Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb (March 14, 1903 – March 4, 1974) was an American abstract expressionist painter who also made sculpture and became a printmaker.

Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York City in 1903 to Jewish parents. From 1920 to 1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which, having determined to become an artist he left high school at the age of 17 and worked his passage to Europe on a merchant ship. He traveled in France and Germany for a year. He lived in Paris for six months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He spent the next year traveling in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other parts of Central Europe, visiting museums and art galleries. When he returned, he was one of the most traveled New York Artists. After his return to New York, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union and Educational Alliance.

Gottlieb had his first solo exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries in New York City in 1930. During the 1920s and early 1930s he formed lifelong friendships with other artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Milton Avery and John Graham. In 1935 he and a group of artists including Ben-Zion, Joseph Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Harris, Mark Rothko and Louis Schanker, known as "The Ten", exhibited their works together until 1940.

During that period Gottlieb made a living with a variety of part-time jobs and worked on the Federal Art Project in 1936. From September 1937 to June 1938, Gottlieb lived in the Arizona desert, outside of Tucson. In those nine months, he radically changed his approach to painting. He moved from an expressionist-realist style to an approach that combined elements of surrealism and formalist abstraction, using objects and scenes from the local environment as symbols to remove temporality from his work. He transitioned from this into more Surrealist works like the Sea Chest, which displays mysterious incongruities on an otherwise normal landscape.

Here he conveys to the viewer the expansiveness he must have felt looking at Arizona desert sky, although he distills this expansiveness into a more basic abstract form: "I think the emotional feeling I had was that it was like being at sea …Then there's the tremendous clarity – out in Arizona there's a tremendous clarity of light and at night the clouds seem very close." When these Arizona works were exhibited in New York after Gottlieb's return they created a break with Gottlieb's former circle of colleagues, several of whom condemned his new work for being "too abstract".

Gottlieb and a small circle of friends valued the work of the Surrealist artists they saw exhibited in New York in the 1930s. They also exchanged copies of the magazine "Cahiers d'art" and were quite familiar with current ideas about automatic writing and unconscious imagery. Gottlieb painted a few works in a Surrealist style in 1940 and 1941. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series "Pictographs" which spanned from 1941 to 1950. In his painting Voyager's Return [1], he juxtaposes these images in compartmentalized spaces. His images appear similar to those of indigenous populations of North America and the Ancient Near East. If he found out one of his symbols was not original, he no longer used it.

In 1941, disappointed with the art around him, he developed the approach he called Pictographs. Gottlieb's pictographs, which he created from 1941 to 1954, are one of the first coherent bodies of mature painting by an American of his generation.

Gottlieb spoke of his painting concerns in a 1947 statement: