Richard Pousette-Dart was most recognized as a founder of the New York School of painting. His artistic output also includes drawing, sculpture, and fine-art photography. He initially concentrated on stone carving, expanding his work to include cast bronze and brass. He held in high regard the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who embraced tribal art and its ability to convey power and mystery through three-dimensional form.

In 1938, Pousette-Dart began a friendship with Russian émigré John D. Graham, whose writings offered a framework for engaging the ideas of European cubists and surrealists then being exhibited in New York City. Graham also encouraged interest in so-called “primitive” archetypal forms, and Pousette-Dart produced canvases with complex, interlocking biomorphic and geometric imagery, as well as hundreds of stylized, abstracted drawings of figures, heads, and animals.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Pousette-Dart experimented widely with varying types of media and approaches, alternating broadly between densely filled canvases and more simplified surfaces and forms. Richly layered works known as Gothic and Byzantine paintings, for instance, use heavy, layered impasto and resplendent, prismatic color to invoke manuscript illuminations, mosaics and stained glass windows. Savage Rose from 1951, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of these heavily impastoed works. White Paintings, in contrast, are ethereal compositions of graphite line on variegated white grounds.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Pousette-Dart experimented with building form through small, individual dabs of color, creating paintings and works on paper that exhibit all-over, field-like compositions. By the 1960s, he concentrated on large-scale works composed of thick layers of such gestural marks, evoking pulsating, glowing allusions to space. Paintings known as Hieroglyphs, Presences and Radiances display dense fields and calligraphic structures that emerge and recede visually. Works of the 1970s and 1980s often exhibit large shapes—orbs and geometric forms— that serve as mandala-like focal points. While Pousette-Dart embraced a wide range of intense color within paintings and works on paper from the 1960s through the 1990s, he equally explored themes in black and white.

Richard Pousette-Dart exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery until its close in 1983, and as such, his work was introduced to a younger generation of artists showing at the gallery, including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jack Youngerman. In 1963, The Whitney Museum of American Art staged Pousette-Dart’s first retrospective, with additional Whitney exhibitions in 1974 and 1998. During the 1970s Pousette-Dart worked in Europe, including Antibes, France, where he concentrated on watercolor. In 1990 Pousette-Dart’s most complete retrospective was held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.