Adolph Gottlieb
(1903–)
(–1974)
Adolph Gottlieb
1903–1974
Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker born in New York. He was a member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and a part of the New York school, with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, among other artists.
Gottlieb studied at the Art Students League of New York with Robert Henri and John Sloan from 1920 to 1921. Afterward, he travelled to France and Germany for a year and studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In 1923, Gottlieb returned to New York and studied at Parsons School of Design and The Cooper Union. He began to exhibit regularly as a member of the emerging New York school in the 1930s.
Together with artists like Ilya Bolotowsky and Mark Rothko, Gottlieb founded the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and expressionism during the Great Depression from 1935 to 1940.
Gottlieb's early works were influenced by Milton Avery, who depicted everyday scenes of domesticity, city, and country life with simplified forms and broad swaths of colour. Gottlieb later incorporated ideas such as automatic drawing and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung into his practice. He utilized pictographs and mythological symbols with emotional intensity through both colour and line. By the 1960s, he began producing some of his most famous works, collectively known as the Burst Paintings, the common motif of the series is a sun-like orb hovering above calligraphic markings.
Gottlieb was the recipient of numerous honours, prizes, and awards, and was also, most notably, the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1963.
Gottlieb has been featured in many collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Reina Sofia National Museum.