ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

(1903-1974)

Cadmium Red Disc
1971

Footnotes

Provenance
Marlborough Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Philadelphia
Knoedler & Co., New York
Private Collection, Florida
Rosenfeld Gallery, Miami
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
New York, Marlborough Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1971-1972, 1972


Pulsating with a burst of forceful red on a stark monochrome ground, Adolph Gottlieb's Cadmium Red Disk (1971) is veritable force of a painting from the artist's iconic Burst series. Impressive in scale with a hypnotic composition, the present lot offers collectors a rare opportunity to acquire an iconic work by one of the most significant figures in American art to date.

A leading pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement alongside Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb is one of the most celebrated artists of the Twentieth Century. Born in New York in 1904 to Jewish Czech parents, Adolph Gottlieb experienced the Great Depression and bore witness to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. These, amongst other determinative cultural moments, are essential contexts in understanding Gottlieb's interest in transcendence, feeling, and human experience. Through poetic, abstract compositions, Gottlieb made visual the fleeting and very real emotions of human experience in the face of insurmountable trauma.

Gottlieb and many of his peers found that Realism did not encapsulate the existential qualms of reality in such a historic, war-torn and financially turbulent period. Gottlieb, along with other New York Abstract Expressionists like his friend and fellow artist Mark Rothko, continually challenged the notions of traditional painting, taking on the schism between meaning and form in their practice. Though Gottlieb had an already flourishing career, his notable style began to take form with his series of Pictographs, whose primitive and dynamic compositions conveyed "life [as] a mixture of brutality and beauty" (the artist quoted by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Making Art in Challenging Times: Gottlieb's Pictographs, www.gottliebfoundation.org). Gottlieb's historic pictographs launched him into a new era of artistic exploration which came to fervent fruition in the artist's Burst series that consequently cemented his artistic legacy and unequivocally personal vernacular.

The present lot is an exceptional example of Gottlieb's Burst series. In this body of work, Gottlieb simplified his compositions to reflect only a few cardinal gestures resulting in a simple, direct and aesthetically hard-hitting visual lexicon. In Cadmium Red Disk, a stark red circle hovers above an endless and absorbing black ground. A separate but intertwined duality is manifested within the work, creating separate but connected polarities. These dualities of darkness and light, line and space, object and expanse, yield a myriad of interpretative possibilities. As Gottlieb states, "I try, through colors, forms, and lines, to express intimate emotions...My paintings can represent an atomic bomb, a sun, or something else altogether: depending on the thinking of whoever is looking at it" (the artist quoted in Pepe Karmel, Adolph Gottlieb: Self and Cosmos, New York, p. 17).

Gottlieb's mention of the sun is particularly compelling with the present work in mind. The vibrating red orb seems to be rising against a night sky, or slowly setting at the close of the evening. As René Magritte did in his Surrealist masterpiece The Banquet (1958), Gottlieb seems to be playing with ideas of light at certain moments of the day, questioning our sense and understanding of time. The red sphere vibrating against the endless black ground creates a never-ending sense of time everlasting. Gottlieb has created a boundless galaxy, drawing the viewer into a mesmerizing universe of his own infinite making.

Though open to interpretation, the present lot is a hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving work. Omitting clear representation and figuration, Gottlieb reduced the work to pure planes of shape and color in order to convey rich and palpable emotions. "Everything is part of nature. Even painting has become part of nature. To clarify further: I don't have an ideological approach or a doctrinaire approach to my work. I just paint from my personal feelings, and my reflexes and instincts. I have to trust these" (the artist quoted in John Gruen, The Party's Over Now: Reminiscences of the Fifties, New York, 1967).

During his lifetime, Gottlieb was the subject of 55 solo exhibitions and over 400 group shows. His first retrospective was organized by Clement Greenberg in 1954 and held at Bennington College, Vermont, followed by a retrospective at the Jewish Museum of New York in 1957. In 1968 a highly significant retrospective exhibition was jointly organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The show opened simultaneously at both museums in New York City, marking the first and only time these major museums have collaborated in such a way. In 1981 another major retrospective was organized by the artist's foundation and travelled to ten locations worldwide including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Gottlieb was the first artist of his generation to have works collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946 and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, two years later in 1948. His work continues to be highly sought after by museums, and examples can be found in more than 140 leading institutions worldwide including the Albertine Museum, Vienna; Art Institute of Chicago; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Jewish Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.