T is an example of Gottlieb’s "pictographs," a group of works inspired by the artist’s desire to level cultural distinctions and aesthetic hierarchies. To create these experimental compositions, he filled the compartments of irregular grids with imagined forms, marks, and abstracted images born of a synthesis of cultural material, including European modernism, Native American pottery, African sculpture, Oceanic carvings, Jungian theory, and the writings of Irish author James Joyce. Through complex, textured canvases that draw on past depictions of human suffering and perseverance, Gottlieb sought to exorcise the anxieties brought about by the horrors of World War II. As he wrote in 1947, "Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint. . . . So-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our times."
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Toronto. Art Gallery of Ontario. "Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs," July 22–September 3, 1978, no. 31.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Tribute to a Curator: Robert Beverly Hale," November 16, 1978–March 4, 1979, extended to March 18, 1979, unnum. checklist.
New York. Studio Museum in Harlem. "Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938–1952," December 6, 1992–April 11, 1993, no. 63.
Washington, D.C. Phillips Collection. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb," September 24, 1994–January 2, 1995, no. 58.
Portland, Me. Portland Museum of Art. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb," February 4–April 2, 1995, no. 58.
Brooklyn Museum. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb," April 21–August 27, 1995, no. 58.
Little Rock. Arkansas Arts Center. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb," November 30, 1995–January 28, 1996, no. 58.
New York. Pace. "Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs 1941–1951," October 29–December 23, 2004, no. 28.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Met Breuer]. "Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context," April 9, 2019–March 12, 2020 [intended closing date June 21, 2020], no catalogue.
T[homas]. B. H[ess]. "Adolph Gottlieb." Art News 49 (January 1951), p. 47, ill.
Thomas B. Hess. Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. New York, 1951, pp. 122, 125, fig. 70.
Albert Ten Eyck Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1957, p. 17.
William Rubin. "Adolph Gottlieb." Art International 3 (March–April 1959), pp. 36, ill. p. 34.
Henry Geldzahler. American Painting in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1965, pp. 189–90, ill.
Diane Waldman in Robert M. Doty and Diane Waldman. Adolph Gottlieb. Exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York, 1967, pp. 16–17, 106, no. 35, ill. p. 50.
Lawrence Alloway. "Melpomene and Graffiti." Art International 12 (April 1968), p. 23, ill. p. 24.
Diane Waldman. "Gottlieb: Signs and Suns." Art News 66 (February 1968), p. 67.
David Mannweiler. "Museum Opener is 'Metropolitan' Show." Indianapolis News (September 19, 1970), p. 9.
Henry Geldzahler. Arte del Siglo Veinte: EE.UU. del Museo Metropolitano de Arte/ Twentieth-Century Art: U.S.A. from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. San Juan, 1974, p. 62, no. 23, ill.
Kay Woods. "Adolph Gottlieb, Art Gallery of Ontario." Artscanada 35 (October–November 1978), p. 61.
Eugene Victor Thaw. "The Abstract Expressionists." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 44 (Winter 1986–87), pp. 17, 29, fig. 11 (color).
Lowery Stokes Sims inWifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938–1952. Ed. Maria R. Balderrama. Exh. cat., Studio Museum in Harlem. New York, 1992, p. 76, no. 63, ill. p. 151.
April Kingsley. The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art. New York, 1992, p. 58, ill.
Lawrence Alloway inThe Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb. Exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C. New York, 1994, p. 44, colorpl. 58.
Michael Kimmelman. "Searching for the Psyche's Secrets Among Grids and Random Images." New York Times (April 21, 1995), p. C30.
Joseph J. Schildkraut, Alissa J. Hirshfeld, and Jane M. Murphy. "Depressive Disorders, Spirituality and Early Deaths in the Abstract Expressionist Artists of the New York School." Depression and the Spiritual in Modern Art: Homage to Miró. Ed. Joseph J. Schildkraut. West Sussex, 1996, p. 207, fig. 18-13.
Jean H. Duffy. Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor. Liverpool, 2003, p. 47 n. 72.
David H. Brown. The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. Washington and London, 2003, pp. xiv, 189–90, fig. 10-14.
Roberta Smith. "Art in Review: Adolph Gottlieb." New York Times (December 3, 2004), p. E41, calls it "T, Plutomania".
Harry Cooper. Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs 1941–1951. Exh. cat., Pace Gallery. New York, 2004, pp. 17, 77, colorpl. 28.
Robert Long. "Gottlieb Before the Sunbursts." East Hampton Star (December 16, 2004), p. C2.
David Cohen. "Paying Tribute to an American Mythmaker." New York Sun (November 11, 2004), p. 1.
Claudine Humblet. The New American Abstraction 1950–1970. Milan, 2007, pp. 88, 99–100 n. 52, ill. p. 80 (color).
Emily Sun. "Decolonizing Western Narratives of Modern Art." hyperallergic.com. September 26, 2019.
Beatriz Cordero inThe Irascibles: Painters Against the Museum, New York, 1950. Ed. Bradford R. Collins et al. Exh. cat., Fundación Juan March. Madrid, 2020, p. 83.
Adolph Gottlieb (American, New York 1903–1974 New York)
1942
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