Dissident duo tweaks the Russians
By Helen L. Kohen
Art Critic

The Miami Herald
Friday, March 29, 1985


Art Review
Pousette-Dart

Moving from the dissident duo to the likes of Richard Pousette-Dart is progressing from the ridiculous to the sublime. In a handsome exhibition of his works at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, Pousette-Dart proves to have enormous staying power, to be in the old sense an authentic artist, and by modernist standards a timeless one.

An associate of the first-generation New York School artists, Pousette-Dart's early style had aspects in common with Rothko, Pollock and Gottlieb, but like them he moved on to invent a style on his own, all his own. While the few works on view that date from the '40s to the '60s can only suggest the several stages in the evolution of that style, the most recent paintings reveal that at this time Pousette-Dart can call upon his means like a master. Choosing among his all-over calligraphic painting modes, from those works that featured single shapes afloat in a field, or from those in which a thousand cell-like bodies appear to be buoyed up by a thousand daubs of pigment, Pousette-Dart can manipulate color tones, or texture, or imagery, singly, or in pairs, at will. What results is always an eyeful, reminding us of the pleasures of seeing.

We get a sense of the spiritual content in the works too, for these same optical effects that enliven his canvases with texture and light also tend toward dematerialization. The earliest religious artists had a similar impulse, meaning to muddle the mind in the midst of reality in order to turn it to otherworldly conceits.

Although he has always had his share of champions, numbering among them such diverse enthusiasts as Peggy Guggenheim and Lucy Lippard, Pousette-Dart, never easy to categorize, remains a well-kept secret in the art world. With so many clamoring for art and so little good art readily available, it is impossible to understand how Pousette-Dart escaped becoming a household word. The relative calm of his career has kept him focused and working, fashioning his jewel-like mosaics with paint and perseverance. All that care shows in this exhibition, which is a highlight of the season.