Adolph Gottlieb — vanguardgirl

Portrait of American artist Adolph Gottlieb in his Chelsea Studio, Fred W. McDarrah, 1962, photograph — *Portrait of American artist Adolph Gottlieb in his Chelsea Studio*, Fred W. McDarrah, 1962, photograph

I frequently hear the question, “What do these images mean?” This is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to conform to either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be “Do these images convey any emotional truth?”
- Adolf Gottlieb quoted in ‘Painting Aims’, written for The New Decade exhibition at the Whitney Museum, 1955

American Abstract Expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker.

Born: 14 March 1903, New York
Died: 4 March 1974, New York
Education: Art Students League of New York, Académie de la grande Chaumière, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union and the Educational Alliance.

Blast, I, Adolph Gottlieb, 1957, oil on canvas, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York. — *Blast, I*, Adolph Gottlieb, 1957, oil on canvas, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York.

Adolph Gottlieb was a first wave Abstract Expressionist painter and an avid supporter of abstract art. In his childhood he witnessed the devastation of the First World War and grew up during the Great Depression. It was not until the interwar years that he matured as an artist.

From 1920 to 1921 he studied painting at the Art Students League of New York after quitting his traditional preliminary education. Inspired by his studies and intrigued by the avant-garde of European modernism, Gottlieb departed the United States and travelled to both France and Germany. Europe proved to be an extremely influential experience which greatly impacted Gottlieb’s style.

In Paris Gottlieb learnt from the European Impressionists, regularly visited the Louvre and spent a year studying at the Académie de la grande Chaumière. When Gottlieb returned to New York in 1923 he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design and at the Cooper Union, inspired and invigorated, but also very much insecure about his own individual style.

During the late 1930s, Gottlieb exhibited his first solo show at the Dudensing Galleries and began working alongside other emerging New York School artists such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In 1935 he founded “the Ten”, a group of in fact nine artists, contrary to their title, who strongly valued abstract and expressionist values in painting. Years later, Gottlieb became a founding member of ’The New York Artist Painters’ - in fact, out of all the Abstract Expressionists, Gottlieb is often regarded as the one who formed most artist organisations. It was Gottlieb who was the primary organiser of a protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art that resulted in him and other artists being given recognition as ‘The Irascibles’ - which later became the moment which ultimately popularised the term Abstract Expressionism.

A great deal of Gottlieb’s works of the 1940s and early 1950s, often referred to as his Pictographs, used archetypal abstractions of which Gorky often used animals, eyes and spirals as a means of expressing the subconscious. He would often invent symbols which would resemble images that could be found in African, Oceanic or Native American art, however he would alter or remove any invented symbols which had any recognisable or relatable meaning to the cultures that inspired him in order to remain part of a collective unconscious in his art. It was important to him that his work carried open ended meanings and interpretations.

The 1950s saw a change in Gottlieb’s technique, reinventing his mythological Pictographs towards his Imaginary Landscape series. These works were much larger in scale and showcased broader brushwork. Gottlieb combined both controlled application and improvised brushwork, with some areas of the canvas left open and other areas filled with forms and mark making. He was very much a gestural painter, but not in the sense of the action painter kind - Gottlieb’s paintings displayed a type of gestural painting which was more about the thinking and constructive act of painting, rather than the physical performance side of painting, say like Pollock.