Adolph Gottlieb

Estate of the Artist
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Milwaukee (acquired from the above)
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1981

Paris, Galerie Rive Droite, Gottlieb: Ecole de New York, April 1959, illustrated
London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1944-59, June - July 1959
New York, French & Co., Adolph Gottlieb: New Paintings, January - February 1960
Vienna, Galerie Wuethle; Salzburg, Salzburg Zwergerlgarten; Belgrade, American Embassies; Skoplje, Umetnicki Pavillion; Zagreb, Moderna Galerija; Ljubljana, Moderna Galerija; London, American Embassy; Darmstadt, Heissischen Landesmuseum, American Vanguard Painting, June 1961 - May 1962, illustrated (in London and Darmstadt catalogues)
New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb, Paintings 1945-1974, February 1977, illustrated in color

Annette Michelson, "Gottlieb Exhibition," New York Herald Tribune, April 8, 1959
"American Exhibit Scores," The American Weekend, April 18, 1959 (text)
"Peintures Français, Gare à vous! Gottlieb est Là!," La Gazette Lausanne, April 12, 1959 (text)
"Gottlieb," Les Beaux-Arts, April 24, 1959 (text)
Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Twentieth Century, New York, 1969 (reprinted in 1980), p. 84, illustrated in color
Harry Rand, "Adolph Gottlieb in Context," Arts Magazine, vol. 51, no. 6, 1977, p. 131, illustrated
Irving Sandler, "Adolph Gottlieb," Art International, May-June 1977, illustrated
Connie Koenenn, "Her Own Space," Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1977
Architectural Digest, December 1988, illustrated in color
Connie Koenenn, "Geometric Shapes Bring an Added Dimension," Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2000
Jori Finkel, "L. A. Confidential," Art & Auction, December 2001, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition overall. Please refer to the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a dark stained wood strip frame with a small float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

With its formal logic and elegant aesthetics, Gottlieb’s Pink Smash is a seminal example of the artist’s influential Burst series, which stands as his most resonant innovation in the transformation of modern post-war painting. Transcendently grand in scale and arresting in composition and lush color, Pink Smash announces Gottlieb’s entrance into the pantheon of American Abstract Expressionists who revolutionized Twentieth Century art. Along with his friends and fellow artists Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, Gottlieb matched the desire to focus on intuitive expression and the creative act that was at the core of the oeuvres of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline; yet they uniquely strove to produce paintings that engender emotive experiences for the viewer, bringing a contemplative component to their art. Painted in 1959, early in the development of the Burst series, Pink Smash is notable for its distinguished exhibition history; it was shown at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris and London’s Institute of Contemporary Art shortly after its completion and a year after Gottlieb’s inclusion in the Museum of Modern Arts’ travelling exhibition of New American Painting which introduced seven centers of European culture to the power of this visionary movement. After a showing at New York’s French & Co, Pink Smash travelled back to Europe in an exhibition organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that broadened the exposure of Gottlieb’s Bursts such as Pink Smash even further in 1961-1962, including Vienna, London, Darmstadt and several cities in the former Yugoslavia. Fittingly, Gottlieb was one of the more travelled of the American avant-garde artists, having gone to Europe at the young age of 17 and spent six months of his sojourn in Paris, frequenting the Louvre often and attending art classes, before returning to New York in 1923. His work would appear in Paris in 1936 and 1946 but with the arrival of his Burst paintings at the Galerie Rive Droite in 1959, a French newspaper could truly state “Peintures Français, Gare à Vous! Gottlieb est Là!” (La Gazette de Lausanne, April 12, 1959)

With its graphic power and elemental force, Pink Smash fulfills its creator’s intent as we are enveloped in its scale and vivacious impact. In 1943, Gottlieb and Rothko co-signed a letter to Edwin Jewell in defiant response to a negative review in The New York Times. In one of the earliest statements about the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, they asserted, “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” (letter to Edwin A. Jewell, June 7, 1943). At this time, Gottlieb was engaged with his Pictograph paintings which presented Surrealist primitive imagery in a modernist grid. In 1956 Gottlieb’s Burst paintings emerged and by 1958/1959 came to full flower and the vitality and boldness of Pink Smash embodies the goals expressed in 1943. Quoted at a conference in 1956, Gottlieb clearly reveled in the attainment of his signature style: “… to paint well, to express one’s own uniqueness, to express the uniqueness of one’s own time,…these are the satisfactions of the artist.” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Corcoran Gallery of Art and travelling, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, 1981, p. 10)  The iconic importance of the Bursts is parallel to Pollock’s “drips”, Newman’s “zips” and Rothko’s floating bands of color. Gottlieb’s unique brand of mark-making, which includes expressive brushwork in the russet background as well as the pink "burst" tinged with white and the same warm russet, incorporated a sensibility of both color and gesture that was tantamount to his illustrious contemporaries.

Abandoning linear formats in favor of color fields, the Bursts are steeped in the dualities of sky and ground, heaven and earth, as Gottlieb juxtaposed two fundamental elements afloat in a monochromatic flattened space. Reductive in palette and composition, Pink Smash is the essence of Gottlieb’s achievement, with the tension of his forms defining the explosive effect of his “signs”; the black “sun” and glowing “burst” are independent of each other in the expansive russet ground, yet we feel one cannot exist without the other. Gottlieb’s embrace of this visual contradiction is complemented by his gifts as a colorist. Gottlieb embraced a tenet of Abstract Expressionism in its predilection for basic and unadulterated form, and just as with the soaring canvases of Rothko, Gottlieb uses color as an expressive agent. He declared in 1962: “I want to express the utmost intensity of the color,…At the same time, I would also like to bring out a certain immaterial character that it can have, so that it exists as a sensation and a feeling that it will carry nuances not necessarily inherent in the color, which are brought about by juxtaposition.” (quoted in Exh. Cat. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Adolph Gottlieb, 1968, p. 21) The immediacy and intensity of the inky black orb is mirrored by the saturated whitish pink explosion that embodies the title of Pink Smash.