Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) was one of the founding members of Abstract Expressionism and among the most spiritually oriented painters of the New York School. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he grew up in a culturally rich environment in Valhalla, New York, where his family moved in 1918. His father, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, was a painter and writer on art, and his mother, Flora Louise Dart, was a musician and poet. From his earliest childhood these parents fostered their son's engagement with art, philosophy, music, and literature. His father's ideas about a romantic, intuitive basis for artistic creation, together with his mother's belief in the fundamentally spiritual nature of art, had a profound influence on Pousette-Dart's mature aesthetic theories and his artistic practice.

Although Pousette-Dart claimed to have had no formal art training, he spent considerable time as a child watching his father work at the easel and discussing painting with him. After graduating from Scarborough-on-Hudson High School he attended Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, leaving before the end of his first year to pursue a career as an artist. Encouraged by his parents, he moved to Manhattan in 1937. To support himself he first served as an assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship, a friend of his father, 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 became one of the youngest members of the emerging Abstract Expressionists. He held his first solo exhibition at the Artist's Gallery in 1941 and subsequently exhibited at the Willard Gallery alongside Mark Tobey in 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in 1944, and at the Betty Parsons Gallery almost every year from 1948 to 1961, showing alongside Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Pousette-Dart also participated in the discussions about abstraction at Studio 35, the legendary meeting place for Abstract Expressionist artists including William Baziotes, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Rothko, and he was active in the Eighth Street Club founded by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Ad Reinhardt.

In 1951 Pousette-Dart left Manhattan and moved to Rockland County, New York, where he lived with his wife, the poet Evelyn Gracey, until his death in 1992. This self-imposed distance from the New York art world helped him preserve his individualism and the unique character of his imagery. He maintained his connection to the next generation of artists, however, through teaching at institutions including the New School for Social Research, the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, the Art Students League, Bard College, and Sarah Lawrence College. His paintings are held in major American museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.