Richard Pousette-Dart ‘East River Studio’ Luhring Augustine Gallery

Tradition, as T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘…Is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.’ Tradition as passed through multiple generations of artists—and artistic practices—is crystalized into Richard Pousette-Dart’s single voice at Luhring Augustine. Pousette-Dart’s early New York City paintings have been organized by two younger artists in his exhibition, ‘East River Studio’ on view in Chelsea. The first artist, Christopher Wool, is one of Luhring Augustine’s stable artists, and who also studied with Pousette-Dart, while the second, Joanna Pousette-Dart, is the artist’s daughter. Taken together, the show becomes both a helpful re-contextualization of a younger, and more obscure, member of the Abstract Expressionist circle, and also a meditation on the capabilities of tradition, labor, and artistic maturation.

                Richard Pousette-Dart’s works on display was created in a five year period from 1946-1951 in the titular ‘east river studio’. Pousette-Dart’s space was an old brewery in east Midtown that turned out to be his last work area in New York City. In 1951 the artist moved with his family upstate for greater access to large space and the critical calm his work required. While continuing to teach and exhibit in New York, Pousette-Dart’s work moved away from the urban towards an exploration of form and ideas not found in Western progressive painting.  Instead, Pousette-Dart borrowed different techniques and practices from both Western and non-Western art including pointillism and the culture of the Pacific Northwest. At Luhring Augustine, Pousette-Dart’s ‘east river’ paintings and sculptures show the artist already moving in these myriad directions. Several wire sculptures have a totemic presence reminiscent of folk-craft traditions while certain images dab paint into dot formations, most successfully in ‘Icarus’ from 1951 that the artist would later soften and harmonize into a coherent whole. Most paintings here, however, are raw and gorgeously incoherent. Bordering on the amateur, Pousette-Dart undermines any classicism inherent in abstract art’s utopian promise. Restricting himself to black and white, as Pollock and de Kooning had during this time, Pousette-Dart moved away from the refined elegance displayed by those two artist’s efforts into a funky eclecticism. ‘Ossi’ from 1949 and ‘Cloud Sign’ from 1950 have elements of Zen action painting as well as resembling discarded roofing tar tiles. Often cut down from larger rolls of canvas, Pousette-Dart’s paintings are strung along the stretcher bars’ edges and act as fragmented remnants of a procedural, psychic studio based dance. Nervy and broken, Pousette-Dart’s ‘east river paintings’ speak as much for today’s painter as wear the concerns of generations past.

                Christopher Wool and Joanna Pousette-Dart further elaborate and in turn diverge from Pousette-Dart’s abstraction. Christopher Wool, in his spray paint monochrome abstractions, and Joanna Pousette-Dart with her multi-paneled shaped paintings, each take elements of Pousette-Dart’s thought as a starting point for their own work. Both of these painters have moved beyond the specific formal concerns of Pousette-Dart’s own work while retaining the integrity his paintings embody. Choosing as their subject a body of important and transitional work, these two artists place themselves in a particular tradition while highlighting the possibility of mutation and change within that practice. Wool and Joanna Pousette-Dart each have received an inheritance from Pousette-Dart that still speaks, however faintly, in their current studio work. Considered alchemically, both painters have used the voice of their elder to illumine the magic inherent in art.

Richard Pousette-Dart
Icarus, 1951
Oil on linen
41 1/2 x 72 1/4 inches 
(105.41 X 183.52 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Cloud Sign, 1950
Oil and graphite on linen
36 x 74 inches 
(91.44 x 187.96 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Angel Forms, 1952/1953
Oil on linen
44 x 63 1/2 inches 
(111.76 x 161.29 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Ossi, 1949
Oil on linen
36 x 62 1/2 inches
(91.44 X 158.75 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Ebony, 1951
Oil on linen
43 x 76 1/4 inches 
(109.22 x 193.68 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
East River Sun, 1947-1949
Oil on linen
55 1/2 x 37 1/2 inches 
(140.97 x 95.25 cm)

Richard Pousette-Dart
Bridge Horizon, 1950
Oil on linen
75 x 47 3/4 inches 
(190.5 x 121.29 cm

Richard Pousette-Dart
Animal Forms, 1940-1943
Oil on linen
38 1/2 x 42 inches 
(97.79 X 106.68 cm)