Ричард Пусетт Дарт: Американдық абстракті экспрессионисінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American abstract expressionist artist

Richard Warren Pousette Dart (June 8, 1916 – October 25, 1992) was an American abstract expressionist artist most recognized as a founder of the New York School of painting. His artistic output also includes drawing, sculpture, and fine art photography.

Richard Pousette Dart was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and moved to Valhalla, New York in 1918. His mother, Flora Louise Pousette Dart (née Dart), was a poet and musician; his father, Nathaniel J. Pousette Dart (né Pousette), was a painter, art director, educator, and writer about art. His parents had combined their last names to form Pousette Dart upon marrying. Pousette Dart began painting and drawing by the age of eight, and in 1928 was featured in a New York Times photograph showing Richard and his father sketching each other's portraits. He attended the Scarborough School and by his teens possessed well formed views about abstract art, writing in a psychology paper, "The greater the work of art, the more abstract and impersonal it is; the more it embodies universal experience, and the fewer specific personality traits it reveals." He attended Bard College in 1936, leaving after one semester to pursue an independent track as an artist in New York City. Pousette Dart's first professional positions were as an assistant to sculptor Paul Manship and secretary in the photographic retouching studio of Lynn T. Morgan.

Pousette Dart initially concentrated on stone carving, expanding his work to include cast bronze and brass. He held in high regard the work of Henri Gaudier Brzeska, who embraced tribal art and its ability to convey power and mystery through three dimensional form. During the 1930s, Pousette Dart frequented the American Museum of Natural History and became deeply interested in the formal and spiritual aspects of African, Oceanic and Native American art, especially carvings produced by Northwest Indian cultures. Many of his paintings and sculptures from the 1930s, such as Woman Bird Group (Smithsonian American Art Museum), embrace these totemic and symbolic forms. In 1938, Pousette Dart began a friendship with Russian émigré John D. Graham, whose writings offered a framework for engaging the ideas of European cubists and surrealists then being exhibited in New York City. Graham also encouraged interest in so called “primitive” archetypal forms, and Pousette Dart produced canvases with complex, interlocking biomorphic and geometric imagery, as well as hundreds of stylized, abstracted drawings of figures, heads, and animals. Pousette Dart's first one man exhibition of painting took place at the Artists’ Gallery in New York in the fall of 1941, a year after he completed the painting Desert (collection of The Museum of Modern Art. In 1942, he completed Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, a painting of heroic scale too large to show at the Marian Willard Gallery, where it was to be exhibited. by Jackson Pollock (1943) and The Liver is the Cock's Comb by Arshile Gorky (1944). During the mid 1940s, Pousette Dart exhibited at Howard Putzel's 67 Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century and, in 1948, joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, which exhibited the work of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and other painters who came to shape the formative cannon of the New York School. During the 1940s, Pousette Dart's studio was located at 436 East 56th Street in Manhattan, near the Queensboro Bridge. His East River Paintings, created in this studio during the late 1940s, embrace the amplification of line, often realized by direct application of paint from the tube onto mixed medium grounds that include sand, poured paint, and gold and silver leaf. In 1951, Pousette Dart relocated to a farmhouse in Sloatsburg, New York, and eventually to nearby Suffern, where he maintained a studio for the remainder of his life. Taos Quartet appears to be the only book illustrated by Pousette Dart. Richard Pousette Dart exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery until its close in 1983, and as such, his work was introduced to a younger generation of artists showing at the gallery, including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jack Youngerman. In 1963, The Whitney Museum of American Art staged Pousette Dart's first retrospective, with additional Whitney exhibitions in 1974 and 1998. During the 1970s Pousette Dart worked in Europe, including Antibes, France, where he concentrated on watercolor. In 1990 Pousette Dart's most complete retrospective was held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for which he created a 10 x 10 foot bronze door, Cathedral, which remains on permanent view. Pousette Dart did contribute to key discourses that shaped the emergence of the New York School: in 1948, he attended gatherings at the Subjects of the Artist experimental school; in 1950 he participated in a three day closed door conference at Studio 35; and a year later Pousette Dart was included in the landmark exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at The Museum of Modern Art. In January 1951, he was included in Nina Leen’s “The Irascibles,” published in Life magazine. From 1950 to 1961 Pousette Dart taught painting at the New School for Social Research. Positions followed at Columbia University (1967), Sarah Lawrence College (1970–1974), the Art Students League (1980–1985), and Bard College (1983–1992).

As early as high school, Pousette Dart held a strong belief in pacifism. His 1935 essay for the high school magazine The Beechwood Tree was “I Have Been Called a Dreamer,” calling for pacifism. During World War II, Pousette Dart became a conscientious objector, sent letters protesting the war to government officials, and refused to undergo an army medical exam. He was not prosecuted for his positions or actions. Richard Pousette Dart married poet Evelyn Gracey in New York City in 1946. Their daughter Joanna Pousette Dart is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York City. The estate of Richard Pousette Dart is represented by The Pace Gallery. In 2019, the Richard Pousette Dart House and Studio in Suffern, New York was listed on the U. S. National Park Service's National Register of Historical Places.

Gordon, John, Richard Pousette Dart, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in cooperation with Praeger, 1963. Hobbs, Robert, and Joanne Kuebler, Richard Pousette Dart, Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1990. Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) p. 266 269
Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) p. 16; p. 38; p. 282 285