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Evolution Of An Artist

Jewish Museum shows work of Adolph Gottlieb, painter who
produced challenging work for challenging times.

FRAN HELLER
Special to the Jewish News

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he role of the artist has
always been that of image-
maker. Different times
require different images.
Today, when our aspirations have been
reduced to a desperate attempt to
escape from evil ... our obsessive ...
images are the expression of the neuro-
sis which is our reality."
American artist Adolph Gottlieb
wrote these words in 1947, but they
could easily refer to today. Gottlieb,
who lived through the horrors of
World War II, was seeking an artistic
vocabulary to express his innermost
feelings. He found it, along with other
creative pioneers, in Abstract
Expressionism.
"Adolph Gottlieb: A Survey
Exhibition," at the Jewish Museum in
New York City until early March,
traces the artist's evolution in 31 works
— from realism in the 1930s through
works of monumental abstraction
through the early 1970s.
Revisiting the pioneering abstract
expressionist in this overview is both a
page out of history and a benchmark
for the present.
The exhibit was organized and curat-
ed by Sanford Hirsch, executive direc-
tor of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb
Foundation, in association with the
Julio Gonzalez Center of the Valencia
Institute of Modern Art in Spain.
The Jewish Museum exhibition is
especially fitting because it was here
that Gottlieb's first solo exhibit in a
major museum took place in 1957.
The historic show also was the first ret-
rospective of an abstract expressionist
artist's work in a New York museum.
A leading member of the New York
School, Gottlieb (1903-74) was at the
center of a diverse group of artists that
included Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark
Rothko, all of whose groundbreaking
work became the seeds of Abstract
Expressionism.

V4,7JA0

Early Style

Knowing what's
going on....

12/6

2002

72

PRICELESS

Born in New York City, Gottlieb was
raised in a comfortable Jewish home.

model. Untitled (Self-Portrait in
His parents hoped he would enter the
Mirror) also echoes Avery's preference
family stationery supply business, but
for the simplified form.
Gottlieb was more interested in art.
In 1937, Gottlieb and his wife,
His parents, who had immigrated to
Esther, who suffered from arthritis,
America as young children, worried
moved to Arizona's drier climate at the
about such an impractical pursuit but
recommendation of her doctor.
were unable to dissuade him.
Though they would return
In 1921, at age 17, Gottlieb
Pioneering
to
New York two years later,
left home for Europe, working
Abstract
it was in Arizona that
his way across the ocean on a
Expressionist
Gottlieb began to establish his
passenger ship. He remained
Adolph
own style, beginning with the
abroad for two years, soaking
"Arizona Still-Lifes." They
up museums and galleries. That Gottlieb in
Provincetown,
incorporate elements of
early exposure to European
Cubism, with its flattened
Mass., 1952.
avant-garde painting would
space, and Surrealism, with its
have a profound influence on
more symbolic approach to subject
his own artistic development.
matter.
The chronological exhibit begins with
canvases created in the late 1920s and
1930s. Though representational in style,
Moving Toward Surrealism
they reflect the influence of Cezanne
In a time of great tension and the
and New York artist Milton Avery,
threat of a second world war, it is not
Gottlieb's mentor during the 1930s.
surprising. that American artists like
It was Avery who taught Gottlieb to
Gottlieb, Pollock,. Rothko, Robert
work quickly and directly on canvas,
loosen up his brushwork and use color Motherwell and others were drawn to
the irrational Surrealist dream world,
to express emotion.
writes art historian Mary Davis
In Untitled (Artist and Model),
MacNaughton in Adolph Gottlieb: A
Gottlieb uses the technique of his
Retrospective.
mentor by shrinking the head and
Many of the Surrealists themselves
magnifying the torso of the nude