Aug 17, 2007 11:04 AM

Window on the infinite, closing soon

by James Panero

Check the Guggenheim Museum’s schedule a few months back, and you won’t find the name Richard Pousette-Dart. That’s because this subject of a small retrospective, which opens today, was a late addition to the New York calendar. An exhibition with a six week run, starting in mid-August, is not your typical museum show, but then again Richard Pousette-Dart is not your typical big-name Abstract Expressionist--an uncanonical figure, always a little off on the margins, in the small side galleries of the major museums.

Now here in New York, it’s no different. It took some convincing for the New York Guggenheim to take on this exhibition of works from the artist’s estate that the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, under Philip Rylands, first put together in Venice. And it can only stay a short while due to scheduling conflict with the show’s next venue in Switzerland. And again, Pousette-Dart must be be content with a forth-floor side gallery, as another Guggenheim toss away exhibition fills the main rotunda. All the more reason to see it now, before Pousette-Dart is again pushed back again out of view.

Over the decades, one of Pousette-Dart’s greatest champions has been Hilton Kramer. Here is what he wrote back in 1981, in one of his last columns as art critic for The New York Times:

Mr. Pousette-Dart has remained steadfast in his devotion to his very individual vision. It is the vision of a poet and a mystic who has found in both the conventions of abstract art and in the physical properties of the painting medium a means of reflecting upon the world of spirit. It is, indeed, in their quality of meditation that Mr. Pousette-Dart’s paintings differ so markedly from much of the abstract art that we see nowadays.

That’s as true today as it was then. For more reviews, take a look at Lance Esplund yesterday in the New York Sun. The Times also takes note, and includes a worthwhile slide show of the artist’s work.

Six weeks and counting, Pousette-Dart will be closing sooner than you think.