Pousette-Dart at the Art Museum (2nd review)

His style and language evolved slowly and (if one can use that much-abused term) organically, but it also turned back on itself; nothing wasted, and nothing lost. Also, as with few other artists, Pousette-Dart approached each new work both as an act of spiritual interrogation and a unique expressive challenge. This means that there is no such thing as “a Pousette-Dart” in the way we speak— carelessly enough, to be sure— of a Pollock or a Van Gogh. It isn’t that the stylistic elements of Pousette-Dart’s work aren’t recognizable, but rather that each new piece seems to have been thought through as an entirely distinct venture.

Pousette-Dart began in the 1930s as a sculptor but is best known today for his paintings. He left behind, however, a very rich and variegated body of graphic art, typically mixed with other media and often technically innovative. The boundaries of what we call “drawing” have expanded greatly in the past century, and about the only constant in the large show of Pousette-Dart’s graphic work now at the Art Museum is that it’s all executed on paper. Perhaps that’s the place to begin, because Pousette-Dart was highly particular about the surfaces he worked on, and whose absorptive qualities were an inseparable part of the effects he sought.

Twins in the womb

He used special laid or wove paper for the most part, and, later on, a thick cast paper that gave — as for example in Pomegranate (1982) — the appearance of a raised plaque being inscribed. The wove paper had curled and ragged edges that, likewise, gave an impression of something ancient and fragmentary, as if time as well as space were an essential aspect of the artist’s composition.

Pousette-Dart’s earliest work is figural, relating to sculpture projects. It depicts heavy, totem-like personages, built up in conjoined planes. The most expressive of them is Agony, in which the figure tilts heavily to the left, as if carrying a crushing burden.

Quite different, however, is Two Dancers, which represents symmetrically entwined figures enclosed by a black border. It contains a suggestion not only of twins in the womb, but also of a primal parturition in which, as in the Platonic myth, a gendered humanity emerges from a unisex prototype. One can see here the beginnings of Pousette-Dart’s gestural indeterminacy as well as his interest in philosophy.

Inner and outer worlds

With the 1940s, Pousette-Dart’s style radically changes, although not his interest in origins. Like Pollock and Gorky, he moves toward biomorphic forms and overlaid textures. In all three men, there is a sense of experimentation in which content works itself slowly to the surface and takes a form that remains provisional — or, as one might say from a different angle, contested. All three, but especially in Pousette-Dart, reflect a preoccupation with dreams, primal states, and the unconscious. Surrealism is patently an influence, but directed more toward process than manifestation, and with figuration, though often implied, ultimately submerged in ambiguity. Germination is insistently the subject, but also the interplay between inner and outer worlds, whose boundaries appear porous and fluctuating, and whose contents likewise seem to flow freely back and forth.

In Sea World, one feels a sense of suspension in a kind of amniotic fluid, while White Undulation takes the suggestion a step further with a floating, spermatazoic-like form. Gothic Garden — gardens too, another image of fecundity, play an important role in Pousette-Dart’s work —has at its center an ovum shape which contains a pair of red, twinned forms.

Pousette-Dart’s graphic work of the 1940s, like his paintings, is rich, complex, and deeply suggestive. Although it’s based in watercolor, it incorporates graphite, ink, and oils. The paper surfaces are additionally subjected to rubbings, scrapings, and gougings to achieve the final desired effect — or, at any rate, the effect the artist is willing to let stand.

Subjective vision

Some of his 1940s works, like the decisively composed, almost muscularly aggressive Partitions of Unity, do seem fully complete; others keep the eye circling, looking for a balance that remains elusive. One can see an approach to rhythm that will suggest the path that Pollock was beginning to take, and by the late ’40s drips and spatters also make their appearance. Yet, again, you can find nothing derivative in Pousette-Dart’s work; the play of structure and spontaneity in it, together with a quite brilliant color sense, marks it as indisputably his.

With the 1950s, Pousette-Dart rethinks his art again. Line, the essential underpinning of his work, begins to give way to looser forms and, by the end of the decade, to a fully declared pointillism. At the same time, color compositions alternate with drawings in black and white.

Forms, too, become more geometrically focused in the ’60s and beyond, though with no loss of fantasy or invention. The inner world that Pousette-Dart had tried to evoke yields to radically simplified compositions whose circles and spirals evoke the force fields of the galactic universe.

Still, the unity of his project remains: the world as seen both within and without from the standpoint of subjective vision. The sense of space created by these works— what Pousette-Dart, a highly perceptive commentator on his own art, called “the living edge”— is unlike that of anyone else.

I’ve mentioned Pollock, who died, seemingly burnt out, at 44. Pousette-Dart went on working up to the end, his creative power undiminished. Fame ruined Pollock, but Pousette-Dart was no less intrepid and visionary an explorer. Recognition would do him no harm now, as it wouldn‘t some other neglected contemporary Expressionists like Robert Richenburg and Jon Schueler either. The Art Museum’s comprehensive show would be a good place to start.

To read a review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.