Blog post revisiting Jack Kroll’s April 1961 profile of painter Richard Pousette-Dart, republished on the occasion of the exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart: The Centennial at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through October 15, 2016.

Kroll writes: “The art of Richard Pousette-Dart seems very much in the line of American “home-made” eidolonian transcendentalism. He is a natural abstractionist in somewhat the same sense that Hart Crane was a natural composer of “abstract” poems—in both cases the complete saturation of the artist in words or signs, produces, through a kind of volitional automatism, a verbal or visual artifact which at its most successful has the compelling power release in the beholder the double sense of the procedural and substantive potency of images formed by the constantly functioning sense of the ineffable as it informs and penetrates the time-bound continuity of our senses.”