Adolph Gottlieb valuation
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.
What a work by Adolph Gottlieb is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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, is preparing the catalogue raisonne, and is the first point of reference for questions of attribution. There is a body of works on paper in gouache and ink, plus prints and a small number of sculptures and stained glass commissions.
At a glance
- Born
- 14 March 1903, New York City
- Died
- 4 March 1974, New York City
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Dudensing, Arizona and the sculpture
Gottlieb studied at the Art Students League in 1920 and 1921 and had his first solo exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries in New York in 1930. He worked on the Federal Art Project in 1936, and from September 1937 to June 1938 lived in the desert outside Tucson, which changed his painting. The first Pictograph was shown in May 1942 at the annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
The Imaginary Landscapes began about 1950 and the Burst late in 1956. In 1967, while preparing for exhibitions at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, he made small sculptures in cut and painted cardboard, which led to a year of work in welded and painted steel and aluminium.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
