Adolph Gottlieb
When Adolph Gottlieb arrived back in New York in 1922, he carried with him the heady ambitions of European modernism, particularly those of German Expressionism and the School of Paris. Under the mentorship of Milton Avery, with whom he became close friends, he was encouraged to apply his painterly attentions to his immediate setting, rather than rehearse the themes and scenes he had encountered during his travels. The resulting portraits from that period would be of lasting significance to the artist, even as he shifted away from figuration towards the abstraction for which he is remembered. As Gottlieb recalled in a 1973 interview:
[A]s you may know, during the Forties most of us in New York were doing all-over painting…there was no beginning and no end. I decided that I was tired of the paintings [that] were endless… I decided that I would try to make paintings [that] had a focal point, very much the way a portrait had. All of the paintings that were done after the Forties have that characteristic, and I still retain that.
To this writer, Untitled (Portrait – Leopard Coat) anticipates – if only incidentally, in the sitter’s patterned coat – the circular motif of Gottlieb’s seminal Burst paintings, a series begun in 1957 and sustained until his death in 1974.
b.1903, New York; d.1974, New York
Though an influential exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Adolph Gottlieb was a painter of no single ideology. “Different times require different images,” he offered with aphoristic simplicity. Across his career, from the figurative expressionism of his early works to his Surrealist-inspired Pictographs and later Bursts, which compositionally unified Colour Field abstraction with its Action counterpart, the artist expressed a reluctance to settle into any one mode. His early life is further revealing of this essential restlessness: in 1921, at the age of 17 and with neither passport nor money, Gottlieb worked his passage to Europe, where he spent a year and a half visiting academies and museums. After returning to the United States, he became a founding member of both ‘The Ten’ in 1935 – a collective of avant-garde modernists – and ‘The New York Artist Painters’ in 1943, which notably included his friend and fellow artist Mark Rothko. The same year, Gottlieb and Rothko published a letter in The New York Times, now largely regarded as the first formal statement on Abstract Expressionism, and led a group of artists in protest at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948, which earned them the epithet ‘The Irascibles’. The following decade, in 1953, Clement Greenberg curated the first survey of Gottlieb’s art, canonising the painter’s pre-eminent position in American modernism. As the critic wrote in a catalogue essay published three years later, “Gottlieb has done more than enough by now to assure his place in the art of our time… his continuing development provides, to a superior degree, that excitement of which art as an unfolding activity, not as a finished result, is alone capable.”