TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111290/1112400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 100

Seeing the Far in the Near


A Midwest show reassesses the underknown Richard Pousette-Dart

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The 50-year retrospective of paintings by Richard
Pousette-Dart, organized by Joanne Kuebler for the Indianapolis
Museum of Art, is -- quite apart from its intrinsic qualities
-- a sobering reminder of how edited a picture of art history
New York City's museums have lately been giving their public.
Here is an American artist of real distinction, now 74, a
contemporary of De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, with whom he
appeared in the famous photo of The Irascibles, the cast of
Abstract Expressionism, in LIFE magazine in 1951. Nevertheless,
he has virtually been dropped from the history of the New York
School. At most, Pousette-Dart has had a sentence or two (and
not always that) in the standard history books; none of the
influential critics of the '50s backed him, and he remains a
decidedly underknown painter.

    Yet this show had to be done -- and at a high level of
curatorial skill -- in Indiana. No New York museum plans to take
it; nor could Manhattan venues be found for Franz Kline, Guido
Reni, early Poussin, De Stijl, Lucian Freud and quite a number
of other splendid and informative exhibitions mounted by museums
west of the Hudson in the past few years. There is something
unpalatable about this, a dismal message about the provincial
art politics of the supposed center.

    Pousette-Dart has always had his following, of course, and
in any case it would be idle to put his early work in the '40s
and '50s on the same level as De Kooning's or Pollock's. He
certainly shared the early Abstract Expressionist interest in
primitive art, totems, archetypal forms. And its general legacy
from '30s Picasso too: Pousette-Dart's Portrait of Pegeen, 1943
(the subject was the deeply neurotic teenage daughter of Peggy
Guggenheim, his dealer), is heavily dependent on Picasso's Girl
Before a Mirror. There is also a scary Expressionist insight to
the chaotic congestion of Pegeen's head, staring at her
reflection reduced to one bulging eye and blond Veronica Lake
tresses. But Pousette-Dart was a stiff, poor draftsman, with the
deficiencies of the self-taught, and this makes the early
totemic paintings, with their biomorphic shapes playing
hide-and-seek in the rigid scaffolding of a Cubist grid, look
somewhat less than fully achieved.

    He was the adored son of a painter father and a
poet-musician mother, both of whom believed more in creativity
and spirituality than in formal art training. The fact that they
wanted him to be an artist annulled, for Pousette-Dart, the
insecurity that makes some painters overdependent on the art
world; he could and did go his own way, being spared the
insecurity and conflict that would presumably have been his lot
if he had decided to go into law or advertising. "I guess I was
even belligerent about my aloneness," he remarked many years
after the early '50s, when he cut his ties with the then small
Manhattan art world to live in the country in Suffern, N.Y.

    There is a permanent residue of ideas from early
Abstractionists in Pousette-Dart's thinking -- notions about
transcendence and spirituality that filtered in from
fin-de-siecle cult figures like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf
Steiner, and that had more impact on Mondrian and Kandinsky than
all the established churches put together. The effect is to
downplay nature in favor of culture. "Nature does not satisfy
art," one finds in Pousette-Dart's copious notes, cited in the
catalog, "but art satisfies nature. Nature is dumb, while art
is conscious, articulate, triumphant." This aesthete's idealism
sounds unduly high flown. What abstract painting really rivals,
in point of organization, the structure of a leaf? But what
counts, in the end, is the paintings the idealism serves, and
many of these are extraordinarily beautiful.

    In the '50s Pousette-Dart's paintings had a general kind of
affinity with Mark Tobey's, in their formal means as well as in
their spiritualist ambitions: an image emerging from subtle
"white writing" spread across the surface, bathing the
ideographic forms in a diffused glow. But Pousette-Dart really
hit his stride in the '60s, through a kind of Impressionism
without objects. In it, the Impressionist idea of fidelity to
the passing nuances of light was subsumed in rendering a
molecular space, dancing and palpitating with perfectly
controlled motes of close-valued color and big, tranquil,
centered images that resembled stars or novas. One can see them
as part of the same (now utterly defunct) fixation on the
"spiritual" possibilities of outer space that tinged the culture
of the day, whose big expression in film was Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey.

    The images are keyed to the scale of the single brushmark
and yet seem immeasurably far away, out in deep space. By
Pousette-Dart's own account, they were influenced by the
graininess of astronomical photography. They don't read as
literal pictures of the firmament but rather as invitations to
contemplate the far in the near. Some of them rely on the kind
of "sacred geometry" -- archetypal figures, the square, the
circle, the triangle -- that obsessed Kandinsky or Kupka. And
at their best, because of the nuanced sensibility that goes into
the labor of building up their primary forms, they are quite
transfixing.

    No reproduction conveys the effect of a picture like Black
Circle, Time, 1979-80. Painted every inch of the way with a
Seurat-like determination to leave nothing accidental on the
surface, it is Pousette-Dart's version of the circle that has
been used, as a mandatory trope, by every Zen roshi for the past
300 years. It is the circle of black ink on white rice paper
that says "emptiness" but also says "fullness," the abstract
figure in which one can reflect on the presence of complete
being.