Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Adolph Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York in 1903 to Jewish parents. From 1920–1921 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 6 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 travelling in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other part 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, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union and the 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 nine others, including Ben-Zion, Joseph Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Louis Harris, Jack Kufeld, Mark Rothko, and Louis Schanker, known as “The Ten”, exhibited their works together until 1940.
From September 1937 to June 1938, Gottlieb lived in the Arizona desert, outside of Tucson. In those 9 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. It is then that 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 group that 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 subconscious 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 1941–1950. In his painting Voyager’s Return , 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. He wanted his art to have the same impact on all his viewers, striking a chord not because they had seen it before, but because it was so basic and elemental that it resounded within them.
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 the first coherent body of mature painting by an American of his generation. Gottlieb spoke of his concerns in a 1947 statement:
"The role of artist has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time".
In May 1942, his first "pictograph" was displayed at the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, located at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York In his Pictographs, Gottlieb introduced a new way of approaching abstraction that included imagery drawn from his subconscious but which notably departed from the idea of narrative. To meet this goal Gottlieb presented images inserted into sections of a loosely drawn grid. Each image existed independently of the others, yet their arrangement on the same plane, along with relationships of color, texture, and shape, force the viewer to associate them. Meaning, then, is intensely personal – another innovation of Gottlieb’s paintings Surrealist biomorphism was one source for his Pictographs. For Gottlieb, biomorphism was a way to freely express his unconscious, in which he had become fascinated via Graham, Freud, and Surrealism. Gottlieb also incorporated automatism – the painterly technique for Freudian free-association – was the method Gottlieb used to generate biomorphic shapes, which were forms spontaneously conceived in his unconscious . These biomorphic shapes were separated by the all over grid pattern, which served as the overall structure of the "pictograph" series.
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