Richard Warren Pousette-Dart (June 8, 1916 – October 25, 1992) was an American abstract expressionist artist most recognized as a founder of the New York School of painting.

Pousette-Dart began painting and drawing by the age of eight, and in 1928 was featured in a New York Times photograph showing Richard and his father sketching each other's portraits.

Pousette-Dart's first professional positions were as an assistant to sculptor Paul Manship and secretary in the photographic retouching studio of Lynn T. Morgan.

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.

Many of his paintings and sculptures from the 1930s, such as Woman Bird Group[5] (Smithsonian American Art Museum), embrace these totemic and symbolic forms.

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.

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.

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.

This short work describes the tumultuous relationship of D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, artist Dorothy Brett and Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy patron of the arts.

In 1990 Pousette-Dart's most complete retrospective was held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for which he created a 10 x 10-foot bronze door, Cathedral,[16] which remains on permanent view.

He was fiercely independent and temperamentally disinclined to the downtown New York City tavern scene that fueled the artistic personas of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and others.

Additional exhibitions include a one-man show at Wittenborn's in New York City in 1953 and inclusion in A Second Talent: Painters and Sculptors Who Are Also Photographers at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 1985.

Notable sitters include Mark Rothko, John D. Graham, Betty Parsons, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, Robert Flaherty, and violinist Alexander "Sasha" Schneider.

Nature studies are often close-up views of organic forms, such as circular flowers and light refracted through ice, that share an affinity with visual themes in his mature painting Among Pousette-Dart's earliest students was Saul Leiter, who came to New York in 1946 to study painting with Pousette-Dart, but became enthralled by the elder artist's photography, spurring him to choose a career as a photographer.