ADOLPH GOTTLIEB | RED PORTRAIT

Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation

Private Collection, New York

Knoedler & Company, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in March 2007

Hudson Hills Press, The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, New York 1994 (illus, p.81)

Knoedler & Company, Adolph Gottlieb Pictographs: A Selection from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York 1998 (illustrated) 

Kuspit, Donald. ''Adolph Gottlieb: Knoedler and Company'', Artforum, XXXVII, September,1998, cited

"Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean, and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality."

Adolph Gottlieb           

Adolph Gottlieb’s enduring painterly voice is defined by a dynamic interplay between distinct individuality and historical awareness. Structured by three pronounced periods of stylistic evolution – his pictographs, imaginary landscapes, and bursts – Gottlieb’s oeuvre is a paragon of the aesthetic trajectory of mid-twentieth century art. Red Portrait, executed in 1944, belongs to Gottlieb’s seminal series of pictograph paintings, which were inspired both by the Surrealist reliance on the metaphysical unconscious, and by his explorations into an abstract visual language. His intention was to create a new mode of expression that would bring significant content to abstraction, evoking profound emotional and psychic responses in the viewer through universal symbols.

Beginning in 1941, and lasting until 1951, Gottlieb’s pictograph series developed as a response to the abject misery and violence of World War II. Believing that the development of American modern art had become stagnant, Gottlieb and his peers – notably Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman – turned to mythology and the archaic for inspiration. In 1947 Gottlieb directly addressed the effect of the modern condition on his aesthetic: “Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality.” (“The Ides of Art,” The Tiger’s Eye, No. 2, December 1947, p. 43) Thus the mythological and metaphysical images that populate his pictographs can be read as a direct reflection of Gottlieb’s intuitive response to his contemporary moment.