s pointillist technique. By the 1960s, Pousette-Dart’s compositions become simpler, with an emphasis on fundamental shapes, like the circle, that evoke the sun, moon, and cosmic realms. Moon M editation (1960s), for example, features a single sphere, meticulously constructed with thousands of painted dots. The following decade, he continued to use the circular focal point, though limiting his color range. In Implosion (1978), graphite lines on white paint dynamically converge on a central void. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the renewal of forms and compositions from his earlier work becomes essential to his artistic development. Created in 1992, the year of his death, Bird in Spring presents the quintessential theme of renewal and regeneration with vivid colors and lively daubs of paint, reaffirming the artist’s mantra-like declaration that art “is affirmation of life. It is Presence. It is Transcendental Being.”

The exhibition features five recently acquired works on paper by Pousette-Dart, including Chromatic Dream (1940s), Jane (1950s), Moon Meditation (1960s), Untitled (1976) and A Separate Force (1980s). These pieces by Pousette-Dart join two already existing works, plus one promised gift, in LACMA’s permanent collection, according the artist a significant presence in the museum’s holdings.

Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992 is curated by Robert Flynn Johnson, FAMSF curator. LACMA’s presentation is coordinated by Leslie Jones, associate curator of Prints and Drawings.

Pressetext

Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart
Works on Paper, 1940–1992