GOTTLIEB, ADOLPH

GOTTLIEB, ADOLPH (1903–1974), U.S. painter and sculptor. Best known for his abstract expressionist paintings, New York-born Gottlieb studied at the Art Students League with John Sloan and Robert Henri (1920–21). After traveling through Europe for two years, and attending life drawing class at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Gottlieb returned in 1923 to New York for additional art instruction. His first solo exhibition was held at the Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1930. In 1935 Gottlieb cofounded "The Ten," a group of artists committed to progressive tendencies in art that also included mark rothko . The Ten exhibited together regularly until 1939. Working under the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project since 1936, Gottlieb executed a mural for the Yerington, Nevada Post Office in 1939. Influenced by European surrealists who settled in New York before World War II; primitive art; and Southwest Indian symbols, introduced to him in Arizona where he lived from 1937 to 1939; Gottlieb created his first pictograph in 1941. An amalgamation of abstraction and the subjectivity of Surrealist-inspired automatism, the Pictograph series is comprised of grid compartments in which Gottlieb placed stylized iconography that sometimes drew on his interest in ancient myths. Critics relate his art of the period to the distress of World War II. The Pictographs (1941–51) were followed by two other major series: Imaginary Landscapes (1951–57) and Bursts (1957–74). The Imaginary Landscapes, such as The Frozen Sounds, No. 1 (1951, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), are characterized by a horizontal line across the center of a canvas, above which he painted different geometric shapes reduced in color from the Pictographs. In the lower half of the canvas he applied a dense array of gestural marks. The Bursts marked the beginning of Gottlieb's work on oversized canvases. Gottlieb typically placed one or more disks floating on the top half of the canvas contrasting with an exploding mass of black gestures on the lower half. Similar shapes comprise sculptures executed in the 1960s. In addition to painting, Gottlieb designed an ark curtain for Congregation B'nai Israel, Millburn, N.J. (1951), and a tapestry for the prayer hall as well as the valance of the ark curtain for Beth El in Springfield, Mass. (1953). He designed and supervised fabrication of a 35-foot-wide, four-story-high stained glass facade for the Milton Steinberg Center at New York's Park Avenue Synagogue (1954). Using compartmentalization similar to the Pictographs, 31 compositions are repeated and interspersed in 91 panels displaying partly abstracted Jewish symbols, biblical stories, religious rituals, and holidays. An arrow, for example, is meant to symbolize a Torah pointer, a serpent symbolizes phylacteries, and 12 calligraphic signs delineate the 12 tribes of Israel. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Friedman, Adolph Gottlieb (1963); R. Doty and D. Waldman, Adolph Gottlieb (1968); A. Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945–1965 (1966), 242–247; Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (1981). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)