RICHARD POUSETTE-DART WORKS AT GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM AUG. 17

AVV 7-23 #707130

NEW YORK CITY — The work of Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), youngest artist of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum August 17–September 25. The exhibition, with approximately 40 paintings representing the artist’s career, premiered earlier this year at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

“Richard Pousette-Dart,” curated by Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim collection, with Luca Massimo Barbero, associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim collection, is organized in collaboration with the estate of the artist, the artist’s widow Evelyn Pousette-Dart and the support of the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich.

Active in New York from the early 1940s, Pousette-Dart made essential contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was among the first of the Abstract Expressionists to be given a solo exhibition (Artists Gallery, New York, 1941), and between 1941 and 1942 he was the first of the group to paint large-scale canvases, including “Undulation,” which anticipated Jackson Pollock’s breakthrough to mural-scale work in 1943.

Pousette-Dart drew inspiration from Native American, African and Oceanic art, as well as European and American artistic trends, and the writings of Freud and Jung. He was influenced by Oriental philosophy and American Transcendentalism and held to the conviction that the abstract symbols of painting could reveal universal truths by suggesting the mysterious realm of the spirit.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-423-3840 or www.guggenheim.org.