"Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is reality. To my mind, so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. on the contrary, it is the realism of our time."
Adolph Gottlieb, “The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness,” The Tiger's Eye, December 1947
In 1994, the Gottlieb Foundation organized an exhibition titled "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb", which was a survey of the breakthrough Pictograph paintings that Adolph Gottlieb began in 1941 – the year the United States entered WWII. This exhibition began at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC in September 1994, then traveled to the Portland Art Museum in Maine, The Brooklyn Museum, and ended at the Arkansas Art Center in November of 1996.
The following images are installation photos from the exhibition's time at the Brooklyn Museum.
Shown from L-R: Black Enigma (1946), Pictograph (1946), Premonition of Evil (1946), Nostalgia for Atlantis (1944).
Shown from L-R: Dark Journey (1949), Centurion (1949), Running (1948), The Terrors of Tranquility (1948), Letter to a Friend (1948).
Shown from L-R: The Token (1945), Blue and White Pictograph (1947), Inscription to a Friend (1948), Black Silhouette (1949), Vigil (1948), Tournament (1951), Pictograph (1946).
Shown from L-R: Archer (1951), Mariner's Incantation (1945), The Token (1945), Blue and White Pictograph (1947), Inscription to a Friend (1948), Black Silhouette (1949).
Below is a small selection of the 67 works that were in the show. Hover over each image to see details about the work.
The show received many positive reviews, such as the ones below from Art News and The New Criterion.
"'The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb' was an important show for several reasons. First, 59 crisply intelligent, precisely colored, and exquisitely brushed oil paintings were on display. Second, a highly significant but little-known episode in the career of a distinguished American painter has been superbly documented. And finally, a reordering in the pantheon of American Abstract painters is politely, but persistently petitioned...Gottlieb's pictographs constitute some of the best-sustained explications of the power and possibilities of abstract art ever made."
Weil, Rex. ''Adolph Gottlieb: Phillips Collection'', Artnews, January 1995
"Individually, the best of the Pictographs are compelling, seductive pictures that require no further justification other than their own excellences, but as a group, they also help us to read Gottlieb's subsequent work. The suggestive imagery of the Pictographs provides clues to the layers of meaning and the dense, ambiguous allusions implied by the Bursts and their descendants. Equally important, the Pictographs offer us graphic, concrete evidence of some of the main preoccupations of New York's small community of truly daring painters during the childhood years of the New York avant-garde, when this handful of young men--and a few young women--strove to establish their own identities as painters and sculptors and, along the way, established a new level of ambition and audacity for American art."
Wilkin, Karen. ''The ‘Pictographs’ of Adolph Gottlieb'', The New Criterion, June 1995
Click below to read catalog essays by
Sanford Hirsch
Charlotta Kotik
Evan Maurer