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Gottlieb and Kline - artists Adolph Gottlieb and Franz Kline
Art Journal, Spring, 1996 by Stephen Polcari
Last winter and spring New Yorkers had the opportunity to reexamine the work of two relatively underrated New York artists who seemingly have very little to do with one another. Although Adolph Gottlieb and Franz Kline are both major players in Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, they are often held to be a cut below the best. Gottlieb gets little individual critical attention and is often described "in context." It is as though he represents the general ideas of Abstract Expressionism - with the famous letter to the New York Times of 1943 most indicative - without his own work having much specific character, whether the examples are his pictographs of the 1940s or paintings from his later allegorical Burst series. Kline's work, on the other hand, has come to represent to the world at large mature Abstract Expressionism of painterly motion and even action painting.
Two recent exhibitions both support and undercut the established niches occupied by these artists. The Phillips Collection organized the most comprehensive show ever of Gottlieb's pictographs, The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb. Seventy of the approximately three hundred pictographs he produced, most borrowed from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and national museums, were displayed. The Brooklyn venue where I viewed the exhibition was an appropriate setting for Gottlieb in New York for he, like Mark Rothko, lived for many years in Brooklyn and visited the Brooklyn Museum frequently, particularly its ancient and tribal collections. Indeed, in the last room of the exhibition and in the wonderful. newly reinstalled African galleries, the museum has included a number of the African sculptures Gottlieb owned and donated to the institution. The exhibition was effective in spite of the somewhat awkward rooms in Brooklyn where it was hung, for Gottlieb's craft is a major revelation.
Scumbled, dry-brushed, impastoed, incised, scored, scratched, roughed, or simply drawn images abound in works more complex and varied than critics have previously acknowledged. The exhibition also revealed Gottlieb as an unusual colorist. Allusive and daring, he joined earth colors (the Oedipus series) with red-and-black-figured images (Oedipus, 1942), or hot pink (the lurid Pictograph, 1946, and Centurion, 1949), or gray-green (the sea of Mariner's Incantation, 1945), or dark gray - black a la Guernica (the vicious Expectation of Evil, 1945), or soft, luminous blue-gray (Archer, 1951). Perhaps his palette, like his work as a whole, is too cool and conceptual, a problem that has often caused recognition of Gottlieb's achievement to lag behind the reputations of such peers as Rothko, Willem de Kooning, or Barnett Newman.
While informative, the direct association of Gottlieb's pictographs with the tribal, both in the exhibition and in Evan Maurer's essay in the catalogue (pp. 31-39), has also unfortunately reinforced the popular but questionable view that Gottlieb's work is largely concerned with so-called primitivism, when, in fact, it has a much larger range. Gottlieb himself denied that his work was primarily about the tribal. He said of the pictographs: "I was interested in reading Jung at the time and the idea [of the collective unconscious] interested me. . . . [I]t just corroborated my idea that I wasn't really interested in primitive art."(1) Despite this explicit denial, critics have too often considered the pictographs merely an exercise in primitivism (or today's fashion has condemned him for it), when allusions to the tribal (and there are many, for Gottlieb studied and collected tribal art from the 1920s on) are simply his way of including as many cultures and periods in the idea of the shared humanity of human beings. The world for Gottlieb consists of at least African, Native American, Inuit, Egyptian, Oceanic, prehistoric, and classical, Renaissance, and modern European art, including the works of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Henry Moore. In other words, his work shares the equalizing if anthropologically unscholastic variety and universalism characteristic of the Abstract Expressionists.
The Brooklyn exhibition and lead catalogue essay by Sanford Hirsch, "Adolph Gottlieb and Art in New York in the 1930s," reveal a complex artist who addressed not his own inner life but the life of his era, in much the same way as did many American artists in the 1940s. It was an inner life haunted by fear, violence, threat, the irrational, and the unknown. Its source lay in the decades of war, upheaval, and degradation in the twentieth century, and particularly in World War II. There are many expressions, forms, and styles of this psychological and emotional experience, from war art to posters, from movies to theater and dance. Gottlieb's method was to create an image of the constancy of such feelings and their frequency in human affairs, whatever the historical time or sociopolitical structure.
The show indicates three stages to Gottlieb's 1940s pictographs. The austere and very controlled works of the first phase seem tentative. Gottlieb adopted the pictographic structure because it was a meaningful, culturally diverse pictorial method appearing in forms ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Renaissance predellas to modern abstract images. However, at first he chose to limit his subjects to one of the principle myths of disaster, the Oedipus myth. The first pictographs consist of irregular compartments containing arcane and subtle references to this story, although it quickly becomes apparent that the "story" is a platform for psychological and emotional suggestions having little to do with Freudian ideas of Oedipal desire and conflict prevalent among the Surrealists.
