Adolph Gottlieb

American, 1903–1974

BiographyAmong all the Abstract Expressionist painters, Adolph Gottlieb received the most rigorous artistic training. He was also unusually well traveled. In 1919 he enrolled in the Art Students League, New York, where he studied with John Sloan and Robert Henri. In 1921 Gottlieb went to Europe, where he attended drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, and traveled to Berlin and Munich. He returned to New York in 1923, finished high school, and studied at the Parsons School of Design, the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and the Educational Alliance Art School. Throughout the 1930s, Gottlieb's portraits, interior and exterior scenes, and still lifes responded first to contemporary trends in American realism and eventually to Surrealism. In 1935 Gottlieb became a founding member of "The Ten," a group that advocated abstract and expressionist painting; in 1936 he was put on the payroll of the WPA.

The pictograph paintings of 1941 inaugurated the mature phase of Gottlieb's work. The pictographs were first shown in the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors held in May 1942, at the Wildenstein Galleries. In 1943 he became a founding member of "New York Artist Painters," a group which also included Mark Rothko and John Graham (1881-1961). By the mid 1940s, Gottlieb was already an established painter with a consistent mode of painting. He participated in and chaired public fora on art and culture throughout the 1940s, and won various prizes and significant commissions.

In the late 1950s Gottlieb developed his "Burst" paintings; these usually consisted of two shapes on a neutral field, a red disk above a gesturally painted black mass. Gottlieb's first retrospective was held in 1968 in simultaneous exhibitions at the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums, New York, in 1968. He suffered a stroke in 1971, and continued painting with paralysis in his left side. Gottlieb was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. He died on 4 March 1974, in East Hampton, New York.