Radiance Chartre, 1974
Radiance Chartre, 1974
58 × 45 inches




Room of Mirrors, 1955
Room of Mirrors, 1955
10-5/8 × 13-3/4 inches




Black and White Fugue, 1979-80
Black and White Fugue, 1979-80
42-1/2 × 85-1/2 inches




Red Oasis, 1978-79
Red Oasis, 1978-79
41 × 80 inches




Black and White Mediterranean, 1978-80
Black and White Mediterranean, 1978-80
33 × 66 inches




 Richard Pousette-Dart: Paintings and Works on Paper

Brian Gross Fine Art announces the inauguration of its newly expanded gallery space at 49 Geary Street on Thursday, November 6, with an exhibition of the American modern master Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992). This will be the first Bay Area exhibition of the internationally acclaimed artist of The New York School, and will include paintings and works on paper from the 1940's through the 1980's.

Richard Pousette-Dart, the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists, had his first solo exhibition at the Artist's Gallery, New York in 1941 and subsequently showed with legendary dealers Marian Willard, Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons. Introspective and less gregarious than many of The New York School, Pousette-Dart was highly concerned with the spiritual and the role of the unconscious. He drew inspiration from Native American, African, and Oceanic art, as well as European and American artistic trends and the writings of Freud and Jung.

In 1942, he completed Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, considered one of the first monumental Abstract Expressionist paintings at nearly eight feet high by ten feet wide. In 1951, he was included in an historic photograph of The Irascibles, depicting a group of abstract painters of The New York School that included de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, and Rothko among others.

Pousette-Dart was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1951), a Ford Foundation Grant (1959), and an Individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1967). Bard College awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1965, and in 1981 the Tiffany Foundation granted him the Distinguished Lifetime in Art Award. In addition to teaching at Bard College, where he was the Milton Avery Distinguished Professor of Arts in 1983, Pousette-Dart taught at The New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and the School for Visual Arts. Richard Pousette-Dart continued to work until his death in 1992.

Richard Pousette-Dart's paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969-70; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1963, 1974, and 1998; the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1986; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana in 1990; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1997; and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany in 2001.

The work of Richard Pousette-Dart appears in numerous public collections, including: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.