Black and White On Pressed Wood by Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb

Pictographs

Past
Jul 1 – Jul 18, 2021
East Hampton

This exhibition in East Hampton features eight pictographs by the pioneering New York-based Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, who forged a strong connection to the East Hampton creative community in the early 1960s.

The presentation includes works created during the 1940s and early 1950s, a period when Gottlieb challenged the accepted norms of painting and helped set a new direction for American art. Drawing from his familiarity with sources as diverse as pre-historic objects, tribal arts, classical European art, and contemporary painting and sculpture, Gottlieb recognized that "the role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time."

As the curator and art historian Harry Cooper wrote in 2004 on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist’s pictographs at Pace in New York, “what Gottlieb invented in the Pictographs was a machine to process the most diverse sources into a nonhierarchical, decentralized array—a cultural leveling device, a destroyer of distinctions.” In addition to his role in the development of the New York School, Gottlieb became a fixture in the East End scene after he and his wife, Esther, purchased an East Hampton home in 1960. In the later years of his life and career, the artist worked in an airy painting studio—formerly a carriage house—on his East Hampton property.

Exhibition Details

Adolph Gottlieb
Pictographs
Jul 1 – 18, 2021

Gallery

68 Park Place
East Hampton

Above: Adolph Gottlieb, Black and White On Pressed Wood, 1950, gouache and tempera on Masonite, 24" × 20" (61 cm × 50.8 cm) 25-3/4" × 21-7/8" × 2-1/4" (65.4 cm × 55.6 cm × 5.7 cm) frame © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY
Adolph Gottlieb, Reflection, 1941, oil on linen, 20" x 16-1/8" (50.8 cm x 41 cm) © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Inscription, 1954, oil on canvas, 49-7/8" x 39-5/8" (126.7 cm x 100.6 cm) © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Festival, 1945, oil on canvas, 27-13/16" × 35-13/16" (70.6 cm × 91 cm); framed, 35-1/2" × 43-1/2" × 2-1/2" (90.2 cm × 110.5 cm × 6.4 cm) © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph, 1949, oil on masonite, 24" × 30" (61 cm × 76.2 cm) © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Untitled, 1947, gouache on paper, 25-5/8" × 19-1/2" (65.1 cm × 49.5 cm); 34-3/4" × 28-1/2" × 1-3/8" (88.3 cm × 72.4 cm × 3.5 cm) frame © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Black and White On Pressed Wood, 1950, gouache and tempera on Masonite, 24" × 20" (61 cm × 50.8 cm); 25-3/4" × 21-7/8" × 2-1/4" (65.4 cm × 55.6 cm × 5.7 cm) frame © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Omen, 1947, gouache on paper, 18" × 24" (45.7 cm × 61 cm) paper; 26" × 31-1/2" × 2" (66 cm × 80 cm × 5.1 cm) frame © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adolph Gottlieb, Pink Pictograph, 1950, oil on canvasboard, 10" × 14" (25.4 cm × 35.6 cm) © Estate of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
To inquire about this artist or any of the works featured in this exhibition, please email inquiries@pacegallery.com.
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Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb worked his passage to Europe when he was seventeen, after studying briefly at The Art Students League. He spent six months in Paris visiting the Louvre every day and auditing classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. Gottlieb made his solo debut in 1930. In 1935, he became a founding member of “The Ten,” a group of artists devoted to expressionist and abstract painting. Eight years later, he would become a founding member of another group of abstract painters, “The New York Artist Painters,” that included Mark Rothko, John Graham, and George L. K. Morris. In 1943, Gottlieb co-authored and published a letter with Rothko in The New York Times, expressing what is now considered to be the first formal statement of the concerns of the Abstract Expressionist artists.

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