Adolph Gottlieb
American, 1903 - 1974
Birth-PlaceNY
Death-PlaceNY
BiographyAdolph Gottlieb was one of the original members of the New York School, sometimes called the Abstract Expressionists. He began his career in 1921, when he left high school, worked on a steamer to get to Europe, and spent the next year and a half studying art and visiting museums and galleries in France, Germany, England, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The cities he visited were centers of contemporary art, which also housed collections of European masterworks and the arts of tribal groups and ancient peoples. On his return to New York, Gottlieb took courses at the Art Students League with John Sloan and Robert Henri, among others.Gottlieb began exhibiting his paintings with other young artists in New York in the mid- 1920s. Two of his co-exhibitors, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, became lifelong friends and important associates. By the mid-1930s Gottlieb and Rothko were members of The Ten, a group of artists that exhibited regularly for the rest of the decade. At that time Gottlieb also befriended David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, John Graham, and Barnett Newman.
By 1941 Gottlieb had begun the paintings he called Pictographs, one of which is "Omen for a Hunter". To understand these works, it is important to consider the context in which they evolved. The world was at war. The so-called civilized societies of Europe and Asia were responsible for the worst acts of barbarism known in recorded history. Gottlieb and Rothko felt that the arts had become too limited to account for the horrors they saw around them. Their goal was to create an art that would engage individuals at the deepest levels of the psyche.
Gottlieb created Pictographs through the 1940s, and they became increasingly abstract. By 1948 he was beginning to evolve more fully abstract paintings that became groups he labeled Unstill Lifes, Labyrinths, and Imaginary Landscapes. Each of these groups took an aspect of the Pictographs and developed it as an independent idea. In 1956 these various approaches merged into the Burst paintings for which Gottlieb is best known. The noted critic Clement Greenberg commented in 1957, "With the achievement already to his credit, and with his equipment, [Gottlieb] continues to seek himself with an utter humility and daring. He is one of the handful of artists on whom the immediate future of painting itself depends."1
Gottlieb continued to refine his paintings and was a leader in the field of abstract art for the rest of his life. His works are in virtually every major museum in the United States and in many collections abroad. Gottlieb co-authored (with Mark Rothko), the first published statement of the Abstract Expressionists (1943), was the first American to receive the Gran Premio at the São Paolo VII Bienal (1963), and was the first-and only- artist to be given a joint retrospective exhibition at the Whitney and Guggenheim museums in New York (1968). Always a champion of the rights and prerogatives of individual artists, Gottlieb was the instigator and organizer of the famous "Irascibles" protest of 1950.
1 Clement Greenberg; Adolph Gottlieb. (New York: Jewish Museum, 1957), p 6.
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