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Adolph Gottlieb

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Adolph Gottlieb

Artist Biography

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Adolph Gottlieb

Born in New York City, in 1935 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 his art, prints and posters 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.

Adolph 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. Gottlieb 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 of art, prints and posters 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”. 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. 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 art, prints and posters were religious in tone but not specifically dogmatic.

Adolph Gottlieb Art, Prints and Posters Collection