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拍品专文
Towering more than two meters in height, Petaloid #2 (1963) is a spectacular large-scale example of Adolph Gottlieb’s “Burst” paintings. These radically simplified and potent compositions—defined by a soft-edged ovoid floating above a more explosive “burst” form on a vertical canvas—were Gottlieb’s crowning achievement, and are some of the most iconic paintings of the Abstract Expressionist era. Against Petaloid #2’s luminous green ground, an orb of emerald hovers over a starry bloom of deep red. The paired shapes, complementary in color, are evocative of fundamental dualities—order and chaos, id and ego, yin and yang, creation and destruction—without declaring any fixed reading. Gottlieb explored endless possibilities of scale, gesture, and color within this profound and elemental format, which occupied him from the late 1950s until his death in 1974. Petaloid #2 dates from an especially triumphant year for the artist. In 1963, he was honored with a major survey exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and became the first American to be awarded the Grande Prêmio of the Bienal de São Paulo.
Gottlieb’s “Burst” works were the climax of decades of curiosity, experimentation, and innovation. Born in New York in 1903, Gottlieb attended night classes at the Art Students League and Cooper Union as a teenager. When he was seventeen, he worked his passage to Europe on a freighter, spending six months in Paris—where he visited the Louvre daily—and a year in Germany. He returned to New York full of the lessons of Cubism, Renaissance painting, and tribal art that he had seen. In 1929 he met his contemporary Mark Rothko and the older artist Milton Avery. The three often worked together over the following years, attempting to escape what they saw as the reigning provincialism of American painting. After a spell in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona in 1937-1938, Gottlieb began to paint dreamlike still lifes of boxed objects, bringing together strains of Surrealism, Cubism, and Native American art. These led to his grid-based “Pictographs” (1941-1951), which—like Rothko’s works of the same period—explored mythic and Freudian themes using primal, archetypal symbols. As he abandoned the grid, these works gave way to the “Imaginary Landscapes” (1951- 1957), whose contemplative upper and active lower elements anticipated the distilled, culminating splendor of the “Bursts.”
In 1943, Rothko and Gottlieb sent a joint letter to Edward Alden Jewell, arts editor of the New York Times, who had written a nonplussed review of their work. The letter was the first formal statement from artists who would become associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and remains an insightful summary of the men’s shared outlook. “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought,” they wrote. “We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth… There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art” (“A Letter from Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the Art Editor of the New York Times,” New York Times, 7 June, 1943, n.p.). Gottlieb would adhere to these ideas for the rest of his career. The statement’s reach for absolutes—the unequivocal, the simple, the true, the timeless—rings true in mature paintings like Petaloid #2.
At the time of Jewell’s review, avant-garde abstraction was largely sidelined and misunderstood by the New York art establishment. Gottlieb was one of its most outspoken defenders. By the 1960s, thanks in part to the advocacy of critics such as Clement Greenberg and MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the art world looked very different. Abstract painters including Gottlieb, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock were household names, their works acquired by museums and sought after by eminent collectors. Petaloid #2 plays a role in an anecdote that illustrates Gottlieb’s elevated cultural cachet at the time. Hans Namuth—the photographer who had famously captured Pollock making his “drip” paintings in 1950—let himself into Gottlieb’s East Hampton studio in 1963, and photographed a model on a ladder in front of several paintings, including Petaloid #2. The resulting image was printed in The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine as an advertisement for the high-end coffee brand Medaglia d’Oro. Affronted at the unauthorized use of his artwork, Gottlieb reached a legal accommodation with Namuth and the brand: the picture could be reproduced with the caption “Paintings by, and photographed in the studio of, Adolph Gottlieb, winner of the grand prix at the 1963 São Paulo Bienal of Painting and Sculpture.”
Unlike his friend Rothko, Gottlieb was relatively untroubled by his rising success. With an assured reputation, financial security, and the latitude to grow and experiment within his chosen painterly format, he was at the height of his powers in the 1960s. The “Burst” works have often been described as integrating opposing poles of Abstract Expressionist painting: they combine the numinous color-fields of Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, or Barnett Newman with the more dramatic, gestural strokes of de Kooning, Pollock, or Franz Kline. Their binary structure strikes a balance between the reductive language of those former painters and the action-filled, “all-over” canvases of the latter. Rather than simply reconciling these different approaches, however, Gottlieb variously held them in tension and harmony in his paintings, transcending his colleagues’ ideas in a unique idiom that proposed a new path for Abstract Expressionism.
With their “Bursts” and “Blasts,” Gottlieb’s works have been interpreted as abstractions of violence and cataclysm. The artist himself certainly did not exclude such readings: like many of his contemporaries, he sought to make art commensurate with the existential tumult of his time, from the tragedies of the Second World War to the development of the atomic bomb. Some critics saw in the soft nimbus above Gottlieb’s explosive “Bursts” the terrible calm of a nuclear mushroom cloud. The painter, however, felt that viewers were free to come to their own conclusions. Many “Burst” paintings, including the present, might equally be seen to offer a serene and restorative vision. Petaloid #2’s botanical title, in concert with its vivid green hues and blossoming red form, gestures toward the wonders of growth, renewal, and rebirth. “I try, through colors, forms and lines, to express intimate emotions,” Gottlieb said in São Paulo in 1963. “… My paintings can represent an atomic bomb, a sun, or something else altogether: depending on the thinking of whoever is looking at it” (quoted in “Gottlieb Pinta Explosoes,” Ultima Hora La, São Paulo, 27 September 1963).
Gottlieb’s “Burst” works were the climax of decades of curiosity, experimentation, and innovation. Born in New York in 1903, Gottlieb attended night classes at the Art Students League and Cooper Union as a teenager. When he was seventeen, he worked his passage to Europe on a freighter, spending six months in Paris—where he visited the Louvre daily—and a year in Germany. He returned to New York full of the lessons of Cubism, Renaissance painting, and tribal art that he had seen. In 1929 he met his contemporary Mark Rothko and the older artist Milton Avery. The three often worked together over the following years, attempting to escape what they saw as the reigning provincialism of American painting. After a spell in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona in 1937-1938, Gottlieb began to paint dreamlike still lifes of boxed objects, bringing together strains of Surrealism, Cubism, and Native American art. These led to his grid-based “Pictographs” (1941-1951), which—like Rothko’s works of the same period—explored mythic and Freudian themes using primal, archetypal symbols. As he abandoned the grid, these works gave way to the “Imaginary Landscapes” (1951- 1957), whose contemplative upper and active lower elements anticipated the distilled, culminating splendor of the “Bursts.”
In 1943, Rothko and Gottlieb sent a joint letter to Edward Alden Jewell, arts editor of the New York Times, who had written a nonplussed review of their work. The letter was the first formal statement from artists who would become associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and remains an insightful summary of the men’s shared outlook. “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought,” they wrote. “We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth… There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art” (“A Letter from Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the Art Editor of the New York Times,” New York Times, 7 June, 1943, n.p.). Gottlieb would adhere to these ideas for the rest of his career. The statement’s reach for absolutes—the unequivocal, the simple, the true, the timeless—rings true in mature paintings like Petaloid #2.
At the time of Jewell’s review, avant-garde abstraction was largely sidelined and misunderstood by the New York art establishment. Gottlieb was one of its most outspoken defenders. By the 1960s, thanks in part to the advocacy of critics such as Clement Greenberg and MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the art world looked very different. Abstract painters including Gottlieb, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock were household names, their works acquired by museums and sought after by eminent collectors. Petaloid #2 plays a role in an anecdote that illustrates Gottlieb’s elevated cultural cachet at the time. Hans Namuth—the photographer who had famously captured Pollock making his “drip” paintings in 1950—let himself into Gottlieb’s East Hampton studio in 1963, and photographed a model on a ladder in front of several paintings, including Petaloid #2. The resulting image was printed in The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine as an advertisement for the high-end coffee brand Medaglia d’Oro. Affronted at the unauthorized use of his artwork, Gottlieb reached a legal accommodation with Namuth and the brand: the picture could be reproduced with the caption “Paintings by, and photographed in the studio of, Adolph Gottlieb, winner of the grand prix at the 1963 São Paulo Bienal of Painting and Sculpture.”
Unlike his friend Rothko, Gottlieb was relatively untroubled by his rising success. With an assured reputation, financial security, and the latitude to grow and experiment within his chosen painterly format, he was at the height of his powers in the 1960s. The “Burst” works have often been described as integrating opposing poles of Abstract Expressionist painting: they combine the numinous color-fields of Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, or Barnett Newman with the more dramatic, gestural strokes of de Kooning, Pollock, or Franz Kline. Their binary structure strikes a balance between the reductive language of those former painters and the action-filled, “all-over” canvases of the latter. Rather than simply reconciling these different approaches, however, Gottlieb variously held them in tension and harmony in his paintings, transcending his colleagues’ ideas in a unique idiom that proposed a new path for Abstract Expressionism.
With their “Bursts” and “Blasts,” Gottlieb’s works have been interpreted as abstractions of violence and cataclysm. The artist himself certainly did not exclude such readings: like many of his contemporaries, he sought to make art commensurate with the existential tumult of his time, from the tragedies of the Second World War to the development of the atomic bomb. Some critics saw in the soft nimbus above Gottlieb’s explosive “Bursts” the terrible calm of a nuclear mushroom cloud. The painter, however, felt that viewers were free to come to their own conclusions. Many “Burst” paintings, including the present, might equally be seen to offer a serene and restorative vision. Petaloid #2’s botanical title, in concert with its vivid green hues and blossoming red form, gestures toward the wonders of growth, renewal, and rebirth. “I try, through colors, forms and lines, to express intimate emotions,” Gottlieb said in São Paulo in 1963. “… My paintings can represent an atomic bomb, a sun, or something else altogether: depending on the thinking of whoever is looking at it” (quoted in “Gottlieb Pinta Explosoes,” Ultima Hora La, São Paulo, 27 September 1963).