A lthough widely known as an Abstract Expressionist whose works during the 1940s and 1950s concentrated on abstracted mythic and totemic forms, in 1960, Richard Pousette-Dart’s painting followed a radically new direction toward allover fields of color achieved through layers of multitudinous, small dabs of paint. Canvases began to concentrate on light-filled optical effects. These late works have erroneously has been tied to Pointillism (his paintings are entirely intuitive, rather than system-based), and the artist noted that his training with photographic prints and negatives allowed him to scrutinize the granular structure of film, revealing that “all form is made up of so many points of light and that everything has a molecular structure. Photography was how I got to the point . . . I’m concerned with form and the nature of light, and I find that I can achieve variations in form through many touches of the brush in a way that I can’t with a single stroke of the brush” (Judith Higgins, “To the Point of Vision: A Profile of Richard Pousette-Dart,” in Exh. Cat., Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Transcending Abstraction: Richard Pousette-Dart, Paintings 1939–1985, 1986).
Red Presence-3 of 1972 innovatively employs abstraction to offer vantages on the idea of space, including expanding and converging recessional depth and sweeping cross-sections of seeming infinitude. Pulsating combinations of colors unify into an interconnected mode of perception. Pousette-Dart called his process “tuning:” achieving an asymmetrical balance that makes all points on the canvas vibrate in harmony and resonate with temporal duration, like a musical passage. A number of works from this period invoke stellar and celestial imagery, suggesting a macroscopic view of the universe, although the artist noted that he never consciously set out to record the heavens. Rather, he sought universal form and structure present in multiple scales, whether observable through a microscope or telescope.
