INNER VISIONS

...I myself am always pleased to see Dorothea Lange's work...

...Solitude commonly breeds obsession, which in turn insures further solitude...

...He began his career, after a brief stint at Bard College, painting in his spare time while working as a secretary in New York...

...One picture that should not be missed is Arnold Newman's inspired marriage of art and photography, a study of Mondrian posed with an easel that is essentially a Mondrian composition...

...It would be good to write of Pousette Dart, for once, without mentioning his disjunction from modern art history...

...If the work of his contemporaries metaphorically sings, roars or pounds, Pousette Dart's canvases could be said to hum, as the curator of the show, James Monte, suggests in his introduction to the catalogue...

...Sometimes the paint builds up to an impastoed center, creating an illusion of strain-as if something were trying to burst through...

...This is impossible, however, because it is the very quality of outsiderness that is so crucial to an appreciation of him...

...Then again, there are pictures that feature a single disc and a serpentine form, or a number of densely packed shapes resembling celestial explosions...

...There are no myths about Pousette Dart, but one would suppose so private a person found the city equally tough...

...In short, the overall impression is of sameness, but upon close examination the works reveal endless variations of content and mood...

...Similarly, there is often no way of telling whether some of these arty experiments took place in the '20s or the '60s...

...Generally, it is a mistake to invoke parallels between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, since the two movements arose from such antithetical impulses...

...No one has ever photographed men as well, and she has no serious rival in the depiction of poverty and despair...

...It is pleasant to drift around allowing their prints, familiar and otherwise, to catch the eye...

...Furthermore, the logic of excluding Bernice Abbott and Laszlo de Moholy-Nagy is, by Doty's guidelines, obscure indeed...

...Interestingly enough, photography does not make the historical impact that art does...

...Now 58, he is among the surviving members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, though in his case the label seems more than usually inappropriate...

...My memory of the artist from an interview in the mid-'60s is of a profoundly serious man, committed to a nameless religion inextricably bound up with art...

...Although Pollock was to continue with the expressive gesture, Pousette Dart gives the impression of starting to rein in his painterly emotions...

...In the '40s these grew into looser heraldic designs not unlike what Jackson Pollock was doing at about the same time...

...The pieces on display, composed entirely of dots, come close to being pointillist brocades...

...Some 31 canvases, including two murals (each a triptych), summarize his painting of the '60s and '70s...

...It is unfortunate that Avedon absolved himself of commercialism with his gross portraits of the famous-here Oscar Levant and Carson McCullers-for it is his early fashion work that is innovative, alive and tasteful, even if beyond the bounds of Doty's definition for this show...

...Also on view at the Whitney is "Photography in America" (through January 12), a survey of the medium's history...

...By that time he had achieved some gallery success, having exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, and having begun his long relationship with the then influential Betty Parsons Gallery...

...Over many of them, the paint is evenly distributed and it takes a few moments to see the small shell- and worm-like images embedded like fossils in the mass...

...Some of the landscapes of Timothy O'Sullivan, a Civil War photographer, could be slipped into the portfolio of Ansel Adams without anyone but a technical expert noticing the difference...

...Albeit a painter of great sophistication, as well as a sculptor and poet, Pousette Dart strikes me now as a kind of primitive, in the sense that the men who put up and decorated all those Gothic cathedrals to the great glory of God were primitive...

...Discussing the implications of mysticism in the painting Presence, Being, Om, Monte notes: "The vibrato quality reached in the collective [om] chant is analagous to the richly inflected paint surface achieved . . . through intense concentration on the act of . . . adjusting hundreds upon hundreds of paint strokes to build a unified whole...

...He himself told me that making art was "an act of love...

...Given the wealth of material that has accumulated over the last 130-odd years, some limits certainly had to be set...

...Pousette Dart is no recluse, but his life has been rooted in the countryside since the early '50s, when he moved to upstate New York...

...Reproductions from that period, the latter part of the '30s, show coherent compositions abstracted from landscape and still life and stylized into sharp, stencil-like patterns...

...On the whole, the exhibition contains no surprises and the big names -stieglitz, Steichen, Weston, Cunningham, Strand, and so forth-remain unchallenged...

...It is not easy to see, for instance, how Margaret Bourke-White, who is omitted, was really any more of a journalist than Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, who are included...

...While Pousette Dart has not exactly eliminated images, he might as well have done so, for the sense of distance between the shapes in his canvases and the spectator is out of all proportion to the shallow space suggested by them...

...It is an ambitious project, involving nearly 300 prints, that for all its fascination is not wholly successful...

...For some reason absurd details about people always stick the hardest, and I remember his saying of his vegetarianism that he could not eat anything possessing eyes...

...None of the early works are included here, but Emergence (1967), being a throwback, gives some idea of the process...

...Merging Presences (1972-73) has the ambience of science fiction, being a dark space nearly filled by two round shapes-a red egg, haloed in yellow, hovering beside an electric white disc...

...The director of the exhibition, Robert Doty, has limited himself to photography that is "informed by a conscious effort toward the perfection of an inner vision or an avowed esthetic content...

...In comparison, one can consider the work of Jules Olitski, only six years younger, who virtually apotheosized the dot with his spray gun, but whose paintings contain no sense of space at all...

...In sharp contrast to the ascetic side of his nature was the pleasant atmosphere of a family existence in a magnificent house with heavy beams and filled with handsome and decorative old furniture...

...American art does not ebb and flow easily into movements and even the first big-time school, the Abstract Expressionists, chafed at categorization...

...Apart from the fact that many of the pieces do not fit that definition, it ruled out photojournalism and fashion work...

...Legends indicate the social scene was too much for Pollock, who had departed earlier for Long Island...

...Quite possibly the school's history will ultimately resist such organization and become nothing but an account of eccentrics, most of them tending toward the mystical, like Pousette Dart...

...Through its screen of small green and blue strokes can be seen a faint irregular grid containing rounded shapes...

...Except for obvious milestones like the daguerreotype and the blow-up, there is no feeling here of moving from era to era...

...In addition, the eye feels impeded looking at them...

...Notwithstanding that almost everyone who can, does leave the city, it is hard to understand why an artist whose star was rising over the new capital of art would head for the bush...

...Looking back, there seems to have been a medieval quality to all this, echoing an intensity in him that could reasonably be called Gothic...

...At other times, the dots converge in the middle in a vortex-like way...

...Yet there is in them enough feeling of pictorial depth to separate the artist from other, later exponents of this technique...

...Her study of a San Francisco breadline-an old man facing forward, surrounded by the backs of his fellow supplicants-is matched for its genuine tenderness only by The Defendant, a black man seated with head in hand in an empty room...

...That is to say, his heavily impastoed shapes-which in the '50s were tall, totemic and often richly colored-began to subside, and by the '60s they are covered with a kind of protective skin...

...This is an important work for offsetting and even helping to explain the cold modernity of Pousette Dart's art as it appears today...

...Still, it is illuminating to think of Monet in his late work virtually dispensing with clear-cut images the better to encompass all air, substance, light, and water, and producing pictures that are invitations to an immersion in these elements...

...Most of the Whitney pictures are composed of all the colors, dot by obsessive dot, yet the overall effect is of one color...

...The younger contenders-none of the photographers represented is very young-tend to be disappointingly tricky, though Duane Michaels' ghostly figures in a room with flowered wallpaper have some kind of magic...

...There are pastel orange, pink, yellow, and grayish-white canvases, as well as strong red, purple and nocturnal blue ones...

...The son of an artist, he grew up in a household attuned to art but took no formal training...

...Nonetheless, I'm not sure the medium can yet afford to disown its poor relatives, especially in the absence of a consensus as to who, precisely, they are...

...yet despite being expressionistic, they are considerably tidier...

...Hieroglyph #4 (1973-74), a large horizontal piece, all pinks and yellows with touches of blue-gray, suggests an ecstatic vision of some heavenly city...