Adolph Gottlieb

Private Collection, New York
M. Knoedler & Co. Inc., New York
Private Collection, New York

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Washington D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Brandeis University, Rose Art Museum, Adolph Gottlieb, February - October 1968
Edmonton, Canada, Edmonton Art Gallery; Vancouver, The Vancouver Art Gallery; Calgary, The Glenbow-Alberta Institute; Windsor, Canada, The Art Gallery of Windsor; Montreal, Musee d’Art Contemporain; Toronto, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs, November 1977 - September 1978
New York, Knoedler & Co., Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, February - March 1987

Harry Rand, "Adolph Gottlieb in Context," Arts Magazine, 1977, p. 124, illustrated
The Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs, 1977, illustrated

This work is in very good condition overall. The canvas is unlined and on the original stretcher. There are areas of fine, scattered craquelure throughout. There are a few pin-point, unobtrusive accretions. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there are some minor areas of restoration. 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.
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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. Man Looking at Woman II, executed in 1949, belongs to Gottlieb’s seminal series of pictograph paintings, in which he arbitrarily divided his canvases into rectangular compartments occupied by a variety of images, both literal and cryptic, that were intended to evoke a profound visceral and mythological response from the viewer. A beautifully composed sister painting to Man Looking at Woman-- also from 1949 and in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York – the present work is a paradigm of Gottlieb’s singular pictographic style.
   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.
    When discussing Gottlieb’s recent work in 1951, Thomas Hess brilliantly distilled this inherently personal facet of the artist’s paintings when he stated: “In theory, the idea is quite simple and noble: to revitalize form by conceiving of it as a part of magic, or myth, or preconscious knowledge – and thus humanize and deepen the painter’s invention” (Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting, New York, 1951, pp. 122, 125). Through the seemingly haphazard arrangement of abstract and figurative fragmented forms, which alternately emerge from and fuse with the dark ground of the canvas, we are able catch a glimpse of Gottlieb’s psyche. Dually inspired by the Surrealist reliance on the metaphysical and subconscious, and prefiguring his eventual move into full abstraction, Gottlieb’s magnificent pictographic paintings exist in an entirely unique and personal realm of their own.