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During the late 1930s he
painted at night and worked as a secretary during the day.
Decided in 1939 to give up everything for painting.
In 1940 he settled in full-time painting.
Painting on large
canvases Pousette-Dart became one of the first members of the New York
School to create a format that was to become of crucial importance to
later Abstract Expressionism.
When the history of the so-called "big picture" was being
written, Pousette-Dart had left New York City, and perhaps this is the
reason why he was not included in the lists of those who had diverged
from the strictures inherent in easel painting by creating all-over
compositions.
When he painted a
picture called 'Symphony Number 1', his contemporaries reacted
negatively. In particular, he remembers Rothko asking him why he had
painted it, and to whom did he hope to sell it, an interesting
incident in light of Rothko's later works.
With the advent
of the big picture, the implicit emphasis on peripheral vision that
designates the concerns of early Abstract Expressionism almost became
explicit, for looking at an expansive surface from only two, or at
most three, feet away, the distance recommended by many painters of
the big picture, places primary emphasis on peripheral scanning and
minimizes the importance of focused vision.
Among Abstract Expressionists' works, Pousette-Dart's are perhaps the
clearest example of psychic automatist procedures. To get rid of the
inhibitory whiteness of the canvas and also to prepare a surface
conducive to creation, Pousette-Dart would begin with an imprimatura
of spirals, lozenges, diamonds, lettering, and usually fish and
flagella. For him painting is a slow process of secreting atavistic
symbols on a surface that is a metaphor of being. His paintings can be
compared to Freud's magic writing tablet - not the acetate shield on
the surface, however, which only temporarily registers the marks of
consciousness, but the wax surface beneath.
A strict
formalist would pronounce Pousette-Dart almost a cubist because he
begins at an early stage to erect a cubist infrastructure which he
overpaints, sometimes with thirty or forty layers. A comparison
between his paintings indicates differences between a thinly painted
cubist Pittura Metafisica in the earlier works and the scumbled
encrustation of the latter, definitely a clearer example of this
artist's early Abstract Expressionist mode.
While Pousette-Dart often attains a cubist articulation of form at
some stage of painting, he almost always destroys it, to create a
surface of quivering indecisiveness. One might think his is a
programmatic intent, except that he works intuitively to diminish the
dictates of cubist grids in his art. By a considerable amount of
reworking of surfaces, he arrives at a conflation of imagery similar
to what Pollock achieved in the early forties with spontaneity and
freneticism.
Pousette-Dart poises his images on a threshold appealing to the
conscious and the unconscious mind. His intent, which he labels
religious, however refusing to ally it with any known orthodoxy, is to
achieve in painterly terms an oceanic feeling of cosmic consciousness
common to many types of mysticism. What he does is to create a
vibrating, hovering surface which both denies as it also asserts the
tactility of the paint. He implants on the surface numerous
uninterpretable ciphers that function analogously to the fleeting
impressions a mystic apprehends during meditation, becoming the
"halo" of consciousness, which Ehrenzweig indicates is
"the playground of our unconscious imagination."
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