Pousette-Dart, Richard, 1916–92, American painter, b. St. Paul, Minn. The son of an artist and a poet and largely self-taught, he was a member of the first generation of abstract expressionism. He lived (1937–51) in New York City, where he was one of the younger members of the so-called New York School, then moved upstate and thereafter maintained a distance from city's art world. Beginning in the early 1940s, his boldly colored abstract paintings, heavily layered and densely encrusted, were filled with iconic symbols, and many have a transcendent air. His paintings of the 1960s and 70s were generally all-over fields of shimmering color dotted with luminous, tactile orbs, dots, and jots. Pousette-Dart was also a talented draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer.
See studies by J. Gordon (1963), R. C. Hobbs and J. M. Knebler, ed. (1991), L. S. Sims (1997), and R. Mattison et al. (2006).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: American and Canadian Art: Biographies
