"...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."
Clement Greenberg, from the catalogue of the Adolph Gottlieb retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York, November and December 1957.
"As for my own work in the fifties, I guess Clement Greenberg did a lot to call attention to it. He wrote a forward to the catalogue of my first retrospective in 1954, held a Bennington. And again, he wrote one in 1958 when I had my show at the Jewish Museum in New York. That, incidentally, was the first time I showed one of my ‘burst’ paintings, which Greenberg saw as a break toward a new direction, and which I did actually develop."
Adolph Gottlieb, in an interview from The Party’s Over Now by John Gruen, 1967.
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb and friends, including Clement Greenberg (kneeling). The artists (from right to left) Adolph Gottlieb, William Scott and Tony Caro in London, June 1959
"We went to London and had a wonderful time. As a matter of fact, I have some photographs—I think I showed you one with Clem. He was there with his wife. It’s a photograph of us in the garden with the painter, William Scott. Then we decide to go to Paris just for a weekend. (Paul) Jenkins was having a show, and we thought we’d go see it. Clem went with us to Paris to Paul’s opening, and then we flew home."
– Esther Gottlieb, in a 1975 interview with Stephen Pearson
Relationships between artists and critics are complex. The relationship between Adolph Gottlieb and Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential critical writers of his generation, was no different. Following are several items from our archive pointing to different moments in that relationship that lasted over 30 years.
According to Gottlieb, he and Greenberg met in the mid-1940s through their mutual associations with Peggy Guggenheim.
The first item in our archive that references Clement Greenberg is his 1945 review in The Nation for an exhibition at Gallery 67 titled "A Problem for Critics" (shown above).
Greenberg wrote another hopeful review of a solo exhibition that Gottlieb had at Jacques Seligmann Gallery in 1949:
"It is presumptuous to urge an artist on, and it is especially so when he is as talented as Gottlieb; but it is hard not to be impatient with a painter whose talent contains so much latent and unrealized force."
Greenberg later reviewed several of Gottlieb’s exhibitions and curated the first survey of Gottlieb’s paintings for Bennington College in 1954.
Exhibition brochure from a 1954 retrospective exhibition of Adolph Gottlieb’s paintings at the Bennington College Gallery. Text by Clement Greenberg.
By the 1950s, the Gottliebs and the Greenbergs had become personal friends.
The Gottliebs and friends (including the Greenbergs) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, September 7, 1959.
Adolph at lower left (in sunglasses), Esther in center back, Clement Greenberg at far right
As a wedding gift, Gottlieb gave Janice and Clement Greenberg his painting Side Pull (1956). Over the course of their friendship, Gottlieb also gave Clement Greenberg a 1949 gouache and a linocut from the mid-1940s.
Adolph Gottlieb, Untitled (Pictograph), c. 1946, linocut, platemark: 11 13/16 in. x 14 3/4 in. (30 cm x 37.5 cm)
Now part of the Davis Museum Collection at Wellesley College
Adolph Gottlieb, Untitled, 1949, crayon, ink, and pencil on paper, 10 x 12"
part of the Clement Greenberg Collection at the Portland Art Museum
Installation view of the 1959 exhibition New American Paintings at MoMA, May 1959
On the left: Side Pull (1956), a wedding gift from Adolph Gottlieb to Janice and Clement Greenberg in 1958.
Their friendship became strained in 1963. Gottlieb, recovering from a heart attack, drafted an angry response to Greenberg’s recently published article “After Abstract Expressionism”.
In later years, these former friends were able to express some of the mutual respect they held for one another. In a 1967 interview with Colette Roberts, Gottlieb praises Greenberg’s unique insights:
"[Greenberg]’s always said the same thing; he always goes by his eye. He thinks he has a good eye and I agree with him. I think he has a marvelous eye...that's what distinguishes him from a lot of other critics who are blind. Some of them are blind but they have really good rhetoric. Their rhetoric is excellent, but they don't even look at paintings. But Greenberg really looks, and he can make very subtle perceptions... He’s one of the few people whose opinion, when he looks at a painting, it’s something that I respect. "
In the course of a talk in 1980, Greenberg similarly stated, "...if you don't understand Gottlieb, you don't understand Abstract Expressionism.."