Richard Pousette-Dart 1916-1992
“Painting is the language of the spirit.”
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) was the youngest member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to artist parents, he studied art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. After graduating, he created small sculptures, poems, drawings, and oil paintings, often inspired by Eastern philosophy, religion, and archaic forms. For Pousette-Dart, abstraction offered a way to move beyond reality and into a mystical, universal language.
In the 1940s his paintings incorporated allegories and symbols reflecting his opposition to war, while the 1950s brought large white canvases marked by biomorphic forms and calligraphic fields. He later developed pointillist abstractions with radiant circles of light, and from the 1960s onward explored vibrant color, evolving into bold geometric compositions in the 1970s and 1980s.
Pousette-Dart’s first solo exhibition was held at The Artists’ Gallery, New York, in 1941, followed by Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1947. His work entered the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and was included in MoMA’s Contemporary American Painting (1949) and the Whitney Biennial that same year. He exhibited widely, including the Venice Biennale in 1982, and received numerous awards such as the Tiffany Foundation grant in 1981.
His work is held in major public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate, London, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. In 2007, his work was honored in a retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
