Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb was of the first generation of New York School painters. Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler were among his closest associates. He called his early abstractions of the 1940s "pictographs" and black, calligraphic gesture remained a feature of his artwork henceforth. He showed with leading New York galleries, including several years with Kootz (1947-54), brief representation by Martha Jackson (1957), Andre Emmerich (1958-59) and Sidney Janis (1960-62), before finally settling with Marlborough in 1964. Gottlieb received the consummate tribute, a retrospective jointly opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1968. Gottlieb remained an active and venturesome artist to the end. Despite a crippling stroke suffered in 1970, he produced some of his most glorious art thereafter. The final Marlborough exhibition in his lifetime (1972) was a tour de force of rich, raw, unembellished painting, a final testament to equal that of any of his New York peers.

Gottlieb was a printmaker consistent with ideas of what it meant to be an artist in his day. Graphic work provided a link between the painterly concerns of the New York school and its alignments with Surrealism and social expression. Gottlieb had two concentrated periods of printmaking activity. The first, 1938-1945, tended toward relief and intaglio processes that elaborated his interest in hieroglyphs. He took up printmaking again in 1966, producing another 50 editions until 1974. These were mainly lithographs and screen prints, the even surface applications of which corresponded with the color-field phase of Gottlieb's late painting styles, known a "Bursts" and "Imaginary Landscapes." He also made five aquatint editions, in which his handwork again became evident.