Richard Pousette-Dart - 1985 Newspaper Review

Human spirit emerges as abstract, dignified
by Leslie Judd Ahlander
Special to The Miami News

Friday, March 22, 1985
The Miami News
Art review

Two artists of international reputation, neither of whom has held a one-man show in Miami before, are on view here now. They’re Lynn Chadwick, the British sculptor, now at Galerie Ninety-Nine through the end of March, and Richard Pousette-Dart, a leading member of the abstract-expressionist group in New York before he broke away to pursue his own direction. He can be seen at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries through May 18.

Chadwick, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth comprised the famous triumvirate of sculptors who came to the fore in England between the wars. Their work attracted immediate international attention. Chadwick’s work is owned in public collections in more than 20 countries around the world, including 11 in this country alone.

Like Moore, Chadwick derives his forms from the human figure and never strays from a somewhat stylized, highly simplified approach. The figures recall kings and queens, so regal is their bearing, but they’re mysterious as well, as though it were Camelot over which they reigned rather than a more pedestrian world. Faceless but now menacing, they move or sit or recline with great dignity, their robes flowing around them. Even the small works have extraordinary presence.

Chadwick trained as an architect and worked in sculpture in several modes, such as the thin and spidery mobile construction done for the Arts Council of Great Britain, but in recent years has stayed with the serene and lovely figures, male and female, that have come to characterize his work. In a world that lives in the shadow of the atomic bomb, his works are a reminder of the potential dignity of man.

At the same time, Galerie Ninety-Nine is showing a group of paintings by Spanish artist Dario Villalba. Accomplished and bravura in the Spanish manner, they pleasantly combine shapes and textures, but they suffer in comparison to Chadwick. They seem merely glib beside the restrained dignity and spirit of the sculptures.

Richard Pousette-Dart, Wall of Signs
84 x 50 inches, Panel I, Acrylic on Linen

Richard Pousette-Dart, Gallery Installation

Richard Pousette-Dart also is an artist of the human spirit, but he achieves his ends through abstractions that attest to his belief in the expansion of consciousness on many levels of being. He has written, “I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe.” His work belongs to the group of abstract expressionists who in the ’50s used their canvases not as arenas, as the action painters did, but as visions of expanding enlightenment as expressed in Zen Buddhism.

Pousette-Dart was one of the artists who exhibited with the Surrealists at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1947 along with Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Motherwell and others, and his early work shows a distinctly surreal cast.

Two of his works from the ’40s are included in his show. The exhibit continues with works from the years in between, with color field painting from the ’60s and ’70s, then with the re-emergence of circles and squares as focal points of an expanding image relating to space and universal consciousness. The paint is piled on the canvas as much as an inch thick. swirled in dots and mysterious runes. The titles give a clue to the artist’s intention: “Time Is the Mind of Space; Space Is the Body of Time,” “Illumination Square,” “Radiance: Imploding Light.”

For all its brilliant color and thick, rough surfaces, the work is reticent and intellectual. As the artist himself has written: “Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life. It is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.”

A leading New York critic has called Pousette-Dart one of the two important abstract expressionists of the first half of this century. He certainly is one who has gone from strength to strength, expanding his vision and means without a loss of force and vigor. He has gone far beyond abstract expressionism as a school and into a vision uniquely his own.

(Leslie Judd Ahlander has served as Metro-Dade County art coordinator, and for 13 years was art critic of the Washington Post — twice winning the Art Critics Award of the College Art Association.)

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