Seeing The Far in the Near

By ROBERT HUGHES

The 50-year retrospective of paintings by Richard Pousette-Dart, organized by Joanne Kuebler for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is -- quite apart from its intrinsic qualities -- a sobering reminder of how edited a picture of art history New York City's museums have lately been giving their public. Here is an American artist of real distinction, now 74, a contemporary of De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, with whom he appeared in the famous photo of The Irascibles, the cast of Abstract Expressionism, in LIFE magazine in 1951. Nevertheless, he has virtually been dropped from the history of the New York School. At most, Pousette-Dart has had a sentence or two (and not always that) in the standard history books; none of the influential critics of the '50s backed him, and he remains a decidedly underknown painter.

Yet this show had to be done -- and at a high level of curatorial skill -- in Indiana. No New York museum plans to take it; nor could Manhattan venues be found for Franz Kline, Guido Reni, early Poussin, De Stijl, Lucian Freud and quite a number of other splendid and informative exhibitions mounted by museums west of the Hudson in the past few years. There is something unpalatable about this, a dismal message about the provincial art politics of the supposed center.

Pousette-Dart has always had his following, of course, and in any case it would be idle to put his early work in the '40s and '50s on the same level as De Kooning's or Pollock's. He certainly shared the early Abstract Expressionist interest in primitive art, totems, archetypal forms. And its general legacy from '30s Picasso too: Pousette-Dart's Portrait of Pegeen, 1943 (the subject was the deeply neurotic teenage daughter of Peggy Guggenheim, his dealer), is heavily dependent on Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. There is also a scary Expressionist insight to the chaotic congestion of Pegeen's head, staring at her reflection reduced to one bulging eye and blond Veronica Lake tresses. But Pousette-Dart was a stiff, poor draftsman, with the deficiencies of the self-taught, and this makes the early totemic paintings, with their biomorphic shapes playing hide-and-seek in the rigid scaffolding of a Cubist grid, look somewhat less than fully achieved.

He was the adored son of a painter father and a poet-musician mother, both of whom believed more in creativity and spirituality than in formal art training. The fact that they wanted him to be an artist annulled, for Pousette-Dart, the insecurity that makes some painters overdependent on the art world; he could and did go his own way, being spared the insecurity and conflict that would presumably have been his lot if he had decided to go into law or advertising. "I guess I was even belligerent about my aloneness," he remarked many years after the early '50s, when he cut his ties with the then small Manhattan art world to live in the country in Suffern, N.Y.

There is a permanent residue of ideas from early Abstractionists in Pousette-Dart's thinking -- notions about transcendence and spirituality that filtered in from fin-de-siecle cult figures like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, and that had more impact on Mondrian and Kandinsky than all the established churches put together. The effect is to downplay nature in favor of culture. "Nature does not satisfy art," one finds in Pousette-Dart's copious notes, cited in the catalog, "but art satisfies nature. Nature is dumb, while art is conscious, articulate, triumphant." This aesthete's idealism sounds unduly high flown. What abstract painting really rivals, in point of organization, the structure of a leaf? But what counts, in the end, is the paintings the idealism serves, and many of these are extraordinarily beautiful.

In the '50s Pousette-Dart's paintings had a general kind of affinity with Mark Tobey's, in their formal means as well as in their spiritualist ambitions: an image emerging from subtle "white writing" spread across the surface, bathing the ideographic forms in a diffused glow. But Pousette-Dart really hit his stride in the '60s, through a kind of Impressionism without objects. In it, the Impressionist idea of fidelity to the passing nuances of light was subsumed in rendering a molecular space, dancing and palpitating with perfectly controlled motes of close-valued color and big, tranquil, centered images that resembled stars or novas. One can see them as part of the same (now utterly defunct) fixation on the "spiritual" possibilities of outer space that tinged the culture of the day, whose big expression in film was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The images are keyed to the scale of the single brushmark and yet seem immeasurably far away, out in deep space. By Pousette-Dart's own account, they were influenced by the graininess of astronomical photography. They don't read as literal pictures of the firmament but rather as invitations to contemplate the far in the near. Some of them rely on the kind of "sacred geometry" -- archetypal figures, the square, the circle, the triangle -- that obsessed Kandinsky or Kupka. And at their best, because of the nuanced sensibility that goes into the labor of building up their primary forms, they are quite transfixing.

No reproduction conveys the effect of a picture like Black Circle, Time, 1979-80. Painted every inch of the way with a Seurat-like determination to leave nothing accidental on the surface, it is Pousette-Dart's version of the circle that has been used, as a mandatory trope, by every Zen roshi for the past 300 years. It is the circle of black ink on white rice paper that says "emptiness" but also says "fullness," the abstract figure in which one can reflect on the presence of complete being.