Editing Adolph Gottlieb (section)

==1940s–1950s==

[[File:Gottlieb Homestead on the Plain.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|''Homestead on the Plain'' (1941), Gottlieb's [[Section of Painting and Sculpture]] mural for the U.S. post office in [[Yerington, Nevada]]<ref>{{cite web |url=https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/post-office-mural-yerington-nv/ |title=Post Office Mural – Yerington NV|website=[[The Living New Deal]] |access-date=September 18, 2022}}</ref>]]
Gottlieb and a small circle of friends valued the work of the [[Surrealist]] artist they saw exhibited in New York in the 1930s. They also exchanged copies of the magazine "[[Cahiers d'art]]" and were quite familiar with current ideas about [[automatic writing]] and [[subconscious]] imagery. Gottlieb painted a few works in a [[Surrealist]] style in 1940 and 1941. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series "[[Pictograph]]s" which spanned from 1941 to 1950. In his painting ''Voyager's Return'' [http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79049], he juxtaposes these images in compartmentalized spaces. His images appear similar to those of [[indigenous population]]s of [[North America]] and the Ancient Near East. If he found out one of his symbols was not original, he no longer used it.

In 1941, disappointed with the art around him, he developed the approach he called [[Pictograph]]s. Gottlieb's pictographs, which he created from 1941 to 1954, are one of the first coherent bodies of mature painting by an American of his generation.

Gottlieb spoke of his painting concerns in a 1947 statement:

{{blockquote|The role of 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, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.<ref>Adolph Gottileb, excerpt from "The Ides of Art", The Tiger's Eye, vol I, no. 2, December, 1947, p.43</ref>}}

In May 1942, his first "pictograph" was displayed at the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, located at the [[Daniel Wildenstein|Wildenstein Galleries]] in New York<ref>{{cite web|url=http://gottliebfoundation.org/the-artist/biography/2/|title=Chronology|work=The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc.|access-date=29 October 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150910181600/http://gottliebfoundation.org/the-artist/biography/2/|archive-date=10 September 2015|url-status=dead|df=dmy-all}}</ref>  In his pictographs, he introduced a new way of approaching abstraction that included imagery drawn from his subconscious but which notably departed from the idea of narrative. To meet this goal Gottlieb presented images inserted into sections of a loosely drawn grid. Each image existed independently of the others, yet their arrangement on the same plane, along with relationships of color, texture and shape, allow the viewer to associate with them. Meaning, then, is intensely personal – another innovation of Gottlieb's pictograph paintings based on [[Surrealist]] [[biomorphism]]. For Gottlieb, [[biomorphism]] was a way to freely express his unconscious mind, in which he had become fascinated via [[John Graham (Scottish painter)|John Graham]], [[Sigmund Freud]] and [[Surrealism]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/1941/pictographs.html|title=Adolph Gottlieb – Pictographs|work=warholstars.org|access-date=29 October 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150923160323/http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/1941/pictographs.html|archive-date=23 September 2015|url-status=dead}}</ref> Gottlieb also incorporated [[Surrealist automatism|automatism]] – the painterly technique for [[Freudian]] [[Free association (psychology)|free-association]] – was the method Gottlieb used to generate biomorphic shapes, which were forms spontaneously conceived in his unconscious [https://web.archive.org/web/20150923160323/http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/1941/pictographs.html]. These biomorphic shapes were separated by the all over [[grid pattern]], which served as the overall structure of the "pictograph" series.

Gottlieb once said, "If I made a wriggly line or a serpentine line it was because I wanted a serpentine line. Afterwards it would suggest a [[snake]] but when I made it, it did not suggest anything. It was purely shape... ".  These lines and shapes that Gottlieb used were easily interpreted to mean different things by different people.<ref name="Oral History">{{cite web |url=https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-adolph-gottlieb-12369 |title=Oral history interview with Adolph Gottlieb, 1967 Oct. 25 |publisher=[[Archives of American Art]] |access-date=September 19, 2022 }}</ref>
By 1950 Gottlieb observed that the "[[all-over painting]]" approach had become a [[cliché]] for American abstract painting. He began his new series of Imaginary Landscapes in which he retained his usage of a 'pseudo-language' but added the new element of space. He was not painting landscapes in the traditional sense, rather he modified that genre to match his own style of painting. Imaginary Landscapes are horizontal canvasses divided into two registers, one very active below a more contemplative upper one, set up a different approach to abstraction at mid-century. In 1955 Gottlieb remarked:
I frequently hear the question, "What do these images mean?" This is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to conform to either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be "Do these images convey any emotional truth?"<ref>Painting Aims, written for The New Decade exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1955</ref>

Late in 1956 Gottlieb formulated the image that has become known as the "Burst" and spent most of the next two years working on this approach. He simplifies his representation down to two disc shapes and winding masses. His paintings are variations with these elements arranged in different ways. This series, unlike the Imaginary Landscape series, suggests a basic landscape with a sun and a ground. On another level, the shapes are so rudimentary; they are not limited to this one interpretation.

He was a masterful colorist as well and in the Burst series his use of color is particularly crucial. He is considered one of the first [[color field]] painters and is one of the forerunners of [[Lyrical Abstraction]].