Birth Year : 1903
Death Year : 1973
Country : US
Adolph Gottlieb, an Abstract Expressionist painter, was born in New
York City. Gottlieb left high school in 1920 to work at odd jobs while
taking night classes at the Art Students League with John Sloan and Robert
Henri. Through these painters, Gottlieb learned of the revolutionary breakthroughs
in European painting. After a disappointing trip to Paris, where he met
none of the French artists he had heard about, he returned to the United
States to finish high school and continue painting. By the mid-thirties,
Gottlieb was exhibiting regularly with "The Ten," a New York group of avant-garde
painters. In 1937 he moved to a small community outside Tucson, Arizona
with his wife Esther.
In Arizona, his subject matter changed
as he became concerned with the natural forms that would continue to mark
all of his subsequent work. A feeling of isolation prompted his return
to New York in 1939; and from there he went to Gloucester where he began
to paint beach still-lives in three-dimensional boxes set against deeply
receding spaces. He soon abandoned this form, but these experiments led
to his pictographs of the forties-stylized motifs based on human and natural
forms isolated in compartments. For Gottlieb the pictographs were his adaptation
of Surrealist automatism-the result of free association. Later, he would
reduce these pictographs to an increasingly basic structure: the grid.
The next step occurred in a painting divided into two parts: in the lower
section he placed the interwoven lines of a grid; on top of this he drew
a horizon line above which floated five areas of color in varying geometric
shapes. This was the first of a series to be known as "Imaginary Landscapes".
Over
the years, Gottlieb's canvases became increasingly monumental in size while
the images grew simpler. In 1957 the rigid format of the Landscapes dissolved
into the fluid space of the "Bursts", in which two images are contrasted;
a peaceful sun-like disc above, and an angry ball of undifferentiated matter
below. As Gottlieb's structures became simpler he became increasingly concerned
with the intensity, nuance and feeling inherent in the juxtaposition of
color. Gottlieb spent the last part of his life in East Hampton, Long Island
amid the natural things that gave him the greatest inspiration. He suffered
from paralysis during the last years of his life and died on March 4, 1973.
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Adolph
Gottlieb
Brink
(1959)
Adolph
Gottlieb
Ochre
And Black, 1962
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all Adolph Gottlieb
Books about Adolph Gottlieb |
