Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb’s wife, Esther, a painter in her own right, was a recurring figure in his portraits, her likeness transcribed time and again with warm intimacy and formal refinement. In sensibility and subject, Gottlieb was deeply influenced by the painter Milton Avery, with whom he often holidayed in the 1930s – “while he was painting a lot of portraits of his wife, I painted my wife,” he later recalled. Whether this was a matter of affection or merely one of convenience went unmentioned. This example is among the more sombre studies in which Esther appears, with its muted palette and shadowed foreground, her eyelids heavy and expression pensive. The title suggests nothing of the work’s mood; the following year, however, the couple decamped to Arizona on the advice of Esther’s doctor, who suggested she might benefit from a drier climate after a long period of illness. Perhaps her poor health in the year preceding their time in the desert lends the scene its apparent listlessness – or perhaps this is only a fancy on the writer’s part.
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.”