Biography
Adolph Gottlieb (*1903 New York US | †1974 New York US) was a prominent American painter and a member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, known as The Ten. An accomplished painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and sculptor, Gottlieb’s active involvement in the progressive movements of his time and as well as the impact of the foundation established in his name creates a legacy of the promotion of the professional status of the arts.
Gottlieb grew up in a tranquil and modest brownstone neighborhood at East Tenth Street. His family expected that he would enter the family stationary business, but by 1920 he had enrolled at the Parsons School of Design, having already attended weekly classes at the Art Students' League. In addition to following Robert Henri's and Joan Sloan's courses at the League, he also enrolled in a design course at Cooper Union. Sloan taught his stu-dents to 'study the masters to learn what they did and how they did it, to find a reason for being a painter yourself'. Gottlieb took Sloan's advice and decided to travel to Europe.
By constantly roaming museums and galleries he developed an appreciation of a wide range of art, from Renaissance panel painting to Cubism and Expressionism. His appreci-ation of the modern tradition, which began on these trips, would grow during the twenties and thirties, and enabled him in his later works to use elements of surrealism and abstrac-tion for his own expressive purposes.
In the late 1920's Gottlieb began showing his work at the Opportunity Gallery, which fea-tured monthly exhibitions of works by young artists. Here he met the artists Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. These three artists began a lifelong friendship. By the early 1930s Gottlieb began to adopt a style revealing the influence of Avery and, ultimately, to Avery's source, Matisse. He started to simplify forms and defining them with thick, dark contour lines. Like Avery, he also contrasted painted and incised lines and brushes up to the edg-es of forms, and surrounded them with shadows that did not create a sense of depth as much as reverberation. This technique reappeared later in abstract form as auras around disks in his famous Bursts.
In 1932, at the age of twenty-nine, Gottlieb got married. Starting their marriage in the middle of the Depression, they had little money and Gottlieb often painted over old can-vases to economize on art supplies. During the summers the couple stayed with the Averys in Maine. Gottlieb and Rothko were the core of a group of artists who gathered around Avery in New York and Gloucester. They admired him for being independent of realism.
These artists all identified themselves with expressionism and they decided to form an of-ficial group in 1935 with nine artists. They later planned to add a final member, so they adopted the name The Ten. Critic Jerome Klein dubbed them the 'Ten who are nine'. The Ten, also known as The Ten Whitney Dissenters were active in New York until 1940. While short-lived, the group was a seminal art movement which acted to promote exposure for the artists in the face of the Great Depression, as well as to oppose the prevalence of Re-gionalism which dominated the art scene they inhabited at the time.
Avery’s work inspired Gottlieb to take the subjects closest to him – himself, his family, and his friends – as suitable themes for serious art. Thus, from 1929 through the mid-30s, while he was closely associated with Avery, Gottlieb took a serious interest in portraiture. He started to define forms as closed color masses more and more and developed a pref-erence for simplified forms in increasingly condensed compositions.
Not only was Gottlieb a virtuoso painter, he was also one of the most active artists of his generation in bringing the painting of The New York School to the attention of the critics. He regularly participated in artists' forums and important group activities of the abstract expressionists, although he did not associate himself closely with most of the artists of this group. In that way he was both part of and apart from the abstract expressionists. He emerged from the same milieu of the Depression and the WPA and he became an active organizer of artists' group activities, but he remained an independent artist, developing his pictorial ideas in his own way.
Generally speaking, the late 1940s and early 1950s were a period during which two poles of Gottlieb's art - a subtle and tender colorism and a coarser, more expressionist calli-graphic coruscation – seem to set against each other. As the 1960s progressed, Gottlieb increasingly worked on large scale color abstractions. In 1963, he became the first Ameri-can artist to be awarded the Garn Premio of the São Paulo Bienale in Brazil. In 1968, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York collaborated on a retrospec-tive exhibition of his art that filled both museums, the only collaborative project between these two institutions to date. During the last fifteen years of his life, Gottlieb's painting was characterized by a masterful freedom that makes generalization difficult and shows Gottlieb to have been one of the finest painters of his generation.
After suffering a major stroke leaving him partially paralyzed, Gottlieb continued to paint until his death in 1974. The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was established in 1976 in accordance to Gottlieb’s will. His artistic output was immense, having participated in 56 solo exhibitions and over 200 group exhibitions. His work is currently held in more than 140 major institutions around the world.