Among the different types of paintings that Adolph Gottlieb was known for were those he called "Imaginary Landscapes". He created the first of these, titled The Frozen Sounds in 1951 and it marked a sharp break with the Pictograph compositions for which he had become known. The grids of the Pictographs, an early form of the all-over composition noted as central to Abstract Expressionist painting, gave way to Gottlieb's incessant drive to look for more. When his colleagues were pursuing the all-over approach, Gottlieb determined to explore the new theories of abstraction using two counterposed horizontal registers--one composed in his all-over method, the other reductive and focused. In 1969, the year after his solo exhibition that filled the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museums, Gottlieb completed a collection of Imaginary Landscape paintings. We wanted to take a closer look at some of the paintings created during that year.

In this interview with Dorothy Seckler from 1967, Gottlieb speaks about the development of Imaginary Landscapes within the larger body of his work 

"I was interested in finding something else to say, to express. So it was necessary to find other forms, a different, changed concept. So I finally, after a certain period of transition, I hit on dividing the canvas into two parts, which then became like an imaginary landscape. However, while this seemed like a great break, it wasn't such a great break because in a philosophical sense what I was doing was the same. In other words, I've always done the same thing. That is, I'm interested in certain opposing images."

All Artworks ©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by ARS, NY, NY