Richard Pousette-Dart

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-Dart was a painter and writer on art, and his mother Flora Louise Dart was a musician and poet. From childhood these parents 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. Although Pousette-Dart claimed to have had no formal art training, he spent considerable time as a child watching his father 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 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 was active in the avant-garde New York art world. He became one of the youngest members of the emerging Abstract Expressionists. He had his first one-person 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, where Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko showed their work, almost every year from 1948 to 1961. 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 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 isolation from the New York art world enabled him to distance himself from the Abstract Expressionist movement and helped him to preserve his individualism and the unique character of his imagery. He, however, 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. His works can be found in the collection of many major museums in the United States, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 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.