Adolph Gottlieb, Illustrated
by John Perreault
Oddly, the number of visitors increased. If this was because museums were no longer free, I do not know. Today there are sometimes so many people that it is difficult to see the art. They stand forever in front of each painting with their earphones protecting them from the opinions of their companions, listening instead to every scripted word pronounced by Steve Martin or Phillippe De Montebello. Are they really looking? Are they thinking? First you pay good money to get in, and then you have to rent a set of earphones to hear longer versions of what could have been gleaned more efficiently from a discreet wall-text.
The one painting from that long-ago, live and in-person free gallery tour that stuck in my mind was Adolph Gottlieb’s Frozen Sounds, a so-called Imaginary Landscape, done after the Pictograms and before the Bursts. The tour guide had a good time talking about painting and music in front of Gottlieb’s floating orbs. There was tension between semi-abstraction and abstraction of the nonobjective type. This painting was definitely not the latter and the speaker made this important and exciting. The lecturer was the young Budd Hopkins, a painter himself (I still think even now worth looking at) who eventually became a friend of mine through his wife, curator and art critic April Kingsley and nowadays is primarily known for his truly scary books about alien abductions.
Then I don’t know what happened. I was abducted by art. It is always exciting to see the real thing, which is easy in New York, rather than the photographs in books you might have seen as a teenager. I saw more art. By the time Gottlieb’s double-header retrospective hosted by the Guggenheim and the Whitney came around in 1968, his Imaginary Landscapes and his signature Bursts, begun in 1957, did not appeal. I may even have written some unkind words.
In the ‘70s, when I was asked by the photorealist painter Marion Pinto to pose for a mural commissioned by The Ballroom, one of the first chic restaurants in that new art district called Soho, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to actually be in the room with all the other subjects for a group photograph. We were photographed singly or in small groups and then collaged together.
The mural was to be a timely mixture of Ivan Karp, Marisol, Larry Rivers, Deborah Remington and others, including Gottlieb. I was photographed wearing a straw hat sitting at a table with the glamorous Remington. When the mural was unveiled, as fate would have it, Adolph sat at our table thanks to the magic of photorealism. Photo-realism had saved me from deep embarrassment. What possibly could I have said to him in real life?
Mr. Gottlieb, I am sorry you are now in a wheelchair, but I used to like your work when I was in artistic diapers and currently think it’s extremely questionable.
Mr. Gottlieb, Clement Greenberg indicated in a 1959 catalogue essay that even after the Bursts, unlike the fallen artists all around you, you were not identified by a recognizable manner?. Was Greenberg blind?
Mr. Gottlieb, you had all the right ideas … such as: "I have to let my feelings go and it’s only afterward that I become aware of what me feelings really were. And for me this is one of the fascinations and great experiences of painting, that I become aware of myself and that in the process of painting I become more aware as a person" (from an interview with David Sylvester) …
…but not enough talent, unlike de Kooning who had all the wrong ideas because they were produced by wit, but was incapable of laying down paint in an uninteresting way.
Well, you get the picture.
What do I think about Gottlieb’s work now? A concise show at the Jewish Museum until March 2 is an unexpected opportunity for reevaluation. Although all 31 works are from the collection of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and it is usually not a good sign when paintings come from one source, particularly the estate of the artist, this appears to be a fair-enough survey. Contrary to Greenberg, a lot of Gottlieb’s paintings, period by period, look pretty much alike. Go on the Web, look at art books, if you need confirmation.
To my surprise, I think I undervalued the Bursts. Burst, 1973, is a perfect painting: the dialogue between the red, sunlike orb and the splashing black below makes total visual sense. An exhibition of just the Bursts would be a real test. Forget the early work, which is tiresome and like so much else of that period. Forget the Imaginary Landscapes. And forget Gottlieb’s last efforts at strange color notations. He stands or falls on the Bursts.
Otherwise there still are issues.
Critic Lawrence Alloway, in a catalogue essay for the artist’s London I.C.A. exhibition, thought that although "he was the last Abstract Expressionist to arrive at holistic surface," this ultimately didn’t matter because Gottlieb managed to pull off a marriage between Abstract Expressionist brushwork or splashing and the so-called color field paintings of his friends Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Gottlieb was right on target with his Pictograms of the ‘40s, but fell back until he came up with his first Burst in 1957.
Alas, the Pictograms no longer look so good. The Argentine modernist Garcia-Torres did them better.
If only Gottlieb had explored the all-over layered bands in the spectacular Labyrinth #3 of 1954, instead of leaving it to Bradley Walker Tomlin to turn this device into a signature style.
If only Gottlieb had separated the Bursts from the multiple orbs of his Imaginary Landscapes a little earlier.
If only his sense of color were a little more complex.
Or simpler.
Once someone I did not know came up to me at an art opening and said that I had changed her life by a definition of art I offered in a class she had attended. I had said that art is the way artists talk to each other.
I still think this is true. And on the spot I added that living artists also conduct conversations with dead artists. Although Pollock never met Picasso, there is a sense in which he talked to him all the time, but through his work. Picasso himself, at a certain point, spent a lot of time talking to Velasquez. Gottlieb’s Bursts were conversations with Rothko and Newman, whether or not he, at that point, had actually met them. If you follow up the indexes in Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture and Harold Rosenberg’s The De-definition of Art, you’ll see that Gottlieb is interlaced throughout both texts, but it is usually in the same breath as Rothko and Newman (and sometimes Ad Reinhardt and Clifford Still).
All were interested in what they considered to be the subject matter of abstract art. But before you imagine that they were lifelong friends, let the following quote from Rosenberg, who liked and supported the whole group, be a shocking corrective:
The absolute images of Rothko, Newman Gottlieb, Still, Reinhardt can coexist in a picture collection but could not coexist in the minds of their originators. Each was the proprietor of a sacred enigma, whose authority had to exceed that of all others the minds. The fate of … [the] original group of artist-companions was to disperse and become in most instances implacably hostile to one another.
At a certain point, the conversation was over. Really over. Finished.
And how do critics talk to each other?
As should now be clear, critics use their criticism to talk to other critics, dead or alive. Hence, my fascination with the late Lawrence Alloway’s well thought-out Gottlieb essay.
Lawrence, you even admit in your essay that "touch" never characterized Gottlieb’s work. Isn’t that the lack? After seeing the paintings in the current survey, I think so.
To be really mean: it is acknowledged that the later paintings, because of Gottlieb’s debilitating stroke, were done by assistants. What is illuminating now is that you can’t tell the difference. The Bursts were always about image and not touch; that is why they are sometimes so inert. Even Franz Kline’s planned-out black "girders" come across as more spontaneous.
Finally, the big issue is that of illustration. Critic and painter Fairfield Porter, as early as 1953, hit the nail on the head. He said of the successors to my old favorite Frozen Sounds that "this year’s paintings also divided between a flat ground below and a sky above in which are suspended circles, ellipses and rectangles, carries on the illustrative idea but not its aesthetic one."
I have nothing against illustration when it means visual addenda to poetry or prose. It too can be art. But let us not forget that a successful illustration proposes a single meaning. Show me an ambiguous illustration, and I will show you one that is not doing its job, is a psychological test, or is straining too much to be art. This is why illustration is anathema to serious painting.
Although I doubt that anyone as clever as Gottlieb was simply aiming to illustrate the A-bomb threat, the postwar age of anxiety or even the joys of Hasidic mysticism, his Imaginary Landscapes and his Bursts have been used as such, and thus have become such.
I thought maybe this had stopped. But when I was browsing my bookcase for relevant tomes, I found the 1995 Schocken edition of the now-classic Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem. Guess what’s on the cover. Gottlieb’s 1963 Excalibur, a red planet over a split loop of dancing brushwork.
Gottlieb’s paintings become illustrations after the fact. Can an artist prevent this?
With the advent of the mass media, everything seems to be fair game. Not only Gottlieb, but Edward Hopper and Grant Wood before him. Paintings get sucked into movies, also. I recently took another look at Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (because I liked his newly released Femme Fatale). And there is Angie Dickinson in the middle of the famous museum cruising scene staring at an Alex Katz painting of his wife Ada. Is the painting illustrating the character’s thoughts? Will I ever be able to look at an Ada painting without thinking of Angie Dickinson and her character’s gruesome end? Vis-a-vis illustration and other media uses of paintings, only Pop Art is poisonous enough to override this use.
However, the question remains. Is there something about the Gottlieb’s Bursts that, God forbid, makes them "one-dimensional" and therefore ideal illustrations? I don’t remember seeing a de Kooning, a Pollock, a Newman or a Joan Mitchell or, let’s get really serious, a Sol LeWitt used as an illustration. Just as the meaning of a word is its use — thank you, Ludwig Wittgenstein — so too is the meaning of a painting. o
copyright John Perreault, 2002
