Richard Pousette-Dart

Born 1916 – Died 1992

Richard Pousette-Dart was born in Minnesota in the USA and attended the Scarborough School and, briefly, Bard College. He moved to New York where he became assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship and also worked as a retoucher in the photographic studio of Lynn T. Morgan. Through the writer and painter John D. Graham, and through his friendship with Jim Ede – who he met in New York in 1940 – Pousette-Dart became acquainted with the European modernist movements. In Autumn 1941 the Artists’ Gallery staged a solo exhibition of his paintings. Pousette-Dart worked from a studio near the Queensboro Bridge in New York in the 1940s, and became associated with the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, showing with Betty Parsons gallery. Pousette-Dart taught at the New School between 1950 and 1961, and a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1963. He later taught at a number of other institutions, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College and Bard College.