Pousette-Dart: Predominantly White Paintings (Phillips Collection)

During the early 1950s, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) created one of the most anomalous bodies of work of his career: graphite drawings on undercoats of blue or ocher painted over a titanium white ground. For an artist known for his love of color and impasto, these predominantly white paintings constituted quite a departure. Twenty-five works were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955, in an exhibition titled Predominantly White; the artist returned to mine this vein in later paintings in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.