Adolph Gottlieb
Pictographs in a grid, then a disc above a burst, for thirty years.
Adolph Gottlieb was born in New York in 1903, left school at seventeen for Paris, and was a founder member of The Ten with Mark Rothko in 1935. In 1941 he began the Pictographs — compartmented grids filled with eyes, hands, snakes and abstracted signs drawn from myth and from the unconscious — which occupied him for a decade and which he and Rothko defended in a famous 1943 letter to the New York Times. The Imaginary Landscapes followed, and then from 1957 the Bursts: a clean disc floating above an explosive black mass, a format he worked through until his death in 1974.
The Bursts lead the market and the Pictographs sit close behind, with the intervening landscape works less sought. Scale is a substantial factor. Gottlieb continued painting after a stroke in 1971, and the late works are a distinct and smaller group. The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation maintains the archive, publishes the catalogue raisonne and handles authentication, and works should be checked against it. There is a body of works on paper in gouache and ink, plus prints and a small number of sculptures and stained glass commissions.
If you own a work by Adolph Gottlieb
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