Gottlieb, Adolph

Gottlieb, Adolph (1903–1974). American painter, one of the leading Abstract Expressionists. He was born in New York, where he studied at various art schools in the early 1920s, on either side of a visit to Europe in 1921–3. His early work was Expressionist and from 1935 to 1940 he exhibited with the Expressionist group The Ten. In 1936 he worked for the Federal Art Project, then in 1937–9 lived in the Arizona desert. Some of his landscapes of this time have a Surrealist air, and after his return to New York in 1939 this tendency was enhanced by contact with expatriate European Surrealists, who helped him to develop an interest in Freudian psychology and the idea of the subconscious as a source of artistic inspiration. His work began to take on a distinctive identity in the early 1940s, and from then until the end of his life he worked in three main series: Pictographs (1941–51), Imaginary Landscapes (1951–7, and again in the mid-1960s), and Bursts (1957–74). The Pictographs use a loose grid- or compartment-like arrangement with schematic shapes or symbols suggesting some mythic force. (Of this series Gottlieb wrote: ‘Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of that time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with and, around 1942, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology … it seemed that if one wanted to get away from such things as the American scene or social realism and perhaps cubism, this offered a possibility of a way out, and the hope that given a subject matter that was different, perhaps some new approach to painting … might also develop.’ ) The Imaginary Landscapes feature a zone of astral shapes against a foreground of heavy gestural strokes ; and the Bursts, becoming still freer, suggest solar orbs hovering above violently coloured terrestial explosions (Orb, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1964). Gottlieb also designed stained glass and other works for churches and synagogues, suggesting a religious mood without any specific representation.