Richard Pousette-Dart.

KNOEDLER & CO.

This first posthumous exhibition of the pioneering American Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart does his reputation little good. Knoedler's selection (fourteen paintings, mostly large; seven small watercolors) revealed a competent but mediocre professional whose work belies much of what has been said about it.

True, he could put paint on canvas, and, at surface level, had a prodigious vocabulary of means and effects. He could paint thin and flat and thick impasto; make purple daubs glitter like jewels, patches of white paint seem liquid, whole paintings resemble stained glass; seamless transitions, strong variations, and so on. Irving Sandler's catalogue essay tells us that the seeming spontaneity of his canvases is the result of a highly self-conscious practice, that Pousette-Dart "worked and re-worked" his canvases in order to "encounter and reveal 'spiritual' light."

About this light I have my doubts. What these paintings do reveal is that Pousette-Dart didn't know when to put the brush down, but rather worked and reworked his effects to the detriment of his compositions, which are confused, spiritless, and murky. In only 14 canvases, so many age-old tasks of painting are taken up and mishandled! For example, in those paintings based on joining two dissimilar figures, or landscapes, or spaces to create a new visual and spiritual unity, he almost invariably overwhelms and obscures a key element, throwing the composition off-kilter.

Like many modern painters, Pousette-Dart was interested in the schematic representation of the human figure. His has a featureless head, vague torso, and short tubular limbs with rounded stumps. The most successful traditional structure here is that which, like the portrait, isolates and clarifies a single figure. The success is consistent from early figurative paintings to Golden Dawn, 1952, a "portrait" of a light golden oval abstraction, dense with expressive gesture and calligraphic drawing, against a plainer ground. Yet similar pictures from the '40s are marred by various faults of handling and overcrowding. In Spirit Adagio, 1942-43, a portrait of a dancer, the failure is in the drawing: contour dissolves into ornament, figure into mass, the adagio into a scherzo that's all haste and no purpose. Whether dancer, lover(s), or Christ, there's not much Pousette-Dart can make his figure do or express. By contrast, Keith Haring's figure tells us the failure of Pousette-Dart's is not in the conception but in the art.

During the '40s, Sandler tells us, Pousette-Dart was also preoccupied with "symbols and signs evoking the archetypal and cosmic." And indeed the '40s pictures here are full of eyes, pyramids, mandalas, totems. These are icons, not forms; their appeal is culturally, not sensuously determined. Art moves us via the senses: the image of Christ crucified is not born in us; we respond devoutly to it if we are devout, which devotion is culturally informed; but even if we are skeptical or ignorant of Christianity, Grunewald's Christ, say, moves us because of its art. Pousette-Dart's mistake was to count on ancient symbols from remote cultures and synthetic symbols belonging to no culture to do the work of esthetic form.

With the '50s work shown here Pousette-Dart becomes credible. By then, Sandler says, he had embraced American Transcendentalism. Golden Dawn's evocation of the infinite is one with this version of the sublime, embraced by Abstract Expressionism. So is The Wave of 1950, in which color is so well understood as dramaturgy that the forms become distinct, rise to a climax, and keep rising toward the beyond, playful and indomitable.

Perhaps Pousette-Dart's '40s were just Wanderjahre? Not everyone seeking transcendence finds it right away.

- BL