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拍品专文
‘To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time’ (Adolph Gottlieb)
Painted in 1968—in tandem with the artist’s unprecedented two-venue retrospective in New York, held simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that year—Sand is a striking late example of Adolph Gottlieb’s ‘Burst’ paintings. These works, with ovoid shapes suspended above sprays of calligraphic brushwork, are among the most iconic of the Abstract Expressionist era. Gottlieb arrived at the format in the late 1950s and developed it throughout the rest of his career. Here, four discs of scarlet, yellow, green and white float against a golden backdrop. Broken black brushstrokes appear below like hints of landscape under a strange sky. The contrasting shapes imply fundamental dualities—order and chaos, id and ego, creation and destruction—without declaring any fixed reading.
Born in New York in 1903, Gottlieb was hungry for art at a young age. At 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. In 1929 he met his contemporary Mark Rothko and the older artist Milton Avery. The three friends worked together closely over the following years, attempting to forge a new path for American painting. After a spell in the Arizona desert in the late 1930s, 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 tranquil upper and active lower elements in turn led to the breakthrough of the ‘Bursts.’
Gottlieb was at the height of his powers in the 1960s. With the latitude to grow and experiment within his chosen format, he explored new directions, multiplying the disc elements—as in the present work—and scattering, building up or diffusing the brushwork below. The ‘Burst’ works can be seen to integrate opposing poles of Abstract Expressionist painting. They combine aspects of the numinous colour-fields of Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, or Barnett Newman with the dramatic, gestural ‘Action Painting’ of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, or Franz Kline. Gottlieb variously held these approaches in tension and harmony in his paintings, seeking his own way into what he and Rothko saw as the ‘tragic and timeless’ subject matter proper to modern painting (‘A Letter from Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the Art Editor of the New York Times,’ The New York Times, 7 June 1943, n.p.).
With their painterly detonations and hovering nimbuses, Gottlieb’s works have been interpreted as abstractions of violence and cataclysm. The artist did not exclude such readings: like many of his contemporaries, he sought to make art commensurate with the tumult of his time, from the tragedies of the Second World War to the development of the atomic bomb. The paintings can be equally suggestive, however, of serenity, renewal and rebirth. Gottlieb left viewers free to come to their own conclusions. The critic Harold Rosenberg singled out the present painting for its mysterious and polyvalent power. ‘His emblems reach out to the magical idioms of medicine men, alchemists, astrologers. They are affiliated with the hieroglyph and the secret formula, as in Sand … No matter how abstract and “reduced” they become, they carry reverberations of a beyond-art realm, be it the world of the primitive-archaic or of the outer space of modern physics’ (H. Rosenberg, ‘Gottlieb’, in Adolph Gottlieb: Painting 1959–1971, exh. cat. Marlborough Fine Art, London 1971, p. 7).
Painted in 1968—in tandem with the artist’s unprecedented two-venue retrospective in New York, held simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that year—Sand is a striking late example of Adolph Gottlieb’s ‘Burst’ paintings. These works, with ovoid shapes suspended above sprays of calligraphic brushwork, are among the most iconic of the Abstract Expressionist era. Gottlieb arrived at the format in the late 1950s and developed it throughout the rest of his career. Here, four discs of scarlet, yellow, green and white float against a golden backdrop. Broken black brushstrokes appear below like hints of landscape under a strange sky. The contrasting shapes imply fundamental dualities—order and chaos, id and ego, creation and destruction—without declaring any fixed reading.
Born in New York in 1903, Gottlieb was hungry for art at a young age. At 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. In 1929 he met his contemporary Mark Rothko and the older artist Milton Avery. The three friends worked together closely over the following years, attempting to forge a new path for American painting. After a spell in the Arizona desert in the late 1930s, 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 tranquil upper and active lower elements in turn led to the breakthrough of the ‘Bursts.’
Gottlieb was at the height of his powers in the 1960s. With the latitude to grow and experiment within his chosen format, he explored new directions, multiplying the disc elements—as in the present work—and scattering, building up or diffusing the brushwork below. The ‘Burst’ works can be seen to integrate opposing poles of Abstract Expressionist painting. They combine aspects of the numinous colour-fields of Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, or Barnett Newman with the dramatic, gestural ‘Action Painting’ of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, or Franz Kline. Gottlieb variously held these approaches in tension and harmony in his paintings, seeking his own way into what he and Rothko saw as the ‘tragic and timeless’ subject matter proper to modern painting (‘A Letter from Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the Art Editor of the New York Times,’ The New York Times, 7 June 1943, n.p.).
With their painterly detonations and hovering nimbuses, Gottlieb’s works have been interpreted as abstractions of violence and cataclysm. The artist did not exclude such readings: like many of his contemporaries, he sought to make art commensurate with the tumult of his time, from the tragedies of the Second World War to the development of the atomic bomb. The paintings can be equally suggestive, however, of serenity, renewal and rebirth. Gottlieb left viewers free to come to their own conclusions. The critic Harold Rosenberg singled out the present painting for its mysterious and polyvalent power. ‘His emblems reach out to the magical idioms of medicine men, alchemists, astrologers. They are affiliated with the hieroglyph and the secret formula, as in Sand … No matter how abstract and “reduced” they become, they carry reverberations of a beyond-art realm, be it the world of the primitive-archaic or of the outer space of modern physics’ (H. Rosenberg, ‘Gottlieb’, in Adolph Gottlieb: Painting 1959–1971, exh. cat. Marlborough Fine Art, London 1971, p. 7).