Adolph Gottlieb
Pink and Indian Red
Oil on canvas
1946
Adolph Gottlieb
The Seer
Oil on canvas
1950
Adolph Gottlieb
Pictograph-Symbol
Oil on canvas
1942
The story of Adolph Gottlieb is typical of that of the group of Abstract Expressionists. Close friends with Milton Avery and Mark Rothko from the early 1930s, he was a founder in 1935 of “The Ten,” a loosely defined group of Expressionist painters. Studiously attentive to the European avant-garde, Cubism and Surrealism in particular, he developed a pictorial format in the 1940s that he termed the Pictograph, a grid into which he inserted a personal symbolic language of forms, evocative of primitive myth.
In 1950 Gottlieb was the organizer of “The Irascibles,” a group that formed in protest to its exclusion from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and which has been immortalized in a photograph by Nina Leen. His work became more abstract, gestural and expressionist in the 1950s, leading up to a series of images, Bursts, for which he is now best known. [Extract : Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective]
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