Adolph Gottlieb

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist in 1971)
Luis Mestre Fine Art, New York
Private Collection
Gallería Elvira González, Madrid
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Rome, Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Adolph Gottlieb, March 1970, cat. no. 16, n.p., illustrated in color
Bergamo, Galleria Lorenzelli, Adolph Gottlieb, May 1970, cat. no. 7, n.p., illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is very light evidence of handling along the edges including very minor evidence of hairline craquelure along the pull margin at the right edge and some minor hairline craquelure in the lower right corner. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. Under very close inspection, a few pinpoint media accretions are visible from the time of execution in the upper and lower forms and a ½-inch wide spot of craquelure is visible at the lower right corner of the lower form. Under Ultraviolet light inspection the aforementioned craquelure in the lower right corner and a 1-inch horizontal line in the upper right corner fluoresce darkly and appear to have benefited from light retouching. Framed.
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.

“We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements…We favor the simple expression of 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.”

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko

Adolph Gottlieb was one of the most influential painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His Burst series, of which Brown Glow is a superb example, synthesizes both color field and gestural painting, and thus prevents him from being characterized as either. He stood apart from his contemporaries, and although he was profoundly affected by the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, his artistic language and aesthetic were his own.

Part of the appeal of Abstract Expressionism to Gottlieb was its emphasis on myth, ritual and symbology. As early as 1943, Gottlieb and Rothko sent a letter-cum-manifesto to the New York Times in which they defined the “basic aesthetic themes of the New York School” (Exh. Cat., Montreal, Landau Fine Art, Adolph Gottlieb: Important Works, 1993, p. 3), including an endorsement for “the simple expression of complex thought” and a dismissal of meaningless abstraction, commenting that “there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing” (“Rothko and Gottlieb’s Letter to the Editor,” 7 June 1943 cited in In Writings on Art: Mark Rothko, New Haven 2006).

Gottlieb’s Pictographs from the 1940s, which constitute his first distinctive style, demonstrate these twin desires. Aesthetically reminiscent of Torres-Garcia and Klee, he would form a grid of lines on his canvas and fill each box with images and symbols, drawing upon concepts of the Jungian unconscious popular in his milieu. His painting became a locus of cultural allusion and semiotics bound up in the watershed moment of the 1940s, where war, destruction and crisis were omnipresent. However, in 1950 Gottlieb grew tired of pictographs and turned his attention towards greater degrees of abstraction, careful not to sacrifice meaning or subject in the process.

The culmination of this movement within Gottlieb’s oeuvre was his Burst series, now comfortably his most famous body of work, and one that occupied him from 1958 until his death in 1974. Each painting follows the same basic structure: an orb of color suspended above an amorphous mass, set in a field of saturated color or pure white. Many have interpreted them as representing the anxieties of the atomic age, fireballs floating above the tangled intricacies of human civilization, ready to eliminate it altogether, however this is not the only way to approach these works. True to the Jungian archetypes that had fascinated him ten years earlier, the higher and lower forms are aesthetically dependent on each other, as Jung’s theory of the binary self dictates that nothing can exist without its counterpart. Taken in the context of the bomb this points to a cycle of creation and destruction, with the power and aesthetic majesty of the orb predicated upon the mess of the civilization that fashioned it, but more broadly it points to notions of mutual reliance, perhaps referring to notions of the collective unconscious that was of such import to Jung. In Gottlieb’s words, “there are so many opposites in nature and life...My paintings have always been an attempt to resolve the polarity” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Manny Silverman Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb: Works on Paper, 1990, p. 11).

Notions of reliance and opposition are vital in developing our understanding of Gottlieb’s work, and indeed all the works of the Abstract Expressionist movement. As much as anything, Gottlieb’s Burst series represents the tension between the movement’s opposing tracts. The influences of Color Field painting are represented by the hanging spheres, and those of gestural expressionism, in the style of Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline, by the weighty dark web of brushstrokes underneath. Gottlieb stands astride these two divergent movements, representing “the central stream of ideas and forms of Abstract Expressionism” (Exh. Cat., Montreal, Landau Fine Art, Adolph Gottlieb: Important Works, 1993, p. 4).

Brown Glow sees Gottlieb at the height of his powers and artistic dexterity, and squarely at the crossroads of these divergent movements. Executed late in his career, the subtle tonal variations in the canvas and the warm ripple emanating from the vibrant red orb demonstrate mastery of his style. The dark mass in the lower register is seething and compact, its circular shape providing visual echo of the red circle above, with brief forays of gray paint venturing in the color beyond, intrepid but never subsumed into the enormity of the canvas. The beauty of the red in the higher plane belies notions of impending destruction, and indeed Gottlieb, who placed great stock in the emotional power of color, cited red as being among the colors that had the “certain charge” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat. New York, Manny Silverman, Adolph Gottlieb: Works on Paper, 1990, p. 10) that he was constantly searching for.

He described his work as an effort to achieve “a totality of experience which is emotional irrational, and also thoughtful” (ibid., p.14). With its preoccupation with dualities of beauty and terror, creation and destruction, color and gesture, reliance and opposition, Gottlieb’s Brown Glow represents the culmination and success of that effort.