Adolph GOTTLIEB

Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974): Biography and Fine Art Prints for Collectors

Adolph Gottlieb (born March 14, 1903, New York City; died March 4, 1974, New York City) was a native New Yorker and one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism. With Mark Rothko he wrote the movement’s first public manifesto; with the “Irascibles” he took on the Metropolitan Museum. His Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes and, above all, his Bursts made him a pioneer of color field painting, and in 1963 he became the first American to win the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Bienal. Collectors of fine art prints know two sides of him: rare early etchings made on his own press in Brooklyn, and the vivid screenprints and lithographs published by Marlborough Graphics in New York from 1966 on.

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A Manhattan Start

Gottlieb grew up on East 10th Street in Manhattan, where his father ran a wholesale stationery business. At 17, in 1920, he quit high school and signed up for evening classes with John Sloan at the Art Students League, also attending Robert Henri’s lectures. In 1921 he worked his way to Europe on a ship, drew at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and toured museums in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Vienna and Prague before coming home in 1922. Back at the League, he met Barnett Newman, a friend for life; in 1928-29 at the Opportunity Gallery he met Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. His first solo show opened at the Dudensing Gallery on May 1, 1930.

The Depression Years: The Ten, the WPA and Arizona

In 1935 Gottlieb joined The Ten, a group of expressionist and abstract painters that included Rothko. A year later he was on the WPA easel project, and in 1939 he won a Treasury Department competition for a post office mural in Yerington, Nevada. From October 1937 he and his wife Esther spent about eight months near Tucson, Arizona; the desert paintings, shown in New York in 1940, pushed him toward Surrealism and abstraction.

Pictographs and the 1943 Letter

In 1941 Gottlieb and Rothko set out to reach abstraction through myth and so-called primitive art. The result for Gottlieb was the Pictograph: a loose grid filled with eyes, profiles, fish and signs, “a device I use to kill space,” as he told Newsweek in 1946. On June 13, 1943, the two painters published a joint letter in the New York Times laying out their beliefs. Samuel Kootz took him on in 1946, and he became one of the first painters of his generation to enter the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. In 1950 he led the protest against the Met’s jury system; Nina Leen’s photograph of the “Irascibles” ran in Life in January 1951.

Bursts, São Paulo and a Double Retrospective

The horizontal, two-part Imaginary Landscapes began in 1951; the Bursts, a disc floating over a ragged mass, arrived around 1956-57. Clement Greenberg organized his 1954 retrospective at Bennington College; the Jewish Museum followed in 1957. After a heart attack in December 1962 at his East Hampton home, Gottlieb won the São Paulo Grand Prize in 1963, the same year the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis opened Martin Friedman’s survey of his work. He joined Marlborough in 1964. On February 13, 1968, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a joint retrospective, the only one they have ever shared; it traveled to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Rose Art Museum. He also turned to sculpture; large outdoor pieces are at the National Gallery of Art, Storm King Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum. A stroke (1971, according to the Gottlieb Foundation) paralyzed his left side, but he kept painting until early 1974. MoMA marked his death with a memorial exhibition that included Voyager’s Return (1946) and Blast I (1957). In 2010 the U.S. Postal Service put one of his paintings on a stamp in its Abstract Expressionists series.

Gottlieb’s Prints: Etchings, Screenprints and Lithographs

The early etchings (1933-1947). The Gottlieb Foundation says he bought a used press in 1933 and printed at home in Brooklyn until 1947. Some 40 images are known, mostly etchings, from stylized figures to Surrealist scenes and Pictographs. Printed in tiny numbers, sometimes hand-colored, they are scarce; the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin and the Milwaukee Art Museum showed the group in 2006-07.

The Marlborough years (1966-1974). In 1966 he went back to printmaking with Marlborough Graphics, New York. The output is mostly color screenprints, plus some lithographs: Lemon Yellow Ground (lithograph, 1966, edition of 50), Rosy Mood (1967, 75), Blues on Green (1971), Chrome Green and Pink Ground (1972, 150 each). Editions run from 5 to 200. Some 1972 sheets carry the stamp of Kelpra Studio in London on the back. Hard-edged discs and bars in saturated color carry the Burst imagery straight onto paper, which is why these sheets hang so well next to his paintings. He also made monotypes up to his last weeks; the Gottlieb Foundation published Monotypes of Adolph Gottlieb in 1991.

The catalog. No scholarly print catalog raisonné has been published yet. Dealers and auction houses cite Adolph Gottlieb: The Complete Prints, published by Associated American Artists, New York, in 1994 (text by Ian Harvey), which lists 83 prints. A reference like “AAA 46” (Rosy Mood) or “AAA 77” (Pink Ground) points to that book. For the early work, use Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints (Gottlieb Foundation, 2006).

How to Buy an Adolph Gottlieb Print

Match the AAA number. Title, date, medium and size must all line up; several screenprints from the same year have similar colors and names.

Know the edition. Look for the pencil number and check it against the published edition size. Artist’s proofs are numbered in Roman numerals; printer’s proofs are marked as such. See the printing process.

Check the signature. Most Marlborough prints are signed, dated and numbered in pencil. A pencil date can be a year off from the catalog date. More on the signature.

Look at the paper. Arches with full margins is common. Flat fields of color show scuffs, dents and light-staining, so look closely before you buy.

Skip the posters. Offset posters and reproductions are not original prints, signed or not. Monotypes are unique works and fall outside the print catalog. Read what is an original print, our authenticity guarantee and our framing tips.

Gottlieb fits naturally beside other postwar abstract printmakers we carry: Sam Francis, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Roberto Matta and Roy Lichtenstein. Explore modern art and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and References

Adolph Gottlieb: The Complete Prints, text by Ian Harvey, New York, Associated American Artists, 1994 · Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints, New York, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 2006 · Robert Doty and Diane Waldman, Adolph Gottlieb, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968 · Sanford Hirsch, Mary Davis MacNaughton, Lawrence Alloway, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, New York, 1981 · Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation · MoMA – Memorial Exhibition press release, 1974 · Allen Memorial Art Museum – Early Prints · Marlborough New York – Adolph Gottlieb: Prints