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Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart Works on Paper, 1940–1992
8/30/2006 Legion of Honor, San Francisco
October 14, 2006–January 14, 2007 “The only explanation of painting is the poetry of the painting itself. Painting is a feeling thinking, a material awareness of spirit, a sense of direct experience which transcends any intellectual method.” Richard Pousette-Dart
San Francisco, August 30, 2007—The 51 glowing and luminous works on paper in this exhibition of art by abstract expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart commemorate his prolific career of over 50 years as a draftsman, representing the full range of his graphic work from the 1940s to the 1990s. Included in the exhibition is a selection of his finest drawings, paintings on paper, and painted prints, which illustrate the important role that works on paper played in his life’s work. The exhibition also features five of the artist’s works that were recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, its prints and drawings department. These signal works include Sea World, 1945; Heraldic Chorus, 1950s; Radiance White Center, 1960s; White Spiral, 1978; and Imploding Circle, 1981. These are the first works by this important artist to enter the museum’s collections.
The exhibition, curated by Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, and co-organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, marks the first retrospective of Pousette-Dart’s work that was organized on the West Coast. Prior to its showing in San Francisco, the exhibition will have been on view at
LACMA from June 29 through September 17, 2007. At the conclusion of the San Francisco presentation, the exhibition will travel to Cincinnati Art Museum,
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) was a first generation abstract expressionist artist and a founding member of the New York School, the loosely knit group that included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. The youngest member of the group and a master of many media, Pousette-Dart was a painter, sculptor, photographer, and prolific draftsman, creating works on paper throughout his life in diverse media, including watercolor, ink, oil, acrylic, and graphite. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and American transcendental thought, his deeply felt sense of the spiritual informs his work. Says Robert Flynn Johnson, “There is an almost Whitmanesque intensity that permeates his art with metaphors, challenging the viewer to probe beneath its formal beauty and strength.”
Pousette-Dart’s works from the 1940s and 1950s are characterized by a dense assortment of concentric circles, eye and egg forms, squiggles and crescents, and compositions in rich colors, which are organized within an underlying grid. Melding the organic forms with the grid, Pousette-Dart makes references in these works to both Surrealism—through the forms that are reminiscent of totemic Pacific Northwest, Oceanic, and African art—and to mid-20th-century developments in abstraction, particularly the decentralized picture plane with no firm focal point. In the late 1950s, Pousette-Dart eliminates the grid and begins to apply paint in dots, often directly from the tube, in a manner that suggests French artist Georges Seurat’s pointillist technique. By the late 1960s, the compositions become simpler, emphasizing fundamental shapes such as the circle, which evoke the sun, moon, and cosmic realms. In the following decade, Pousette-Dart continued to use the circular focal point, though limiting its color range, in some cases, to white. In the last two decades of his work, Pousette-Dart renewed forms and compositions from his earlier work, as in Bird in Spring, which he produced in 1992, the year of his death. The imagery in this work suggests the quintessential theme of renewal and regeneration and reaffirms his declaration that “art is affirmation of life. It is Presence. It is Transcendental Being.”
Organization and Credit
Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992 was curated by Robert Flynn Johnson, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Cincinnati Art Museum. The presentation in San Francisco is generously supported by the San Francisco Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums.
Catalogue
Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992 is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, all-color catalogue published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The publication includes essays by Robert Flynn Johnson, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Kevin Salatino, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Available in the Museum Stores; paperbound, $19.95.
Admission Fees and Hours
The Legion of Honor open from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.
Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors age 65 and older, $6 for youths ages
13–17, and children 12 and under are free. There is a $2 discount on paid admission upon presentation of a valid MUNI transfer or Fast Pass. Admission tickets to the Legion may be used on the same day for free entrance to the de Young. Admission is free at both museums on the first Tuesday of the month. For further information please call the Hotline at 415-863-3330 or visit www.leginofhonor.org
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