Richard Pousette-Dart

Art Brokerage: Richard Pousette-Dart American Artist: b. 1916-1992. Richard Warren Pousette-Dart (June 8, 1916 – October 25, 1992) was an American artist most recognized as a founder of the New York School of painting. His artistic output also includes drawing, sculpture, and fine-art photography. Pousette-Dart initially concentrated on stone carving, expanding his work to include cast bronze and brass. He held in high regard the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who embraced tribal art and its ability to convey power and mystery through three-dimensional form. During the 1930s, Pousette-Dart frequented the American Museum of Natural History and became deeply interested in the formal and spiritual aspects of African, Oceanic and Native American art, especially carvings produced by Northwest Indian cultures. Many of his paintings and sculptures from the 1930s, such as Woman Bird Group (Smithsonian American Art Museum), embrace these totemic and symbolic forms. Pousette-Dart's first one-man exhibition of painting took place at the Artists' Gallery in New York in the fall of 1941. That year, The Museum of Modern Art acquired his 1940 painting Desert. In 1942, he completed Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, a painting of heroic scale too large to show at the Marian Willard Gallery, where it was to be exhibited. This work was the first mural-sized easel painting by the New York School artists, influencing works such as Mural by Jackson Pollock (1943) and The Liver is the Cock's Comb by Arshile Gorky (1944). During the mid-1940s, Pousette-Dart exhibited at Howard Putzel's 67 Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century and, in 1948, joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, which exhibited the work of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and other painters who came to shape the formative cannon of the New York School. From 1950 to 1961 Pousette-Dart taught painting at the New School for Social Research. Positions followed at Columbia University (1967), Sarah Lawrence College (1970–1974), the Art Students League (1980–1985), and Bard College (1983–1992).