Word: dart
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...