Adolph Gottlieb
02 May - 14 Jun 2008
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB
"Paintings from Four Decades"
May 2, 2008 — June 14, 2008
PW 57
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB: PAINTINGS FROM FOUR DECADES
ON VIEW AT 32 EAST 57TH STREET IN MAY
NEW YORK, April 23, 2008—PaceWildenstein, in conjunction with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, is pleased to announce its third exhibition of Adolph Gottlieb’s work entitled Paintings from Four Decades at 32 East 57th Street, New York City from May 2 through June 14, 2008. Art critic and curator Lilly Wei contributed an essay, “Adolph Gottlieb: Image Maker,” to the accompanying catalogue. A public reception will be held on Thursday, May 1st from 6-8 p.m.
Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings from Four Decades traces the continual and deliberate evolution in the artist’s work from his early to late career and reveals Gottlieb’s constant willingness to reevaluate his paintings throughout his lifetime. The eleven works on view, created between 1948 and 1972, focus on three specific series: the Pictographs, the Imaginary Landscapes and the Burst paintings. As Lilly Wei writes, “All three serve as deeply meaningful touchstones, sometimes serious in intent, other times playful, to which he returned to time and again, in one formulation or another, all his life.”
The Pictographs, begun in 1941, laid the foundation for Gottlieb’s development into pure abstraction. The early Pictographs were created with a defined grid structure in order to organize the images, often figurative and fragmented, in a utilitarian manner. Around 1948, Gottlieb began deconstructing the grid in an effort to find an alternative way to balance nature’s interrelated forces: order and chaos. The earliest work on view, Inscription to a Friend, 1948, is an example of Gottlieb’s initial attempts to integrate abstract forms that could still be relatable to a larger universal language, without the help of the grid. Inscription, 1954, demonstrates Gottlieb’s further progression into purely abstract imagery using an evocative and highly developed lexicon.
In 1950, Gottlieb created his first Imaginary Landscape paintings, which unfolded across a central horizon line, though this could be rendered higher or lower as evident in Mirage, 1970, or even a fraction off-center as in Excalibur #2. Gottlieb naturally progressed from this body of work to his Burst paintings, which were even more simplified and abstracted. Wei writes that Gottlieb’s Burst paintings are a “synthesis of gestural abstraction and color field, the painterly and the graphic.” She also remarks that “Gottlieb’s choice of colors is always arresting, the shades a little off, unexpected, his combinations idiosyncratic, resulting in harmonies and dissonances that snag the eye and make the viewer pause.”
From late 1960 onward, a prolific time for the artist, Gottlieb almost exclusively painted Imaginary Landscapes and Bursts. Wei summarizes that “for the next ten years, he experimented constantly, adjusting and refining his compositional syntax and his methods, stripping away what he considered unnecessary, little by little, as he continued to challenge both his own and his viewer’s expectations.”
In addition to a number of group exhibitions currently on view, Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints, which has been traveling since November 2006, will open at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York from May 1 through July 26, 2008. This is the last venue for Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints, which originated at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio and traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, and most recently, the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. Colby College also presented another Adolph Gottlieb exhibition entitled Paintings and Early Prints from February 3 through April 13, 2007.
PaceWildenstein has represented the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation since 2002.
Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York City – d. 1974, New York City) studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris for six months when he was eighteen before returning to New York and enrolling in the Art Students League, Cooper Union where he studied under John Sloan and attended lectures by Robert Henri. He also studied at Parsons School of Design and the Educational Alliance Art School. Gottlieb participated in his first group exhibition in 1929, and made his solo debut one year later. In 1935, Gottlieb 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 Mark 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. In 1949, Gottlieb organized the protest of an exhibition jury at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would lead him and twenty-seven of his colleagues, all pioneers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, to be called “the Irascibles.”
Adolph Gottlieb participated in hundreds of exhibitions and received numerous accolades in his lifetime. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first American recipient of the Grand Prêmio at the VII Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1963), the recipient of the American Academy of Achievement award (1965), appointed to The Art Commission for the City of New York (1967), and elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1971). In 1959, Gottlieb was invited to exhibit in Documenta II, Kassel, West Germany. In 1968, Gottlieb was honored with a retrospective exhibition, Adolph Gottlieb, the first and only exhibition jointly organized by and exhibited simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
The artist’s work is part of seventy public collections worldwide, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Ein Harod, Israel; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem; IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain; Jewish Museum, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Miami Art Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The Saint Louis Art Museum; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
For more information on Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings from Four Decades please contact Jennifer Benz Joy, Public Relations Associate, at 212-421-3292 or via email at jjoy@pacewildenstein.com.
"Paintings from Four Decades"
May 2, 2008 — June 14, 2008
PW 57
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB: PAINTINGS FROM FOUR DECADES
ON VIEW AT 32 EAST 57TH STREET IN MAY
NEW YORK, April 23, 2008—PaceWildenstein, in conjunction with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, is pleased to announce its third exhibition of Adolph Gottlieb’s work entitled Paintings from Four Decades at 32 East 57th Street, New York City from May 2 through June 14, 2008. Art critic and curator Lilly Wei contributed an essay, “Adolph Gottlieb: Image Maker,” to the accompanying catalogue. A public reception will be held on Thursday, May 1st from 6-8 p.m.
Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings from Four Decades traces the continual and deliberate evolution in the artist’s work from his early to late career and reveals Gottlieb’s constant willingness to reevaluate his paintings throughout his lifetime. The eleven works on view, created between 1948 and 1972, focus on three specific series: the Pictographs, the Imaginary Landscapes and the Burst paintings. As Lilly Wei writes, “All three serve as deeply meaningful touchstones, sometimes serious in intent, other times playful, to which he returned to time and again, in one formulation or another, all his life.”
The Pictographs, begun in 1941, laid the foundation for Gottlieb’s development into pure abstraction. The early Pictographs were created with a defined grid structure in order to organize the images, often figurative and fragmented, in a utilitarian manner. Around 1948, Gottlieb began deconstructing the grid in an effort to find an alternative way to balance nature’s interrelated forces: order and chaos. The earliest work on view, Inscription to a Friend, 1948, is an example of Gottlieb’s initial attempts to integrate abstract forms that could still be relatable to a larger universal language, without the help of the grid. Inscription, 1954, demonstrates Gottlieb’s further progression into purely abstract imagery using an evocative and highly developed lexicon.
In 1950, Gottlieb created his first Imaginary Landscape paintings, which unfolded across a central horizon line, though this could be rendered higher or lower as evident in Mirage, 1970, or even a fraction off-center as in Excalibur #2. Gottlieb naturally progressed from this body of work to his Burst paintings, which were even more simplified and abstracted. Wei writes that Gottlieb’s Burst paintings are a “synthesis of gestural abstraction and color field, the painterly and the graphic.” She also remarks that “Gottlieb’s choice of colors is always arresting, the shades a little off, unexpected, his combinations idiosyncratic, resulting in harmonies and dissonances that snag the eye and make the viewer pause.”
From late 1960 onward, a prolific time for the artist, Gottlieb almost exclusively painted Imaginary Landscapes and Bursts. Wei summarizes that “for the next ten years, he experimented constantly, adjusting and refining his compositional syntax and his methods, stripping away what he considered unnecessary, little by little, as he continued to challenge both his own and his viewer’s expectations.”
In addition to a number of group exhibitions currently on view, Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints, which has been traveling since November 2006, will open at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York from May 1 through July 26, 2008. This is the last venue for Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints, which originated at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio and traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, and most recently, the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. Colby College also presented another Adolph Gottlieb exhibition entitled Paintings and Early Prints from February 3 through April 13, 2007.
PaceWildenstein has represented the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation since 2002.
Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York City – d. 1974, New York City) studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris for six months when he was eighteen before returning to New York and enrolling in the Art Students League, Cooper Union where he studied under John Sloan and attended lectures by Robert Henri. He also studied at Parsons School of Design and the Educational Alliance Art School. Gottlieb participated in his first group exhibition in 1929, and made his solo debut one year later. In 1935, Gottlieb 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 Mark 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. In 1949, Gottlieb organized the protest of an exhibition jury at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would lead him and twenty-seven of his colleagues, all pioneers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, to be called “the Irascibles.”
Adolph Gottlieb participated in hundreds of exhibitions and received numerous accolades in his lifetime. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first American recipient of the Grand Prêmio at the VII Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1963), the recipient of the American Academy of Achievement award (1965), appointed to The Art Commission for the City of New York (1967), and elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1971). In 1959, Gottlieb was invited to exhibit in Documenta II, Kassel, West Germany. In 1968, Gottlieb was honored with a retrospective exhibition, Adolph Gottlieb, the first and only exhibition jointly organized by and exhibited simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
The artist’s work is part of seventy public collections worldwide, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Ein Harod, Israel; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem; IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain; Jewish Museum, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Miami Art Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The Saint Louis Art Museum; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
For more information on Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings from Four Decades please contact Jennifer Benz Joy, Public Relations Associate, at 212-421-3292 or via email at jjoy@pacewildenstein.com.