Arts and Letters

Adolph Gottlieb entered the Institute in 1972. He had suffered a severe stroke in 1971 but was still working steadily on paintings which formed an impressive last exhibition. My wife Charlotte asked him how he was still able to maintain the spirit and the strength to continue his work, and he said "What else is there for me to do?" In March of 1974 the art world lost a very real part of its fabric with his death.

In 1968 he wrote, "In my studio I am in a non-verbal world. Surrounded by my materials; canvas, paints, oils, brushes, etc., I feel like a relic of the past because paintings are still among the few things made by hand. Yet with these crude implements it seems possible to convey something of the spirit that transcends our mundane and often brutal environment. Perhaps even the emanation of a divine spark may become manifest."

The first work I saw of his was done in 1937 when he lived in Arizona for a short while: dark, abstracted desert forms, and, later, several years of Freudian or Indian pictographs enclosed in grids; then a series of paintings called "Imaginary Landscapes," containing several orbs over a horizon above a seeming cross-section of earth. This then expanded into a final form, and his most impressive: a large format in clear color and contrasts with the simple theme of an orb, above a "burst" as he called it. These eloquent canvases spoke with tremendous stillness—but with intimations of an approaching storm. The polarities of containment and explosiveness, and the varieties of expressiveness that could be distilled from these two elements, were constant sources of wonder.

Adolph spent no effort in dramatizing his image as an irrational, singular figure. He neglected hyperbole and spoke squarely, many times with an acerbic wit. Some worried that he lacked the gift of living the bohemian life, but he couldn't have cared less. He knew his life spoke clearly through his art.

He was born in 1903 near Tompkins Square in New York City, the son of parents who had emigrated from Hungary. He left for Paris at seventeen to study art, returning to New York three years later to finish high school. He had his first show at the now defunct Dudensing gallery and two years later married Esther Dick, who was a constant support for him through his career. He worked as an easel painter for the Works Progress Administration, was a member of a group of artists called "The Ten" during the Depression, and in the late forties was a major figure in what was called the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was a member of the Art Commission of New York City, and he was awarded the Grand Premio VII Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil in 1963. He remains one of the most original and influential of modern painters.