Adolph Gottlieb was a founding artist of the American abstract expressionist movement of the 20th century, renown for employing invented abstract symbols that transcend time, place and language in his artwork to achieve universal meaning. Born in New York’s East Village to Jewish Czech immigrants in 1904, Gottlieb grew up during the Great Depression and the interwar period. He studied at the Arts Students League in New York, and studied classical and modern art traditions in Paris. Throughout his life, Gottlieb staunchly supported the avant-garde movement, which includes Abstract Expressionism, for its ability to express authentic feeling during World War II.  

Inspired by Surrealism’s automatic drawing, mythological symbols, and primitive tribal art, Gottlieb began to produce his Pictograph series in 1941, early in his career, which that laid the foundation for his development into pure abstraction. Pictographs rejected traditional narratives and instead depicted images from his subconscious mind, arranging each figurative symbol into a loose grid structure. In the early 1950s, Gottlieb painted a series of Imaginary Landscape Paintings, which divided the canvas into two horizontal parts – a celestial zone and a terrestrial zone. This duality crystalized in Gottlieb’s last series of Burst paintings of the late 1950s, of a sun-like disks hovering above explosive, irregular calligraphic marks. Gottlieb’s highly developed lexicon of simple abstract forms is evocative and relatable to a larger universal language.

Today, Adolph Gottlieb’s works are held in collections internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among many others.