Richard Pousette-Dart was in his mid-20s when joined a group of like-minded painters and signed a petition to protest the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s policy against ‘progressive’ art. Nina Leen would go on to photograph this group of artists for Life magazine, solidifying Pousette-Dart’s place within the pantheon of first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters.

Much like Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Clifford Still, and the other celebrated New York School painters, Richard Pousette-Dart strongly believed in abstract art’s ability to elicit transcendence. Essentially, the question of how spirituality could be effectively represented in art drove his work, as it did countless other American artists of his generation. By the 1960s, the convoluted, surreal shapes of his early oeuvre gave way to shimmering, luminous treatments of circles and squares as universal symbols of cosmic forces arising as if from a sublime, ineffable ether. Painted in 1962, From the Mind of the Sea is of this sort.

In a historical context, the painting seems largely intent upon challenging the post-war obsession with materialism by offering an alternative non-western based perspective. Imbued with the warmth of radiant sunlit yellow hues set against a soft blue background, it relies not on traditional perspective devices, but the dense layering of pigment, pointillist touches, marks, and colors to create a maze of sublime forms set upon an illusion of deep space. As the eye moves across the canvas surface, it seems simultaneously aqueous and atmospheric. The largely circular or ovoid shapes and forms accompany a radiant solar presence that reflects a sensation of energy immersed in a sublime haze that creates an atmosphere of pulsating fluorescent spirals, spheres, and arabesque tendrils.

The duality of intuition and order is present here, but mostly From the Mind of the Sea evokes the impression of being a portal to another dimension of potentiality and possibilities. It has an organic delicacy of shifting atmosphere achieved here with compelling skill; its visual and philosophical implications remain elusive, fugitive, incandescent, and numinous.