There is nothing post-Modern about Richard Pousette-Dart’s dazzling paintings—no cultivated detachment, no ironic stance, no disavowal of subjectivity, no sense of style as an arbitrary accoutrement one dons like this season’s new fashions. This large, well-documented retrospective underscores the single-mindedness that has sustained the intensity of Pousette-Dart’s work for fifty years, even as it has made him seem irrelevant for the latter part of that period, underscoring the fact that his paintings have never attracted the critical attention they deserve.

Early on, Pousette-Dart achieved