This
is a pivotal work from the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in 1950.
It's executed in a deep and radiant cobalt blue. It depicts calligraphic
and hieroglyph structures over a grid /pyramidal base by the first
generation abstract expressionist.
Signed and dated verso: "Richard Pousette-Dart 1950"

Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract
Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of
abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a
reflection of what he called "the concealed power of the spirit," he
said, “not of the brute physical form." His was not aiming for a
singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of
painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and
exploration is this painting Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34
years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American
painting, Betty Parsons.

A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the
Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born
artist. He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on
masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger
scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length
now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both contain
fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic
vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility,
Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas
of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the
pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking
back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a
similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal,
but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated
character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that
one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature
is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he
has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually
move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of
articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color. The painting’s
imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors,
cobalt blue and white all outlined in black. Pousette-Dart
symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows: blue is ground, white
is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The
painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate
a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart
authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture
and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle with
parts fitting into parts, this landscape is one that is both imagined
and remembered. It’s as if this secret code is a challenge for him to
build a mythical place that is first created in his mind and then laid
out like a map on the masonite support in surprising detail. We see the
individual parts dance across the surface in an elegant symmetry. The
clarity and directness of this work stands in sharp contrast to the
other imagined landscapes he painted during this same period, paintings
suffused with atmosphere and texture. Though white again is the
protagonist it is a warm and weathered white. They have something of
an ethereal glow and it is here too that Pousette-Dart like Mark Rothko
and Barnett Newman seeks and finds a spiritual connection through the
means of abstract painting. The series of white paintings like Path of
the White Bird, 1950-51 or White Garden Sky, 1951 while of their day
they also seem a nod to the past, that is to painters of the past like
Titian or Veronese. Untitled,1950, however, takes us in an entirely new
direction. It very fresh, of the moment, spontaneous, a revelation as
if Pousette-Dart has had a vision of what is to come. One can’t help
but read this rather intimate composition as a kind of musical score
made up of notes and notations, a magical transformation in paint
combining themes and variations that are repeated throughout the canvas.
He has now orchestrated a perfect harmony using elegant blocks filled
with twists, curves, circles, squares, rectangles and arabesques that
refer to trees, flowers, streams, all of nature as if seen through a
prism . The world represented here is ultimately for the artist and for
the viewer pure abstraction. In Untitled 1950 Pousette-Dart has
developed a geometry like no other, because it draws from nature yet
eschews the colors of nature in favor of a mid century modern palette.
In the years to come Pousette-Dart will draw from Untitled 1950 and
expand on each of these small abstract elements, these notations as I
called them, draw them on a larger scale or combine them into larger
groupings; pushing their symbolic character in each and every painting.
As Pousette-Dart moved on his paintings over the next few decades would
become more meditative and iconic drawing inspiration from what he
discovered in this 1950 composition.

Several years after his death
now over two decades ago the Metropolitan Museum mounted a survey of his
career. The breadth, depth and scope of Pousette-Dart’s work took many
by surprise. In this exhibition they saw a painter who had expanded the
definition not only of Abstract Expressionism but painting itself. It
was his ability to explore and articulate all aspects of this visual art
and find ways in which he could continue to employ and expand these
unique symbols and signs as created in this remarkable untitled
painting. This 1950 work is a prelude of works such as The Square of
Light, 1979-80 or Cathedral 1979-80 in the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s
permanent collection are two prime examples

Untitled 1950 is the
key that unlocks the door to his future while defining who he was then, a
brilliant member of the New York School.


( Michael Klein knew
Pousette-Dart personally as well as his daughter Joanna and visited his
studio in Rockland country, several times between 1985 and 1988 )

Michael Klein
Sharon Springs New York
2019

Michael Klein

Michael Klein Arts LLC
An agent for Artists and Artists Estates
www.michaelkleinarts.com
www.patreon.com/michaelklein