27 Facts About Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter who made sculpture and became a print maker.

Adolph Gottlieb traveled in France and Germany for a year.

Adolph Gottlieb lived in Paris for six months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.

Adolph Gottlieb spent the next year traveling in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other parts of Central Europe, visiting museums and art galleries.

Adolph Gottlieb had his first solo exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries in New York City in 1930.

From September 1937 to June 1938, Adolph Gottlieb lived in the Arizona desert, outside of Tucson.

Adolph Gottlieb moved from an expressionist-realist style to an approach that combined elements of surrealism and formalist abstraction, using objects and scenes from the local environment as symbols to remove temporality from his work.

Adolph Gottlieb transitioned from this into more Surrealist works like the Sea Chest, which displays mysterious incongruities on an otherwise normal landscape.

Adolph Gottlieb painted a few works in a Surrealist style in 1940 and 1941.

Adolph Gottlieb's images appear similar to those of indigenous populations of North America and the Ancient Near East.

Adolph Gottlieb spoke of his painting concerns in a 1947 statement:.

Adolph Gottlieb began his new series of Imaginary Landscapes in which he retained his usage of a 'pseudo-language' but added the new element of space.

Adolph Gottlieb was not painting landscapes in the traditional sense, rather he modified that genre to match his own style of painting.

Late in 1956 Adolph Gottlieb formulated the image that has become known as the "Burst" and spent most of the next two years working on this approach.

Adolph Gottlieb's paintings are variations with these elements arranged in different ways.

Adolph Gottlieb was a masterful colorist as well and in the Burst series his use of color is particularly crucial.

Adolph Gottlieb is considered one of the first color field painters and is one of the forerunners of Lyrical Abstraction.

Adolph Gottlieb created "Burst" and "Imaginary Landscape" type paintings for the remainder of his career but, unlike some of his colleagues, he did not limit himself to one or two images.

Discussion of Adolph Gottlieb's art is usually limited to mentions of "Bursts" or "Imaginary Landscapes", which detracts from the broad range of ideas this artist examined.

In 1967 while Adolph Gottlieb was preparing for the Whitney and Guggenheim Museum exhibition he began to make small models for sculptures out of cut and painted cardboard that, he said, made him feel like "a young sculptor, just beginning".

Adolph Gottlieb had 56 solo exhibitions and was included in over 200 group exhibitions.

Adolph Gottlieb was accomplished as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor.

Adolph Gottlieb designed and oversaw construction of a 1500 square-foot stained glass facade for the Milton Steinberg Center in New York City in 1954, and he designed a suite of 18 stained glass windows for the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn.

Adolph Gottlieb was the first of his generation to have his art collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Guggenheim Museum.

Adolph Gottlieb's work is included in the permanent holdings of numerous museum institutions in the US, for instance, his work Altar from 1947, is included in the permanent collections of the Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

Adolph Gottlieb continued to paint and to exhibit his art until his death in March 1974.

Adolph Gottlieb was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972.