Adolph Gottlieb

 

Weirs at Dawn, 1949

oil, gouache, and tempera on linen

37.88 x 30 in. (95.3 x 76. s 2 cm)

Gift of the Gordon F. Hampton Foundation, through Wesley K. Hampton, Roger K. Hampton, and Katharine H. Shenk

© 2007 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VACA, New York, NY

 

 

 

Adolph Gottlieb (American 1928-1978)

Adolph Gottlieb was born in 1903 in New York. He studied at the Art Students League in New York in 1919 before traveling to Europe for two years studying at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere. He returned to New York in 1923 to finish his studies at the Art Students League as well as the Parsons School of Design. He gained the respect of his contemporaries early on in his career exhibiting his work by the early 1930s. In 1935, Gottlieb became founding member of “The Ten,” a group that included Mark Rothko, Joseph Solman, and Naum Tschacbasov, this group later became knows as abstract expressionist painters.

Gottlieb, like so many of the New York artists of the 1930s, looked to “primitive” cultures and sculpture as well as the Cubist and Abstract exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibit, a major influence to Gottlieb and colleagues as a source for inspiration as well a motivation to develop their own styles. Throughout much of the 1930s, Gottlieb produced expressionist paintings within the same vein as his colleges, but it was a 1937 move to Tucson, Arizona that marked a shift in Gottlieb's work.

Living in Arizona, Gottlieb looked to his new surroundings taking into view both the landscape and Native American art and artifacts. He combined the influences of Arizona along with the principles of abstraction and surrealism to create a new pictorial language of various shapes and symbols that are read as both personal and universal. It was in 1940 that Gottlieb began to work on his pictographs. He produced the pictographs throughout the 1940s later expanding his canvas size and subject matter in the 1950s with the Imaginary Landscape series. Gottlieb simplified his forms as the canvases grew in size and began to explore notions of space and color in his work, producing the Burst series of the late 1950s into the 1960s. The decade brought with it the first of two major set backs in Gottlieb’s career when in 1963 a fire destroyed his studio along with its contents and the second in 1970, when he suffered from a stroke leaving him partially paralyzed. He continued work on his Burst paintings after his stroke until his death in 1974.

Throughout his career, Gottlieb participated in numerous exhibitions and received several awards including the Grand Premio at the V11 Bienal de Sao Paolo Brazil, 1963 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. In 1945 the Guggenheim Museum purchased 11 of his works and in 1968 a retrospective of his work was held at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York simultaneously.