Richard Pousette-Dart
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The first thing to be said about the Richard Pousette-Dart retrospective, which opens tomorrow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is that it closes, in less than six weeks, on September 25. If this were a gallery exhibit, it might seem as if we had all the time in the world to see it. For a museum show, however, this is an appallingly short run, especially for an exhibit of this quality. And yet, timing is everything: “Richard Pousette-Dart” comes in August — and is a cool, bright light during what is generally a hot, dark, and humid period in the New York art world.

The mini-retrospective, curated by Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it originated, is compact and invigorating. Fire and ice, this gathering of paintings reminds us, yet again, that Abstract Expressionism is much more than the de Kooning-Pollock-Rothko trinity.

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–92) was the youngest of the founding members of the New York School, and one of its leading innovators. A visionary and a polymath, he drew on, besides Surrealism and Modernism, the mythology, styles, and symbols of Native American, African, Byzantine, and Oriental art, as well as the ideas of Jungian psychology and Transcendentalism. These interests, which were always put to the pursuit of abstract painting, led him in numerous directions, some more fruitful than others.

“Richard Pousette-Dart” brings us works from nearly every facet of his oeuvre. Still, it is not fully representative of the course of the artist’s career. To begin with, it is small. Comprising approximately 40 paintings made between the 1930s and the 1990s, and a dozen photographs (most of them taken by the artist, who was an avid photographer), the show is installed chronologically in low-ceilinged galleries off the rotunda. This limits the number and scale of works. But there are other limitations: Sculpture is absent; and although there are a few loans from private collections, the exhibition is compiled almost entirely from the artist’s estate. Since many of the biggest or best works are in museums, this restricts the number of greatest hits, mural-size paintings, and masterpieces.

The show, which is generally best in its early stages, is also heavier on some types of painting and lighter on others. Whether this is by curatorial choice or curatorial predicament is unclear. But it presents us, somewhat misleadingly, with a streamlined trajectory in which the artist appears to have gradually emptied out and pared down his paintings compositionally, and moved toward his signature all-over, impressionistically stippled and squiggling fields with subtle shifts in color and little or no geometry. Though shimmering and intense, these works, which are the most prevalent in the show, are the least successful paintings of Pousette-Dart’s long and uneven career.

Pousette-Dart produced dense and cluttered, primordial and alchemical paintings that resemble world-mythology stews, as well as thick and pulsating, nearly monochromatic works made up of a layering of dots. These macro-micro works, which sometimes center on a single radiating circle or square, are often one-note, high-pitched, vibrating surfaces in which you must immerse yourself. He also painted in black and white, producing luminous oil and graphite works whose surfaces range in color and texture. Within a single pearlescent work, the artist can evoke down, plaster, glass, skin, and bone. He also worked large and small. His “Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental” (c. 1941–42), which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first large-scale work to be painted by an Abstract Expressionist. If not for this heroic leap from easel to mural scale, which anticipated Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist movement may have never fully taken off.

“Richard Pousette-Dart” is not as mixed-up and messy as it could be. It is also not as rich. Yet, despite its few large works, it is true to the artist’s range. The show begins with conté crayon and gouache drawings, from the late 1930s, of dancers that resemble Henry Moore’s melding of figure and anthropomorphic stone, as well as Picasso-inspired, yet somewhat muddled, Cubist still lifes and talismanic, masklike portraits. What becomes immediately clear in these accomplished pictures that blend woman, bird, totem, fish, and symbol, is that, though taking his cues from Surrealism, Cubism, and Constructivism, especially from André Masson, Pousette-Dart is an individualist with his own inner agenda. He wants to make art that is iconic, personal, and spiritual.

Sometimes I sense that the Pousette-Dart’s ideas and vision are more important than the paintings themselves, as if the artist was struggling with automatism and composition. When he is best, the two ascend in tandem, producing surprising results. “Undulation” (1941–42), a long, horizontal, mostly black-and-white canvas gives us an underwater or buried space that flits among womb, cosmos, and grave. White lines electrify the blackness. A long biomorphic form suggests infant, amoeba, root, mummy, and bone. Almond-shaped forms peer out at us like eyes. Comets rush by, and totems rise into angels or birds.

The best Pousette-Darts are those that keep shifting identity: Lines become water, air, and wing. Circles become orifice, eye, head, and planet. In the white and graphite “Descending Bird Forms” (1950–51), biomorphic forms hold loosely to a grid. Teardrops drift like spores. Circles become child’s heads and lollipop trees. In “Illumination Gothic” (1958), as in other works, brushstrokes are embedded like jewels, suggesting Byzantine mosaics and cloisonné. The artist, dissolving brutally heavy forms at their edges, is able to evoke stained glass and tracery, giving thick color the intangibility of light. “Fountains of Penelope” (1960–62), with its squidlike, pictographic, and fairy-tale castle crowns, gleams like an underwater carnival.

In the 1960s, Pousette-Dart begins to pare down his forms, and his vision. Although he never abandons the wonderful mythic clutter of his earlier work, he tends to reach for a more cosmic and meditative, if not Tantric, art. Sometimes, as in the laterally drifting, mostly blue, white, and gold “Night Landscape” (1969–71), he achieves a twinkling magic reminiscent of van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” But too often in the later works he arrives at a decorative intensity, and his forms feel prepackaged and machine-made. What is missing in many of the later paintings is the labyrinthine journey and quest, for artist and viewer alike. In the earlier paintings the world — its essences, epiphanies, mysteries, and transformations — are always in flux and ready to be discovered in time. In the later pictures, the artist, seemingly impatient with building a complex composition, leapfrogs to the prize.

Until September 25 (1071 Fifth Ave., at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).