| Facts/Data
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Birth
1903 (New York City)
Death
1974 (New York City)
Lived/Active
New York
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primitive painting-totemic non ob and real
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Categories of Interest
Modernism
Abstract Expressionism
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in New York City in 1903, Adolph Gottlieb was a founding member of
The Ten, a group devoted to abstract art with whom he was active for
about five years. He became a major exponent of Abstract
Expressionism whose painting style is linked to Marc Rothko, Clyfford
Still and Barnet Newman. A major theme in Gottlieb's painting is
the challenge to humans to resolve dualities within the universe, the
pressure of opposites: male and female, chaos and order, creation and
destruction, order and chaos.
His career is described as
having four phases: Pictographs (1940s), Grids and Imaginary Landscapes
(1951 to 1957), Bursts (1957 to 1974) and Imaginary Landscapes
(1960s). Although he lived primarily in New York City and was one
of the few Abstract Expressionists born in that city, time spent in
Arizona and Provincetown, Massachusetts had a marked influence on him.
Gottlieb
studied at the Art Students League with Social Realists John Sloan and
Robert Henri, but left abruptly in 1921 for Paris where he enrolled at
the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere. Returning in 1923, he lived
in New York and developed an interest in primitive sculpture.
He
was a WPA mural artist and painted a mural in 1939 for the Post Office
in Yerington, Nevada. From 1937 to 1939, he was in Tucson,
Arizona, which influenced his subsequent "pictograph" series that
occupied him the remainder of his life. The pictographs involved
compartmentalized grid divisions of the canvas, primitive iconography
and imaginary landscapes and were intended "to evoke mythological
responses" (Baigell 141). For him, the time in the Arizona desert
was a time of transition from expressionist landscapes to highly
personal still lifes of simple desert items such as gourds and
peppers. From November 13, 1999 to January 9, 2000, the Tucson
Museum of Art held an exhibition, Adolph Gottlieb and the West",
sponsored by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. The
publicity described it as "dedicated to more than 50 works from the
seminal Abstract Expressionists little-known 1937-1938 stay in the
Arizona desert."
In the early 1950s, he designed a stained-glass
exterior, 1,350 square feet, for the Milton Steinberg Memorial Center
in New York City. His work was religious in tone but not specifically
dogmatic.
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
Jessie Benton Evans Gray, exhibition informaton of the Tucson Museum of Art
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Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, E-O):
| Born in New York in 1903, Adolph Gottlieb studied at several New York art schools and traveled abroad extensively. During this early period, he befriended Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and John D. Graham.
In 1935, Gottlieb, with Rothko, William Baziotes, and others, founded the Ten, a group opposed to the dominance of American Regionalism in the New York art world. Exhibiting together for five years, these artists, along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others would come to be known as the first generation of Abstract Expressionists.
In 1937 Gottlieb moved to Arizona, where exposure to Native American wall paintings and the desert landscape contributed to his developing aesthetic. Surrealism also emerged as a strong influence. The Surrealists’ emphasis on the collective unconscious and primal motifs resonated with Gottlieb’s desire to create universal art using elemental symbols. These varied influences inspired Gottlieb to develop his pictographs, which he first exhibited in 1942 at the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors at Wildenstein Galleries. Later that year, he exhibited a series of pictographs in a solo exhibition at Artists’ Gallery, New York.
In 1943, Gottlieb and Rothko wrote a letter to "The New York Times," in which they made the first formal statement of Abstract Expressionism: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
In his paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb demonstrated an increasing interest in color-field painting and abstract symbolism. He died in 1974.
© Copyright 2008 Hollis Taggart Galleries |
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