LACMA

Leslie Jones, associate curator of Prints and Drawings.

LACMA’s associate curator of Prints and Drawings spoke to At Lacma, the members’ magazine, about the originality and resolute independence of an artist who resisted all “isms, creeds or entanglements.” Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart, Works on Paper, 1940–1992, was on display in the Modern and Contemporary Building through September 17, 2006.

Q. Pousette-Dart was a painter, sculptor, and photographer. Why is it, then, that this exhibition focuses on only paper?

A. By their nature, works on paper are inherently more intimate and conducive to reflection and experimentation, and thereby offer the viewer a closer look into the artist’s creative process. Throughout his career, Pousette-Dart explored the expressive potential of diverse media—watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, oil, graphite and wax—on paper, often combining them in a single work. And, as a highly absorbent support, paper demands a certain spontaneity. This sense of immediacy and improvisation cannot be recreated in painting or sculpture. Yet, while his works on paper were often an arena for his most daring experimentation, he considered them complete and independent works of art.

Q. Pousette-Dart was the youngest founding member of the New York School, so why did he leave during the heyday of abstract expressionism?

A. Pousette-Dart was fiercely independent throughout his life, believing that one learned primarily through self-exploration. As a young man he studied art briefly at Bard College in upstate New York, but soon left saying that “he preferred to think for himself.” His decision to leave New York City in 1951 was motivated by this same impulse. Although he shared his contemporaries’ interests in exploring the transcendental power of abstraction, Pousette-Dart chose to stand apart from such movements or, as he called them, “isms, creeds or entanglements which would tend to make [the artist] other than himself.”

Q. Was the move a pivotal one?

A. The move was pivotal in terms of the artist proclaiming his creative independence and demanding that his work be viewed on its own terms. But stylistically, his work did not change until he moved a second time, in the late 1950s. At that time he began to apply paint in dots, his palette brightened and his works’ titles, such as Summer’s Breath and Garden Light, began more directly to evoke nature.

Golden Eye, 1945-46, Watercolor and ink on gesso board, 19 7/8 x 24 in., LACMA, gift of Fannie and Alan Leslie,  © Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Q. Is that what we see in Golden Eye?

A. Golden Eye was actually painted prior to this time, in the mid '40s. Much of his work from this era reflects the influence of Jungian archetypes and the belief in a universal form of expression rooted in the idea of a collective unconscious. In the piece you mention, a dominant bird form emerges from a veritable petri dish of richly colored organic shapes. The artist himself wrote that “Out of the rich enmesh of chaos and ashes arises the bird pure and free,” pointing to the bird’s larger cultural meaning.

Q. Were similar themes constant throughout his career? For instance, much of his work seems to appear almost . . . cosmic. Organic and earthy at times, almost ethereal at others.

Moon Meditation, 1960s, o il on Arches paper, 11 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart, © Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart, photo by Jim Strong, Inc.

A. It is precisely this duality—between the immaterial and material, between the transcendent and worldly—that distinguishes Pousette-Dart’s art. In works with cosmic themes like the sun or moon, for example, the artist applied thousands upon thousands of dots of paint in order to create an ethereal sense of emanating light or an immense void. Although it seems counterintuitive, Pousette-Dart’s thick application of paint was intended to create what he described as “a material awareness of spirit.”

Q. How does his work relate to other artists?

A. This painterly approach to the subject of light is not unlike the heavy impasto of Jay DeFeo’s The Jewel (1959) in LACMA’s collection, while the emphasis on transcendent luminosity evokes the light and space installations by Robert Irwin from the late 1960s. There are also several other artists whose work demonstrates a certain affinity with that of Pousette-Dart. His fascination with the cosmos as a realm of existence beyond the everyday can be related to Lee Bontecou’s black holes or Russell Crotty’s nocturnes. And while the art historical tendency, based primarily on the artist’s own writings, has been to emphasize the transcendental or spiritual aspect of his work, there is clearly an equal interest in materiality and mark-making that speaks to work by artists as distinct as Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin.

Q. And what changes in his work do we see toward the latter part of his career?

A. In the last twenty years of his work, Pousette-Dart began to reference the forms and compositions of his earlier work. In the 1940s, he was exploring animated totemic shapes, and these show up again in his pieces from the 80s and 90s, this time in a group of geometric black and white works in acrylic. This time, though, there was a new emphasis on contrast, reflecting his desire to represent the balance of opposites.

Q. Now that we have a greater understanding of the artist, how should we navigate our way through the exhibition?

A. The installation is roughly chronological beginning with the first gallery devoted to works from the 1940s–1960s and the third (and final) gallery devoted to works from the 1970s until 1992, the year of his death. The second gallery contains white monochromatic works from his entire career. By interrupting the conventional order of things, we’re calling attention to Pousette-Dart’s lifelong exploration of white as a variation on a theme, while also creating a meditative pause in the installation.

This interview was conducted by At LACMA Editor Brooke Fruchtman.