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"It was in the air": Adolph Gottlieb, the pictographs, New York, and the Zeitgeist of the 1940s

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"It was in the air": Adolph Gottlieb, the pictographs, New York, and the Zeitgeist of the 1940s

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Content "IT WAS IN THE AIR"
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB, THE PICTOGRAPHS, NEW YORK,
AND THE ZEITGEIST OF THE 1940S
by
Martha Neighbors
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS IN ART HISTORY
(Museum Studies)
December 1994
Copyright 1994 Martha Neighbors
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
T H E G R A D U A TE S CHO O L
U N IV E R S IT Y RARK
LO S A N G E LE S . C A L IF O R N IA 8 0 0 0 7
This thesis, written by
Martha Neighbors
under the direction of Aer. Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre-
seated to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
/ S L a.
Dtmm
Date .October'.].! ( 1994
THESIS COMMITTEE
C A « irM M
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The genesis of this paper was formed during my tenure as a
curatorial intern in the Department of Contemporary Painting and
Sculpture at The Brooklyn Museum. The Museum houses Adolph
Gottlieb's collection of tribal art (see Appendix B) and is currently
organizing an exhibition of the Pictographs in conjunction with the
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. This exhibition will open
at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, in autumn 1994, to be
followed by The Brooklyn Museum in spring 1995; it will then
travel to several other venues. The Brooklyn presentation will
include approximately 60 Pictographs and will be supplemented
by a coda of tribal pieces from Gottlieb's collection. My job was to
coordinate all this, and in the course of doing so I realized that
much of the territory that Brooklyn proposed to cover was
uncharted. Hence this thesis.
At The Brooklyn Museum I want to thank Charlotta Kotik,
Chair of the Department of Painting and Sculpture and Curator of
Contemporary Art, whose support, encouragement, and wide-
ranging knowledge of twentieth-century art, all unselfishly
transmitted, has been invaluable; William Seigmann, Curator of
the Arts of Africa, who was always generous with his time in
answering my numerous questions regarding Gottlieb's collection;
and Carole Rusk, Research Librarian, who cheerfully made it easy
for me to find the sources I needed. I also want to acknowledge
the support of my Department, including Brooke Kamin Rapaport,
Pamela S. Johnson, Vesela Sretenovic, and Maureen Cross.
At the University of Southern California, thanks go to
Professor Susan Larsen, whose depth of knowledge and
expertise in American art and museum history originally inspired
my interest in these subjects in several seminars; Professor Glenn
Harcourt, whose careful reading of this manuscript is greatly
appreciated; Dr. Selma Holo, a warm and wonderful human being
who runs the best Museum Studies program in the country; and
my colleagues in the program; Mariana Amatullo, Curtis Brown,
Max Schulz, Jennifer Wood and Tim B. Wride, who taught me
more about mounting exhibitions than I could ever imagine.
For his support, encouragement, unflagging belief in me,
and incredible patience, I acknowledge my husband, Charles
Boday, with much love and eternal gratitude.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments................................................................................ii
Introduction.......................................................................................... 1
I. The Early Years: Europe, the Art Students League,
and Friendship..........................................................................3
II. Absorption and Formation............................................................ 12
III. The Pictographs and Resolution................................................ 24
IV. Conclusion....................................................................................37
Bibliography........................................................................................41
Appendix A: New York Museums and Galleries..........................48
Appendix B: Adolph Gottlieb's Collection of Tribal A rt............... 52
INTRODUCTION
"It was in the air," said Oscar Collier.1 "It," in this case,
referred specifically to the art of the tribes of the Northwest Coast
of North America--the Kwakiutl, Haida and Tlingit in particular-
aspects of which were to be appropriated by a group of artists who
became known as the Indian Space Painters. "It" in general can
be seen to stand for all tribal arts, and the "climate of primitivism"-
the zeitgeist-that pervaded New York in the 1940s. It was this
Zeitgeist that informed the art of Adolph Gottlieb perhaps to a
greater degree than any of the other Abstract Expressionists, with
the possible exception of Mark Rothko. Of the Abstract
Expressionists, only Gottlieb actively collected tribal art; we know
too that he was an avid museum visitor, and that he read widely on
the subject of what was then known as "primitive" art.
If it is fashionable in this day and age to think of ourselves
as cultural pluralists and to once again search for content in art,
then Adolph Gottlieb can be considered the father of
multiculturalism. In his impressive body of work known as the
Pictographs, which he produced from 1941 to 1951, he drew on
sources as diverse as Sienese trecento altarpieces, Surrealist
automatism, the theories of Cart Jung, mythology, and the arts of
Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. All these sources were
available to him in New York during the formative years of his
career, the mid-1920s through the 1940s.
This period was one of great excitement in the American art
world. Old schools were being rejected, new schools founded;
new museums were opening; exhibitions of art from all over the
world were being held both in "art" museums and "ethnography"
museums; artist-run periodicals were published; and-with the
advent of World War 11-the "center" of the art world shifted from
Paris to New York when numerous artists and writers sought exile
from the Nazis. It was a time when a "national" art was being
sought, when European modernism was being re-evaluated in
light of American experience, when modern American artists
began to reject the perceived derivative artistic traditions of this
country and tried to forge an American artistic identity independent
of Europe. It is to the combination of all these factors that we must
look to discover the genesis of the Pictographs and to more fully
understand their subsequent development.
1 Interview with Ann Eden Gibson, 8 Dec. 1981. Quoted in Gibson, "Iconograoh
Magazine," The Indian Space Painters: Native American Sources for Abstract Art
{New York: The Sidney Mishkin Gallery ol Baruch College, CUNY, 1991): 36.
2
I. THE EARLY YEARS: EUROPE. THE ART STUDENTS
LEAGUE. AND FRIENDSHIP
Adolph Gottlieb was born in New York City on 14 March
1903. His parents owned a stationery store and had hoped that
Gottlieb would follow in the family business. He dropped out of
high school in 1919 and did go to work for his father, however he
soon realized that he wanted to be an artist.1
He enrolled at the Art Students League, taking classes with
both Robert Henri and John Sloan. Sloan recommended that his
students should "study the masters to learn what they did and how
they did it, to find a reason for being a painter yourself."2 Gottlieb
followed this advice and, in 1921, he went to Europe with an old
high school friend.
Gottlieb had no passport--nor did his friend-and he worked
his passage on a ship, arriving in Paris without much money.
Paris in 1921 was an artistically active city: Picasso was painting
The Three Musicians, synthetic Cubism was peaking, the Dadaists
were becoming Surrealists. This trip was to have an enormous
effect on his later work. As Mary Davis MacNaughton says,
"Gottlieb's appreciation of the modern tradition . . . began on this
trip and grew during the twenties and thirties, enabling] him in his
Pictographs of 1941*42 easily to transform sources in Surrealism
and abstraction for his own expressive purposes."3
Gottlieb himself agreed, perhaps for different reasons, that
the European jaunt had a tremendous impact:
I went to Europe for the first time in 1921.... I eventually
got to Paris and I did very little painting. I was going to the
Grand Chaumiere to a sketch class where I did sketches
from life.... And I did something more useful, I went to the
Louvre almost everyday, I certainly went there every other
day.... I think that the real university for any young artist is
the museum which has a rich collection.4
It was in the museums of Paris-particularly the Louvre-that
Gottlieb became exposed to a wide range of art, including works
by "the heroes of [his] youth," such as "Cezanne, Van Gogh, and
the many others who were the symbol of the defiant and heroic
artist in a world of Philistines,"5 which is how he liked to view
himself. It should be kept in mind that at that time-the early 20s-
"modern" art was unavailable in New York, and would essentially
remain so until the opening of the Museum of Modem Art in 1929.
At the Louvre, Gottlieb also saw Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, "whom
[he] admired so much that they impressed [him his] whole life,"6
and early Italian Renaissance altarpieces which would play a key
role in the spatial organization of the Pictographs.
4
While in Paris, Gottlieb may have visited the other museum
that had played a central role in the development of modernism:
the Trocadero, re-named the Musee de I'Homme in 1937. The
museum was created by the decree of King Louis Philippe in the
mid-nineteenth century as a repository for the ethnographic
specimens from France's colonies, particularly in Africa.7 Since
the early part of the twentieth century the Trocadero had been a
source of inspiration for the Parisian avant-garde:
The cubists were the first of the artistic community in Paris in
the 1910s, followed by the Surrealists in the 1920s, to
recognize that these exotic objects were indeed a form of
art. The artists 'discovered' the dead objects in the museum
and, like Pygmalion, transformed them into what they gave
the name 'art negro,' a term which encompassed objects
from Oceania as well as Africa.8
"Art negre," or "primitive" art, was actively collected by Picasso and
the Surrealists during the time that Gottlieb was in Paris. Its
presence in artists' collections was already being reflected in
works ranging from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avianon (1907) to
Max Ernsts Elephant of the Celebes (1921). Although Gottlieb did
not speak French and his contact with individual artists was
limited, he had to be aware of what was happening artistically
through visits to contemporary art galleries.
In 1922, Gottlieb left Paris and traveled briefly through
Europe, visiting Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich before
returning to New York. MacNaughton says a he spent most of his
time, as he had in Paris, in museums and galleries, looking at
works by the old masters and German Expressionists."9 In
addition to the great artists of European tradition, there were also
ethnographic museums scattered throughout the central European
cities. Indeed the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Berlin had a
collection of American Indian art that numbered some 30,000
pieces, most of which were on display.1 0
Although Gottlieb’s art at that time did not assimilate what
he had seen--it was still largely figural in the tradition of his
teachers Henri and Sloan-his belief in the importance of the
educational role of the museum is central to his development as
an artist. He, with the exception of Hans Hofmann and Willem de
Kooning, "was the only Abstract Expressionist to acquire a direct
knowledge of modern art in Europe at such a formative stage in
his career."1 1 He continued throughout his life to visit museums on
a regular basis, and the impact of exhibitions on his work will be
seen to be strong.
On his return to New York, Gottlieb re-enrolled at the Art
Students League and re-entered John Sloan's painting class. At
the League, he met two people who would have a major influence
6
on his development as an artist: John Graham and Barnett
Newman.
John Graham was a Russian emigre who had come to New
York via Paris in the early 1920s.1 2 In Paris, he had cultivated
friendships with Picasso, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and other
Surrealists, through them developing a taste for and expertise in
primitive art. In 1937 Graham published his book, System and
Dialectics of Art.1 3 and an article drawn from it, "Primitive Art and
Picasso."1 4
These two works were to have an enormous impact on the
New York art world in general and the Abstract Expressionists in
particular, via the advocacy of tribal art as a source of genuine
expression and the championship of the theories of Carl Jung-
particularly his notions regarding archetypes and the collective
unconscious. Graham also collected tribal art, both for himself and
on behalf of Frank Crowninshield. Gail Levin says, "by the late
twenties, Graham had already assembled a collection of African
sculpture, which he enthusiastically showed to artist friends who
visited his New York home. .. ."1 5 Graham’s involvement with
primitive art preceded the ground-breaking exhibitions in New
York in the 1930s and 40s, and paved the way for the artistic
innovations of The New York School.
7
As Annalee Newman, the artist's wife, explains, "Barnett
met Adolph when he was seventeen, in 1922. Adolph considered
himself an artist, wheras [sic] Barnett was still a young kid."1 6
Nonetheless, the two became close friends and, as John O'Neill
explains, "among their common interests was primitive art, which
they could view at close range in the treasure-laden apartment of
their friend, the artist and dealer John Graham."1 7 Newman also
became knowledgeable on the topic of primitive art, curating
exhibitions and writing frequently on the subject in the 1940s.1 6
In 1929 Gottlieb's work was accepted as part of a group
show at the Opportunity Gallery on 56th Street. MacNaughion
says, "at the opening of this show . . . Gottlieb met Milton Avery.
About the same time he became a friend of Mark Rothko, who had
also recently met Avery.'1 9 The three started to work together on a
regular basis, frequently spending summers together with their
families. Jill Snyder, in her recent exhibition catalogue, described
Avery's influence thus:
The progressive appeal encoded in Avery's confluence of
native and European pictorial conventions, together with his
quiet authority, independent spirit, and mature style,
attracted a younger group of painters searching for new
ground. Already middle-aged by the early 1930s, Avery
became the eminence grise of the American
expressionists.20
8
Gottlieb remained under the influence of Avery throughout the
early to mid-1930s, as did Rothko (see, for example, Rothko's
Subway paintings). It was not until Gottlieb and his wife moved to
Tucson, Arizona, in 1937 that Gottlieb felt sufficiently removed from
Avery to risk experimenting on his own. His work of this time,
small still lifes reflecting the desert palette such as Box and Sea
Objects, presages the Pictographs in their compartmentalization
but does not yet contain the symbolic content that the later work
assumes. As Gottlieb himself put it, TBox and Sea Obiectsl led to
the idea of the pictographs where instead of having a realistic
representation of an object in a box, I had more of a symbolic
representation."2 1
While in Tucson, Gottlieb also had the opportunity to visit
the State Museum of Arizona, with its vast collection of Southwest
American Indian Art. As a former pupil of John Sloan's, he would
already have formed a solid appreciation of the arts of native
America. Gail Levin points out that Sloan had "an interest in the
American Indian as subject matter for his painting," which he later
expanded on in "organizing] the great Exposition of Indian Tribal
Arts held at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York in 1931*32,
which treated the objects as art rather than as ethnographic
artifacts."22
9
The Gottliebs returned to New York in 1938, having felt
culturally isolated in the southwestern desert. It was on his return
to New York that Adolph Gottlieb's development as an artist took
its own unique turn.
1 Unless otherwise indicated, all biographical data is drawn from Mary Davis
MacNaughton, "Adolph Gottlieb: His Life and Art," Part 1, Adolph Gottlieb: A
Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: The Arts Publisher with the Adolph and
Esther Gottlieb Foundation): 11-28. Hereafter "MacNaughton."
2 Quoted in MacNaughton, 12.
3 Ibid., 12-13.
4 "A Conversation Between Adolph Gottlieb and Jack Breckenridge," Phoebus
2: A Journal of Art History (1979): 90.
5 Ibid.. 96.
6 ibid.. 90.
7 Jean Guiart, "The Musee de I'Homme, the Arts, and Africa," African
Masterpieces from the Musee de I'Homme. exh. cat. (New York: The Center for
African Art with Harry W Abrams, 1985): 13.
8 ibid., 13.
9 MacNaughton, 12.
10 Gail Levin, "American Art," "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern, exh. cat. William Rubin, ed. (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1984): 457. Hereafter "in Rubin."
11 MacNaughton, 12.
12 Karen Wilkin, in her essay "Adolph Gottlieb: The Pictographs," Art
International 2 1/6 (Dec. 77): 28, says Graham was in New York by 1919. Gail
Levin gives a date of November 1920 [in Rubin, 466]. He was certainly in New
10
York by the time Gottlieb returned from Paris, but it is doubtful that Gottlieb knew
him beforehand as he does not mention it in any of his statements.
13 New York: Delphic Studios. Gottlieb owned an inscribed copy reading 'To
Esther and Adolphe (sic], Graham."
14 Magazine of Art 30/4 (Apr. 1937): 236-239+.
15 in Rubin, 466-67.
16 Quoted in MacNaughton, 26 n.14.
17 Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1990): 58.
18 See Pre-Colombian Stone Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: Wakefield Gallery,
1944) and Northwest Coast Indian Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Betty Parsons
Gallery. 1946). Newman also collected pre-Colombian art, and loaned two pieces
(both Guerrero figures) to the Wakefield exhibition.
19 MacNaughton. 14.
20 “Going Native: Milton Avery and American Expressionism in the 1930s,"
Against the Stream: Milton Avery. Adotoh Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko in the 1930s
(Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 1994): 10.
21 Quoted in Jeanne Siegel, "Adolph Gottlieb: Two Views," Arts 42 (Feb. 1968);
30.
22 in Rubin, 466.
1 1
II. ABSORPTION AND FORMATION
Before the move to Arizona in 1937, Gottlieb was working
regularly with Milton Avery and Mark Rothko and saw much of his
friends John Graham and Barnett Newman. Both Dore Ashton
and Mary Davis MacNaughton speak of frequent visits by the three
to various museums around New York City to view both modern
and primitive art.1 (See Appendix A.) Sanford Hirsch states:
Throughout the 1930s, Gottlieb and other artists in New
York witnessed an incredible variety of exhibitions at
galleries and museums... . New York offered a great
diversity of art from many sources, in various contexts,
resulting in much speculation about the many roles which
are served by works of art. Gottlieb found merit in all of
this.2
Hirsch continues, "The art Gottlieb saw in those years confirmed
some basic beliefs about the universality of visual images and a
role for art in contemporary society."3 It also was responsible in
large part for the direction his art and other interests would take in
the coming decade.
Prior to the opening of the Museum of Modem Art in 1929,
the availability of modern art to the New York public was limited.
The 1926 Societe Anonyme exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum,
organized by Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp, was the first
major exhibition of contemporary European art since the 1913
Armory Show. A.E. Gallatin opened his Gallery (later Museum) of
Living Art at New York University in 1927, and it rapidly became
the primary source for New York artists to view contemporary art
from Europe. Gallatin's collection included Picasso, Leger,
Mondrian and others, as well as "a traditional wall painting by
John Wallace, a Northwest Coast Indian from the Haida tribe.
Gallatin's interest in this work called attention to Northwest Coast
Indian art and placed it within the context of modem art."4 Located
in Greenwich Village, which was home to many artists, the Gallatin
Collection exerted tremendous influence on the development of
art in New York. Peter Busa recalls, *[A] place we frequented was
the Museum of Living Art at N.Y.U., the Gallatin Collection. We
haunted it like it was our own personal Village museum."5
Certainly Gottlieb as an inveterate gallery visitor and
neighborhood resident6 would have known the Picassos and
Mondrians, and indeed borrowed Mondrian's grid structure for the
Pictographs-which also reflect the open "gridwork" of traditional
Northwest Coast art.
In 1936, the Museum of Modem Art held two pivotal shows:
Fantastic Art. Dada and Surrealism, and Cubism and Abstract Art.
13
These two shows brought to New York the latest currents in
European art. Cubism and Abstract Art also included a large
number of pieces of African sculpture, again in the context of
influencing modern art. It was exhibited together with the New
York premiere of Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Aviqnon (1907). The
African pieces shown came from the collections of Helena
Rubinstein and Frank Crowninshield, both of which had been
compiled by John Graham.7 Both the Cubists and the Surrealists
were great collectors of tribal art, which was reflected in the work
of the two groups.
The previous year, 1935, the Museum of Modern Art had
staged its African Negro Sculpture show. In his article for the
MOMA Bulletin, catalogue author Charles Ratton wrote, "America
does not seem to have shared at least up to recent years Europe's
enthusiasm for African Negro art.... [To rectify this situation,] the
Museum has assembled into a single exhibition most of the finest
African sculpture scattered among the museums and private
collections of Europe."6 The exhibition included over 450 objects
from all over the continent, many lent by artist-collectors including
Henri Matisse, Jacques Lipschitz, Andre Derain and poet Tristan
Tzara. Attendance averaged 1,000 per day, which reflected a six
percent increase over usual attendance figures, with the Museum
14
making special outreach to "the Negroes of New York."9 A lecture
by Franz Boas, author of the seminal work Primitive Art1 0 (in which
he put forth the notion that the art of primitive tribes was created for
aesthetic reasons-among others--and could and should be
enjoyed as such), was offered to museum visitors on 17 April.
This exhibition marked a departure in the usual
presentation of African works. No longer were they mere
ethnographic curiosities, suitable for exhibition only in
anthropology museums, but now accorded the status of "art."
Ratton continues, "No one had ever remarked that these pieces
were beautiful.. . . For us Negro art is no longer a primitive or
savage art nor does our interest in it rest any longer upon passing
esthetic fashions."1 1 MacNaughton says, "Gottlieb was impressed
by the exhibition,"1 2 as indeed he must have been for he went to
Paris with his wife later that year and commenced buying for his
own collection.
In a 1967 interview with Dorothy Seckler, Gottlieb recalled
that trip:
In 1935 my wife and I took a trip to Europe and spent a lot of
time in Paris. I had some connections there [through
Graham] with people who handled primitive art. So I
bought a bit, I bought a few pieces. I didn't have much
money or I would have bought a great deal. However I had
been interested in African art long before that because the
interest was aroused by the interest the Cubists had in
15
African art and also there were very famous collections that
you could see in New York. A friend of mine, John Graham,
had a marvellous collection.1 3
Gottlieb purchased his first five pieces of African sculpture from
dealers recommended by Graham in Paris in 1935 (see Appendix
B). He also told Seckler the he "read whatever I could about it so
that I became quite familiar with it."
The African Negro Sculpture show was not the first time that
the Museum of Modem Art had presented the art of indigenous
peoples. Their American Sources of Modem Art exhibition,
mounted in 1933, broke the ground. In his catalogue essay for
that show, Holger Cahill writes:
The purpose of this exhibition has been to bring together
exhibitions of this art which are to be found in collections in
the United States, to show its relation to the work of modem
artists.. . . [I]ts influence is present in modern art in the work
of painters and sculptors some of whom have been
unconscious of it its influence, while others have accepted it
or sought it quite consciously.1 4
At this stage of his career, Gottlieb would have fallen into the
former category; it was not until the next decade that the influences
surrounding him in the 1930s began to assert themselves in his
work. One example of an artist who "sought it quite consciously" is
16
Diego Rivera, who had been the subject of a retrospective at
MOMA the previous year.
However the American Sources show did speak to one
need of Gottlieb's at the time: how to present a "pure" American
art, untainted by European influence, without falling back on the
sentimentality and provincialism of American Scene painting and
Social Realism. The idea of an "American art" was prevalent at
the time; indeed, Marsden Hartley, an established painter
(although ironically he spent the better part of his career in
Europe) said," a National esthetic consciousness is a sadly
needed element in American life. We are not nearly so original as
we fool ourselves in thinking. . . . We have the encouragement of
redman [sic] esthetics to establish ourselves firmly with an esthetic
conscience of our own."1 5
American Sources followed on the success of the
Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts at Grand Central Art Galleries,
showing both historic and contemporary pieces. Organized by
John Sloan in November, 1931, this show too aimed to "present
Indian art as ad; and to win for it the appreciation that it so richly
deserves."16 As a student of Sloan's in the 1920s, it is quite likely
that Gottlieb would have been infected with this view and would
have seen the show.
17
In 1937 the Museum of Modern Art presented Pre-Historic
Rock Paintings in Europe and Africa. Based on the work of
internationally-known anthropologist Dr. Leo Frobenius, this
exhibition brought life-size facsimiles in the form of photographs
and drawings of cave paintings and rock art from the two
continents--works colloquially known as "pictographs." As with the
African Negro Sculpture show, various events were planned by
the Museum around this exhibition, including a talk by Dr.
Frobenius on 29 April, which Gottlieb may well have attended. It
was Frobenius's hope that this exhibition would renew what he
called the "Lebensgefuhl," or feeling for life, in those who saw it: "it
is my hope that the enormous perspective of human growth and
existence which has been opened to us by these pictures and by
the researchs of the modem prehislorian may serve to contribute
in some small measure to its development."1 7
The similarity of this view to Carl Jung's theories of
archetypes and the collective unconcsious is noteworthy. Jung's
"collective unconscious" is "made up essentially of archetypes." or
"definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and
everywhere."1 8 Jung continues, "this collective unconscious does
not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent
forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious
18
secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic
contents,"1 9 ie. as reflected in works of art. Partly through the
influence of John Graham, Jung's views became widespread and
admired among artists in the 1930s. In Graham's article, "Primitive
Art and Picasso," published in 1937; he espouses Jung and the
relationship of primitive art to the racial memory of humanity, the
collective unconscious:
The art of primitive races has a highly evocative quality
which allows it to bring to our consciousness the clarities of
the unconscious mind, stored with all the individual and
collective wisdom of past generations and forms. In other
words, an evocative art is the means and the result of
getting in touch with the power of our unconscious.20
In Graham's System and Dialectics of Art. published
simultaneously, he further explains, "Our unconscious mind
contains the record of all our past experiences-individual and
racial. .. . The unconscious mind is the powerhouse, the creative
agent.. . . Art offers an almost unlimited access to one's
unconscious."2 1 Gottlieb had an inscribed copy of the book in his
personal library, and he "was [also] interested in reading Jung at
the time and the idea [of the collective unconscious] interested
me."22 It also interested the Surrealists, as evidenced in the
Fantastic Art. Dada and Surrealism show at MOMA in 1936, and in
the various copies of Cahiers d'Art floating around New York at the
time.
The closing of the decade in 1939, with Gottlieb back in
New York following his Arizona sojourn, brought several important
events to the New York art world. The Museum of Non-Objective
Art opened under the auspices of Baroness Hilla Rebay and
Solomon R. Guggenheim, bringing a wide variety of abstract
expression to the city, particulary the works of Kandinsky and
twentieth-century German masters.23 The New York World's Fair
was held in Flushing, Queens, and included two pavillions
dedicated to art: "Masterpieces of Art," representing the "great
epochs of European art from the Middle Ages to 1800;" and the
Contemporary Arts Building featuring "Art of the United States
Today, the most representative and democratically selected
exhibition of the work of living American painters, sculptors, and
printmakers ever assembled.*24
Simultaneously, the Museum of Modern Art staged Art in
Our Time and Pablo Picasso. The American Museum of Natural
History presented Native Arts of Americas, Africa and Polynesia
and Ubiquitous Primitive Art. The Brooklyn Museum clocked in
with Masks: Barbaric and Civilzed and Old Arts of the Northern
20
Andes. Salvador Dali had a major one-person show at the Julien
Levy Gallery
In conjunction with the Picasso show at MOMA, the
Valentine Gallery arranged the first American viewing of Picasso’s
Guernica, organized by the American Artists' Congress of which
Gottlieb was a founding member.25 Guernica’s massive size and
multiplicity of sources, ranging from the contemporary horror of the
Spanish Civil War to tribal art, heralded a new decade for
Gottlieb's own art.
1 Ashton. The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Penguin
Books, 1963): 99, and MacNaughton, on. cit.. 13.
2 Title assay in Adoloh Gottlieb: The Pictooraphs 1942-61. exh cat (Los
Angeles: Manny Silverman Gallery. 1992): 6-7
3 Had. 8
4 Sandra Kraskin. title essay In The Indian Space Painters, op. cit.: 7
5 Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, by Sidney Simon. Minneapolis. 1966
Reprinted in Life Colors Art: Fifty Years ot Painting bv Peter Busa. exh. cat.
(Provincetown, Mass.: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 1992): 47-48
6 The Gottliebs lived at 14 Christopher Street. Greenwich Village, in the early
1930s. See ‘Chronology,'' Against the Stream, oo cit.: 58
7 See Cubism and Abstract Art. exh. cat (New York Museum ot Modem Art.
1936 Rep. 1974).
0 Museum of Modem Art Bulletin 2/6-7 (Mar -Apr 1935): n p Hereafter "Ration *
9 Ibid. MOMA attendance for fiscal year 1935 (October 1934-September 1935)
was 187,487 This figure includes the approximately 65,000 who saw Alncan
Negro Art. The author thanks Leslie Heitzman, Archives Technician al the
Museum of Modern Art, for her help in compiling this information.
10 Originally published in New York in 1927. Reprinted Dover. 1955. This book
was in Gottlieb's library and was widely read by many artists, including those
associated with the Indian Space movement.
1 1 Ration, n.p.
12 p.20.
13 Interview 25 Oct. 1967. Unpaginated copy of original in the Archives of the
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
14 Title essay, American Sources of Modern Art. exh. cat. (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1933. Reprinted with Arno Press, 1969): 5. Hereafter
"Cahill."
15 Quoted in Gail Levin, in Rubin, op. cit.. 461.
16 Grand Central Art Galleries, Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts. Prospectus, n.p.
17 Quoted in Douglas C. Fox, "Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa,"
Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 4/5 (Apr. 1937): n.p.
19 "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious," The Portable Jung. James
Campbell, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976): 60.
1 9 Uai
20 Op. cit.. 237.
21 Op cit.. 19+.
22 Seckler. op. cit.. n.p.
23 The name of the museum was changed in 1952 to the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum to reflect its broader mission toward modern and
contemporary art, and to serve as a memorial to its founder. The author thanks
Luisa Gugliemotti in the Guggenheim's Office of Public Affairs for her assistance.
24 New York World’s Fair, Official Guidebook: The World of Tomorrow (New York:
n.p., 1939): 81, 89.
22
25 The author wishes to thank Charlotta Kotik for allowing me to review her
preliminary manuscript of her forthcoming essay on Gottlieb's Pictographs in an
exhibition catalogue to be published autumn 1994 by the Adolph and Esther
Gottlieb Foundation.
23
III. THE P1CT0GRAPHS AND RESOLUTION
In 1941 the United States entered World War II, which had
been raging in Europe for the previous two years. With the
outbreak of war, many artists fled to the relative safety of America--
among them several of the Surrealists (including Andre Breton,
Salvador Dali, Matta, and Andre Masson) and Piet Mondrian. The
presence of such internationally renowned artists in New York had
a catalytic effect on American art.
American artists, via the Museum of Modern Arts's 1936
show Fantastic Art. Dada and Surrealism and numerous
exhibitions (both group and one-person) at the Julien Levy
Gallery, were already knowledgeable about the major themes of
Surrealist theory and practice: automatism, biomorphism,
primitivism and myth. But the presence of these eminent artists in
the City made their practice that much more relevant. In regard to
the changes in his own work, Gottlieb said, "I think what happened
in the early forties after the War started was, first of all, a number of
Surrealists came to this country and we were able to see them in
the flesh, and see that they were just ordinary people as we are.”
"Surrealism" became a viable method practiced by real people,
24
and not just a strange, European dogma transmitted via the
magazine Cahiers d'Art.
As Gottlieb was Jewish, the terror of the Nazis must have
had a particular poignancy for him. As MacNaughton says,
It is not surprising that during this time of escalating World
War, Gottlieb was drawn to the irrationality of the Surrealist
dream world. As the German Wehrmacht swept across
Europe spreading violence and death, Surrealism’s dark
view of man's psyche made more sense than Avery's
serene outlook on the world.1
The Surrealists were also firm believers in the power of primitive
art, and by extension the primal beliefs of mankind-myth. The
myths of ancient Greece and Rome as a subject matter offered a
return to a historic past, while simultaneously explaining the
present. Similarly, the arts of indigenous peoples offered a formal
and spiritual solution to the need for new forms of expression to
meet the new circumstances presented by the upheaval of the
War.
In addition to the physical presence of the Surrealists, two
periodicals were available in New York in the early 1940s
produced by Surrealist exiles: Dyn. published by Wolfgang
Paalen, and VVV edited by David Hare with input from Breton. In
1943 Dvn ran a "Special Amerindian Number," including a
25
lengthy, well illustrated article on "Totem Art" by Paalen himself in
which he refers to the "pan-human importance" of this
“ autochthonous and fascinating art."2 This issue covered
extensivley the arts of the Northwest Coast tribes and the
indigenous arts of Central and South America. VVV. which was
published from 1942 to 1944, featured numerous articles on the
arts of indigenous peoples, with contributions by Claude Levi-
Strauss (also in New York at the time),3 Kurt Seligmann, and
Alfred Metraux. It also included illustrations by artists such as Max
Ernst, Matta and again Seligmann, as well as advertisements for
New York galleries and reviews of worthy shows.
These publications furthered the concerns of the Surrealists
and made their program easily available to New Yorkers. Gottlieb
and his contemporaries shared an active interest in Surrealism.
Several of his contemporaries, including William Baziotes, Arshile
Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, met with Matta in
the early 40s to experiment with automatism. Gottlieb at this point
was already working in an automatist manner, and as he had by
this time moved to Brooklyn he was not part of this group.4
For some time-since returning to New York in 1938--
Gottlieb had been working essentially on his own, in Brooklyn. He
was, however, collaborating with both Rothko and Newman and it
26
was with the support of these two artists that he made the
breakthrough he was looking for in his own art.
It was in a combination of Surrealism, Cubism, primitive art
and myth that Gottlieb found the artistic solutions he sought. He
said, “ the whole problem seemed to be how to get out of these
traps-Picasso, Surrealism-and how to stay clear of American
provincialism, regionalism and Social Realism."5 The answer
came with the advent of the Pictographs6, the first --Eyes of
Oedipus-- painted in 1941. Gottlieb said,
Around 1942 [Rothko and I] embarked on a series of
paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter,
preferably from Greek mythology.. . . It seemed that if one
wanted to get away from such things as the American scene
or social realism-perhaps Cubism, this offered a possibility
of a way out, and the hope was that given a subject matter
that was different, perhaps some new approach to painting
. . . might also develop.7
Gottlieb himself gave this "new approach to painting" the title
"Pictograph." He told Martin Friedman, "Yes, I gave it to them. I
gave them the term because I felt that if I didn't, somebody else
would call it something else that I didn't want it to be called so I just
used the term, and apparently, it was more or less picked up and
eventually everyone referred to it that way."8 The series relied on
Surrealist method-automatism-combined with the spiritual power
27
Gottlieb derived from viewing works of primitive art, and a return to
an archaic subject matter: myth.
Formally, Gottlieb needed a structure in which to place the
images called up from his unconscious (the symbols), and he
turned to the grid. His sources for the grid were as contemporary
as the work of Piet Mondrian, on view in the Gallatin collection
since the late 1920s,9 and and as historically remote as trecento
Sienese predella painting. Gottlieb told Dorothy Seckler, "nobody
ever mentions Mondrian, no one ever thinks of early Italian
painters,"1 0 in relation to his work. He explains the grid thus:
I'll tell you how the idea of compartmentalization occured to
me. I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting
down these subjective images and I had always admired,
particularly admired the early Italian painters who preceded
the Renaissance.. . . [In their altarpieces], the story would
be told chronologically, like a comic strip technique. And it
seemed to me that this was a very rational method of
conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not
interested in . . . chronological sequence. What I wanted to
do was . . . to present what material I was interested in
simultaneously, so that you would get an instantaneous
impact from it.... You were supposed to see the thing
simultaneously.1 1
This sense of simultaneity is central to the Pictographs. All are
arranged non-hierarchicalty in an all-over composition with
multiple focal points. As Gottlieb later stated, "during the forties
28
most of us in New York were doing all-over painting. There was
something in the air. . . it was all-over, there was no beginning and
no end.12 Gottlieb's experiments with the method pre-dated those
of Jackson Pollock by several years.
Gottlieb's images with which he filled his grids were
uniquely personal and recalled from the depths of his psyche: "I
was putting images into the compartments of my paintings as if I
were doing automatic writing. And so I let these images and
associations crop just up freely as they occured to me-with very
little editing."1 3 But, as he told Dorothy Seckler,
It wasn't just picture writing. I considered myself a painter. I
was involved in the painting's ideas and making the thing
truly painterly.. . . If I made a wriggly line or a serpentine
line it was because I wanted a serpentine line. Afterwards it
would suggest a snake but when I made it it did not suggest
anything. It was purely shape . . . no composition in
conventional terms . . . no focal point.1 4
Gottlieb told Gladys Kashdin, "I wanted [the meaning of my
symbols] to be ambiguous because nobody seemed to be sure
about anything anyway."1 5 Thus his images varied throughout the
pictographs, but he did keep a "roster" of those which he used
frequently: the eye, the hand, organic shapes resembling birds
and fish, the letter "T," which reflected in large part the works with
which he surrounded himself and which he saw in exhibitions
29
throughout the 30s and 40s. Irving Sandler called him "the
symbolist of the first generation of the New York School."1 6
During the 1940s Gottlieb continued to produce
Pictographs, and he continued to visit museums and to feed on
what was happening around him. As Stephen Polcari wrote, the
Abstract Expressionists in general "searched for the root causes of
contemporary events [ie. World War II] in the early history of
mankind, in psychologies of the archetypal and universal, and in
images of the natural history and evolution of life."1 7
The "natural history and evolution of life" were frequent
topics of exhibitions in New York in the early 1940s. The Museum
of Modern Art again led the way, with their 1941 exhibition Indian
Art of the United States which gave Gottlieb a chance to view a
wide range of native American objects. In a review of this show in
Time magazine, the reviewer likened the Chilkat blankets to
Gottlieb's own Pictographs. Gottlieb was sufficiently taken with
this compliment to purchase his own Chilkat blanket in 1942.1 0
t
Two exhibitions that reflected America's new political
interest in the Pacific were the Museum of Modem Art’s Art of
Australia in 1941, and Art of the South Seas in 1946. These two
shows again presented familiar items in an unfamilar setting. The
American Museum of Natural History, an anthropology museum,
30
had a large collection of Oceanic art, but by removal to an art
museum, the works assumed an new aesthetic. It was after
viewing these two exhibitions that Gottlieb added works from the
region to his own collection.
"Primitivism'1 as such offered Gottlieb and other artists a
connection to a presumed simpler time, but one also well
acquainted with violence and upheaval. As Gottlieb said in a
radio interview in 1943 with Mark Rothko
If we profess a kinship to the art of primitve men, it is
because the feelings they expressed have a particular
pertinence today. In times of violence, personal
predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant.
All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of
powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear,
a recognition and acceptance of the natural world as well
as the eternal insecurity of life.
That these feelings are being experienced by many
people thruout Isic) the world today is an unfortunate fact,
and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings,
is superficial or meaningless. That is why we insist on
subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these
feelings and permits them to be expressed.1 9
Clearly, Gottlieb had absorbed John Graham's lessons well. The
early Pictographs, those produced before the end of the War,
show a reliance on the grid structure and multiple borrowings from
Gottlieb's own collection of tribal art. For example, as
MacNaughton points out in Hands of Oedipus (1943) and
31
Pictograph #4 (also 1943, and one of the few numbered works20),
"the profile at the lower left [of both works] recalls Nayarit
pottery,"2 1 which Gottlieb had seen at MOMA's American Sources
show in 1933, and which he had begun to collect in the early 40s.
Pictograoh (1942) recalls the Chilkat blanket he had recently
purchased, with its banded eyes and even patterning of positive
and negative space. The stacked structure also evokes the totem
poles of the Northwest Coast, such as those at The Brooklyn
Museum which Gottlieb was known to frequent.
At this time, Gottlieb was exhibiting at the Wakefield Gallery
run by Betty Parsons in the back of a bookstore. His close friend
Barnett Newman, who had met Parsons at the Gottlieb's in 1 9 4 3 ,2 2
wrote the catalogue for his 1944 exhibition of drawings. In the
same year, Newman curated a show of pre-Colombian sculpture
at Wakefield, to which Graham contributed six pieces and
Newman himself two. In 1946 Newman curated the inaugural
show of the new Betty Parsons Gallery, Northwest Coast Indian
Painting, and wrote in the catalogue:
To understand modern art, one must have an appreciation
of the primitive arts, for just as modem art stands as an
island of revolt in the stream of western European
aesthetics, the many primitive art traditions stand apart as
authentic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of
European history.23
32
Newman's interest in Northwest Coast Indian art was
shared not only by Gottlieb,24 but also by a group of painters
working contemporaneously with Gottlieb in New York known as
the Indian Space painters. This group included, most prominently,
Peter Busa and Steve Wheeler. For them, Sandra Kraskin says,
"the tribal art of the Northwest Coast became their major focus.
The flattening of the picture plane, fusing positive and negative
space, along with the use of symbol, myth, and the process of
metamorphosis, became the visual signature of the artists."25 This
process was not unlike Gottlieb's, and inded he and Wheeler were
friends who worked together on occasion.26
The Indian Space painters also published their own artist-
run periodical, Iconoaraph magazine (later The New Iconographf.
"that would use Native American art as a springboard for
contemporary art." As with the periodicals produced by the exiled
Surrealists earlier in the decade, Iconograph included articles by a
variety of artists and writers (among them Oscar Collier and Henry
Miller), as well as reviews of shows and advertisements for
galleries such as Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim's Art of
this Century. The final issue, published in Fall 1947, was devoted
to the work of Mark Rothko.27
33
Although Gottlieb was never an Indian Space painter, he
did use some applications as noted above. His late Pictographs,
get more "pictographic," recalling more strongly the American
Indian pictographic rock paintings that he had seen in Arizona in
the late 30s, in works such as Letter to a Friend {1948) and
Pictoaraph (1950).
In the early 1950s, the grid had broken down entirely and
Gottlieb had moved on to the next stage of his career, the
Imaginary Landscapes and Bursts.
1 Op. cit.. 24.
2 Dyn 4-5 (December 1943): 7.
3 See Levi-Strauss's "New York in 1941," Chapter 21 in The View from Afar,
trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, (New York: Basic Books, 1985),
for a beautiful piece of nostalgia.
4 MacNaughton, 30.
5 1972 interview with Dore Ashton, quoted in MacNaughton, 29.
6 "Pictograph: A pictorial symbol or sign; a writing or record consisting of pictorial
symbols.T h e Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed.
7 Interview with David Sylvester, 1963. Quoted in Maurice Berger, "Pictograph
into Burst: Adolph Gottlieb and the Structure of Myth," Arts (Mar. 19B1): 135.
8 Interview with Martin Friedman, Aug. 1962. Unpaginated copy of original in the
Archives of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
9 Mondrian himself was in New York, from early 1940 until his death on 1
February, 1941. His presence in the city was heralded by a great deal of publicity,
which alerted New York artists that he was there; consequently they began to
look at his work anew.
10 Seckler, n.p.
34
1 Ibkt
12 Breckenridge, 88.
13 Interview 28 Apr. 1965 with Gladys Kashdin. Unpaginaged copy of original in
the Archives of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
14 Seckler, n.p.
15 Unpaginated.
16 "Adolph Gottlieb," Art International 21/3 (May-June 1977): 38.
17 "Adolph Gottlieb's Allegorical Epic of World War II," Art Journal 47 (Fall 1988):
203.
10 Telephone interview by the author with Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of
the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 12 July 1994.
19 "The Portrait and the Modem Artist," typescript of a broadcast on "Art in New
York," Radio WNYC, 13 Oct. 1943. Reprinted in MacNaughton, 170-71.
20 Sanford Hirsch tells us,"in response to an interviewer's question about why
Gottlieb didn't number his paintings, instead of titling them, Gottlieb's response
was Prisoners have numbers'." Manny Silverman catalogue, 13, n.4.
21 p.39.
22 John P. O'Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990): 61,
23 New York: Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946, n.p.
24 See letter from Barnett Newman to Gottlieb, dated "summer" [either 1943 or
1944] regarding the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass. Newman discusses their
holdings in primitive art. pointing out that a few of their pieces are "not as good as
yours but interesting." Reproduced in O'Neill, 59-60.
25 Kraskin. op. cit.. 15.
26 Telephone interview by the author with Gary Snyder of Snyder Fine Art,
Wheeler's gallery, 2 May 1994.
35
27 See Iconograoh 1-4 (Spring 1946-Winter 1946) and The New Iconoqraph 1
(Fall 1947).
36
IV. CONCLUSION
The Pictographs as a whole were a result of Gottlieb's
absorbtion of the artistic climate in New York, via exhibitions,
publications, conversations etc. He used his unconscious, via
automatism, to recall the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art
with all their tribal objects, to recall his own collection of
indigenous art, to recall the lessons first learned in Paris as a
student in the 1920s when he encountered the early Renaissance
painters of Italy.
Clearly, Gottlieb's relationship with John Graham was of
paramount importance to his development as an artist, a collector,
and an author. In the 7 June 1943 letter to the New York Times,
scripted with Mark Rothko, Gottlieb co-authored a document that
would become one of the seminal documents of Abstract
Expressionism. Written in reponse to a negative review by the
Times art editor Edward Alden Jewell of two paintings in
particular--Gottlieb's The Rape of Persephone (1943) and
Rothko's The Syrian Bull (also 1943)-the two artists outline the
basic themes in their art:
37
The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an 'explanation1 of
the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within
the frames of these pictures have significance.
We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs,
some of which we, therefore, list:
1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which
can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently
opposed to common sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the
world our way--not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.
We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the
unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are
for flat forms, because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does
not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. We
assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter
is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess
spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.1
The first four points are Gottlieb's, the last Rothko's. Barnett
Newman edited the letter and added an introduction,2 however the
spirit of John Graham is everywhere apparent. Although this letter
was never intended as any sort of group manifesto, it did have
resonance for other members of the New York School. Point 4
virtually describes the work of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock
toward the end of the 40s. And with their insistence on content,
38
Gottlieb and Rothko broke away from the decorative painting of the
American Scene and set the standard for American painting to
follow,
Adolph Gottlieb absorbed the cultural atmosphere around
him to produce a compelling series of works that has stood the test
of time. Lawrence Alloway wrote,
I visited a warehouse with Gottlieb once and saw the artist
standing knee-deep in Pictographs, like the Colossus of
Rhodes astride the harbor, and realized that the
Pictographs represented a storehouse of culture. He was
demonstrating that the world was accessible to the
American artist of the forties.3
His was a truly pluralistic body of work, revealing wide-ranging
cultural interests not limited to the western European tradition, and
thus wholly relevant for the 1990s. Sanford Hirsch writes "the
issues Gottlieb explored are a part of the groundwork for the
serious American painting to follow. The importance of the viewer
as participant, of art as experiential, and the work of art as an
object rather than depiction are vital to Abstract Expressionism."4
And vital, too, to the art of today. That is Adolph Gottlieb's legacy.
1 Letter reprinted in MacNaughton, 169.
2 Bonnie Clearwater, ‘Shared Myths: Reconsideration of Rothko's and Gottlieb's
Letter to The New York Times." Archives of American Art Journal 24/1 (1984): 25.
39
As a sign of their gratitude for his assistance, the artists gave him the paintings in
question.
3 'Adolph Gottlieb and Abstract Painting," in MacNaughton, 55.
4 Manny Silverman catalogue, 13.
40
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Ashton, Dore. The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New
York: Penguin Books, 1983.
Boas, Franz. Primitive Art. 1927. New York: Dover, 1955.
Campbell, Joseph, ed. The Portable Jung. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.
New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Centurv
Ethnography. Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1988.
Goldwater, Robert. Primitivism in Modern Art. 1938. Revised and
enlarged. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.
Graham, John D. System and Dialectics of Art. New York: Delphic
Studios, 1937.
Johnson, Ellen H., ed. American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980.
New York: Icon Editions, Harper and Row, 1982.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. "New York in 1941.“ The View From Afar.
Trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss. New York:
Basic Books, 1985. 260-67.
O'Neill, John P -., ed. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and
Interviews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
Price, Sally. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1989.
Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of
Abstract Expressionism. New York: Icon Editions, Harper
and Row, 1970.
41
Vaillant, George C. Masterpieces of Primitive Sculpture. Guide
Leaflet Series of the American Museum of Natural History,
no.99. New York: The Museum, 1939. Reprinted from
Natural History 43/5 (May 1939): 2-11.
Wissler, Clark. Masks. Guide Leaflet Series of the American
Museum of Natural History, no.96. New York: The Museum,
1938. Reprinted from Natural History 28/4 (1928): 339-52.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective. Intro. Sanford Hirsch. Essays
Mary Davis MacNaughton and Lawrence Alloway. New
York: The Arts Publisher, with the Adolph and Esther
Gottlieb Foundation, 1981.
Andre Emmerich Gallery. Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1945-1974.
Essay Irving Sandler. New York: The Gallery, 1977.
Betty Parson Gallery. Northwest Coast Indian Painting. Essay
Bfamett] B. Newman. New York: The Gallery, 1946.
The Brooklyn Museum. African Negro Art from the Collection of
Frank Crowninshield. Brooklyn, NY: The Museum, 1937.
—. Image and Reflection: Adolph Gottlieb's Pictographs and
African Sculpture. Essay Charlotta Kotik. Brooklyn, NY:
The Museum, 1989.
— . Masks: Barbaric and Civilized. Essay Herbert J. Spinden.
Brooklyn, NY: The Museum, 1939.
— . T o p of the World: Arctic Lands in Human History. Essay
Herbert J. Spinden. Brooklyn, NY: The Museum, 1944.
The Center for African Art. Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology
Collections. Intro. Susan Vogel. New York: The Center,
with Prestel Verlag, 1988.
42
-**. African Masterpieces from the Musee de I'Homme. Eds.
Susan Vogel and Francince N'Diaye. Essay Jean Guiart.
New York: The Center, with Harry N. Abrams, 1985.
Katonah Museum of Art. Against the Stream: Milton Averv. Adolph
Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko in the 1930s. Essays Jill Snyder,
Isabelle Dervaux, and David Anfam. Katonah, NY: The
Museum, 1994.
The Kootz Gallery. Adolph Gottlieb: New Paintings. New York:
The Gallery, 1947.
Manny Silverman Gallery. Adolph Gottlieb; The Pictographs.
1942-1951. Essay Sanford Hirsch. Los Angeles: The
Gallery, 1992.
Museum of Modern Art. American Sources of Modern Art. Essay
Holger Cahill. 1933. New York: The Museum, with Arno
Press, 1969.
—. Art of Australia. 1788-1941. Essays Marjorie Barnard and
Margaret Preston. New York: The Museum and Carnegie
Corporation, 1941.
—. Arts of the South Seas. Essays Ralph Linton and Paul S.
Wingert with Rene D'Harnoncourt. New York: The Museum,
with Simon and Schuster, 1946.
—. Cubism and Abstract Art. Essay Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 1936. New
York: The Museum, 1974.
— . "Primitivism" in 2Qth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modem. 2 vols. Ed. William Rubin. Essays Gail Levin,
Evan Maurer, Kirk Varnedoe. New York: The Museum,
1984.
New York World's Fair. Official Guidebook: The World of
Tomorrow. New York: n.p., 1939.
43
Pierre Matisse Gallery. Oceanic Art. Essays Frederick R.
Pleasants and Georges Henri Riviere. New York: The
Gallery, 1940.
Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Life Colors Art: Fifty
Years of Painting bv Peter Busa. Essay Sandra Kraskin.
Provincetown, Mass.: The Association, 1992.
Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College of the City University of
New York. The Indian Space Painters: Native American
Sources for American Abstract Art. Essays Sandra Kraskin,
Allen Wardwell, Barbara Hollister, and Ann Eden Gibson.
New York: The Gallery, 1991.
Wakefield Gallery. Pre-Colombian Stone Sculpture. Essay
B[arnett] B. Newman. New York: The Gallery, 1944.
PERIODICALS AND PERIODICAL ARTICLES
Artoress 189 fMar. 19941. Englished. 'Primitive Arts Today.’
Dyn 4-5 (Dec. 1943). ’Special Amerindian Number."
I conograph 1-4 (Spring 1946-Winter 1946).
The New Iconograph 1 (Fall 1947)
VVV 1-4 (June 1942-Feb. 1944)
Alloway, Lawrence. "Melpomene and Graffiti." Art International
12/4 (Apr. 1969): 21-24.
Berger, Maurice. "Pictograph into Burst: Adolph Gottlieb and the
Structure of Myth." Arts (Mar. 1981): 134-39.
Breckenridge, Jack. ’A Conversation Between Adolph Gottlieb
and Jack Breckenridge." Phoebus 2: A Journal of Art
Hi£tS2£¥ (1977): 88-96.
44
Brenson, Michael. Rev. of Image and Reflection: Adolph Gottlieb's
Pictographs and African Sculpture at The Brooklyn
Museum. New York Times 29 Dec. 1989: C22.
Campbell, Lawrence. "Native Abstractions." Art in America (Feb.
1992): 98-103.
Clearwater, Bonnie. "Shared Myths: Reconsideration of Rothko’s
and Gottlieb's Lettter to The New York Times." Archives of
American Art Journal 24/1 (1984): 23-25.
Dembart, Lee. "Adolph Gottlieb, Abstractionist, Dies." New York
Times 5 Mar. 1974: A36.
Dutton, Denis. "Tribal Art and Artifact." Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 51/1 (Winter 1993): 13-21.
Fox, Douglas C. "Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa."
Bulletin of the Museum of Modem Art 4/5 (Apr. 1937): n.p.
Gottlieb, Adolph. "Artist and Society: A Brief Case History."
College Art Journal 14/2 (Winter 1955): 96-101.
—. Statement, "The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on
Their Art and Contemporaneousness." The Tiger's Eye
no.2 (Dec. 1947): 43.
Graham, John D. "Primitive Art and Picasso." Magazine of Art
30/4 (Apr. 1937): 236-39+.
Haas, Richard. "When an Artist Hears the Call of Collecting." The
New York Times 29 Apr. 1994: C1+.
Newman, Barnett. Statement, "The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of
Ten Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness." The
Tiger's Eve no.2 (dec. 1947): 43.
Polcari, Stephen. "Adolph Gottlieb's Allegorical Epic of World War
II." Art Journal 47 (Fall 1988): 202-07.
45
Ratton, Charles. "African Negro Art." Bulletin of the Museum of
Modern Art 2/6-7 (Mar.-Apr. 1935): n.p.
Rubin, William. "Adolph Gottlieb." Art International 3/3-4 (1959):
35-37.
Sandler, Irving. "Adolph Gottlieb." Art International 21/3 (Mav-
June 1977): 35-38.
Siegel, Jeanne. "Adolph Gottlieb: Two Views." Arts 42 (Feb.
1968): 30-34.
Wilkin, Karen. "Adolph Gottlieb: The Pictographs." Art
International 21/6 (Dec. 1977): 27-33.
INTERVIEWS
Friedman, Martin. Interview with Adolph Gottlieb. Aug. 1962.
Unpaginated copy of original in the Archives of the Adolph
and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
Kashdin, Gladys. Interview with Adolph Gottfieb. 28 Apr. 1965.
Unpaginated copy of original in the Archives of the Adolph
and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
Neighbors, Martha. Telephone interview with Gary Snyder. 2 May
1994.
—. Telephone interview with Sanford Hirsch. 12 July 1994.
Seckler, Dorothy. Interview with Adolph Gottlieb. 25 Oct. 1967.
Unpaginated copy of original in the Archives of the Adolph
and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
EPHEMERA
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. "The Pictographs of
Adolph Gottlieb." Pressrelease. 1993.
46
The Brooklyn Museum. "Image and Reflection: Adolph Gottlieb's
Pictographs and African Sculpture." Pressrelease. 1989.
Graham, John D. Letter to Adolph Gottlieb. Feb. 1944. Adolph
Gottlieb papers. Archives of American Art of the
Smithsonian Institution. Reel no. N69-49.
Grand Center Art Galleries. "Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts."
Prospectus. Nov. 1931.
47
APPENDIX A
NEW YORK MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
Exhibitions available to Adolph Gottlieb
The following list represents a selection of important
exhibitions and museum openings as well as special exhibitions
of African, Oceanic and Native American arts in New York City
during the formative years of Adolph Gottlieb's career. It should be
kept in mind that in addition to this listing extensive holdings in the
permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History,
The Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian
were also available to the public.
1926 Societe Anonvme. The Brooklyn Museum.
1927 A.E. Gallatin opens his Gallery of Living Art at
New York University.
1929 The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) opens.
1930 Mexican Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met).
All-Brazilian Exhibition. Roerich Museum.1
1931 Henri Matisse. MOMA.
Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts. Grand Central Art
Galleries. Organized by John Sloan.
Australian Art. Roerich Museum.
48
1932
1933
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
American Folk Art. MOMA.
Diego Rivera. MOMA.
American Sources of Modern Art. MOMA.
American Indian Paintings. Roerich Museum.
African Negro Art. MOMA
Cubism and Abstract Art. MOMA
Fantastic Art. Dada and Surrealism. MOMA
Ethiopian Arts. The Brooklyn Museum (TBM)
Negro Arts of Barotseland. TBM
Primitive Sculptures. Pierre Matisse Gallery
American Folk Art. MOMA.
Prehistoric Rock Paintings in Europe and Africa.
MOMA.
African Negro Art in the Collection of Frank
Crowninshield. TBM. Co-organized by
John Graham.
Special Exhibition of American Indian Objects. TBM.
Child Art of the American Indian. TBM.
Museum of Non-Objective Painting opens.
The New York World's Fair.
Art in Our Time. MOMA.
Pablo Picasso. MOMA. Includes first New York
showing of the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Pablo Picasso. Valentine Gallery. Includes first
showing of Guernica. Organized by the Artists
Congress.
Native Arts of Americas. Africa and Polynesia.
American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
Ubiquitous Primitive Art. AMNH.
Masks: Barbaric and Civilized. TBM.
Old Arts of the Northern Andes. TBM.
Salvador Dali. Julien Levy Gallery.
49
1940 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, MOMA.
Santos and Kachinas. TBM.
African Sculpture. Pierre Matisse Gallery.
Oceanic Art. Pierre Matisse Gallery.
1941 Indian Art of the United States. MOMA.
Art of Australia. 1788-1941. MOMA
Paganism and Christianity in Egypt. TBM.
Peruvian Textiles. TBM.
1942 Joan Miro. MOMA.
Oceanic Art. TBM.
1944 Tod of the World: Arctic Lands in Human History.
TBM.
Pre-Colombian Stone Sculpture. Wakefield Gallery.
Curated by Barnett Newman.
1945 Paul Klee. MOMA.
The Navajo Indian and His Blanket. TBM.
The Negro Artist Comes of Aae. TBM.
War Weapons of the Pacific: Primitive Weapons and
Modem Warfare. TBM.
1946 Art of the South Seas. MOMA.
Northwest Coast Indian Painting. Betty Parsons
Gallery. Inaugural exhibition, curated by
Barnett Newman.
1948 What Cortez Saw in Mexico. TBM.
1950 Recent Purchases of American Indian and Mexican
Ad. TBM.
1954 Museum of Indigenous Art organized. Opens in
1957 as Museum of Primitive Art; since 1978
part of the Met.2
1 Founded in 1921 by Nicholas Roerich, the Roerich Museum and International
Art Center is "dedicated to widening the appreciation of art, of beauty, of culture
50
among all peoples." fRoerich Museum 1921-1931; The First Decade. 1931.] It is
located at 310 Riverside Drive, New York.
2 The author wishes to thank Kamara Holloway of the Mefs Department of the
Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas for providing this information.
51
APPENDIX B
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB’S COLLECTION OF TRIBAL ART
Compiled over a number of years, beginning in 1935 and
ending with the artist's death in 1974, the Gottliebs' collection
reflects their interest in a wide variety of indigenous arts. The
collection was gifted on 28 June 1989 to The Brooklyn Museum by
the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, in recognition of the
role played by the Museum-particularly its holdings in the arts of
Africa, the Pacific and the Americas--in the formation of Gottlieb as
an artist. Height precedes width precedes depth in dimensions.
For easy reference, I have included the Museum's accession
number for each piece. All information regarding original
purchase dates by the Gottliebs was graciously provided by
Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther
Gottlieb Foundation.
i
AFRICA
Western Sudan Region
1. Bamana, Mali. Female Figure. 20th c.
Wood; 8 1/4x1 1/2x2 in.
1989.51.44.
52
2. Bamana, Mali. Female Standing Figure. 20th c.
Wood, metal, cloth; 16 3/4 x 5 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.
1989.51.4.
3. Bamana, Mali. N‘tomo Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.54.
4. Bamana, Mali. Tji Wara Head-dress. 20th c.
1989.51.51.
5. Bamana, Mali. Tji Wara Head-dress I Female). 20th c.
Wood; 31 x 9 1/2x3 1/8 in.
1989.51.13.
6. Bamana, Mali. Tji Wara Head-dress (Male). 20th c.
Wood, metal; 28 1/2 x 12 x 2 3/4 in.
1989.51.14.
7. Dogon, Mali. Figure, n.d.
Wood; 113/4x21/8x23/8 in.
1989.51.48.
8. Dogon, Mali. Male Figure. pre-20th c.
Wood; 19 1/2x3 1/2x3 in.
1989.51.45.
9. Dogon, Mali. Male Figure. 19th c.
1989.51.20
10. Dogon, Mali. Male Figure. pre-20th c.
1989.51.40.
11. Dogon, Mali. Mask n.d.
1989.51.6.
12. Dogon, Mali. "Tellem" Figure. pre-20th c.
Wood, sacrificial patina; 10 1/2x1 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.
1989.51.39.
13. Mossi, Burkina Faso. Mask. 19th c.
1989.51.60.
53
14. Nuna, Burkina Faso. Wood Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.1.
15. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Bird Figure, n.d.
Wood.
1989.51.3.
16. Senufo, Ivory Coast. ‘ ‘Firespitter" Mask. 20th c.
Wood, eggs; 30 x 10 x 12 in.
1989.51.17.
17. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Maternity Figure. 20th c.
Wood, pigment; 19 x 5 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.
1989.51.16.
18. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Mother & Child Figure. 20th c.
Wood, pigment; 19 5/8 x 8 x ? in.
1989.51.5.
19. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Rhvthm Pounder fMalel. 20th c.
Wood; 45 1/2 x 6 x 4 3/4 in.
1989.51.11.
20. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Rhvthm Pounder f Female). 20th
Wood; 42 x 4 3/4 x 4 in.
1989.51.12.
21. Senufo, Ivory Coast. Seated Maternity Figure. 20th c.
Wood; 25 x 7 x 8 in.
1989.51.50.
Western Guinea Coast Region
22. Baga, Guinea. Atol Figure. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.49.
23. Baule, Ivory Coast. Female Figure. 20th c.
Wood; 18 1/8x3x23/8 in.
1989.51.47.
Purchased Paris, 1935.
24. Baule, Ivory Coast. Heddte Pullev. 20th c.
Wood; 7 3/4x23/4x 1 1/2 in.
1989.51.53
25. Baule, Ivory Coast. Male Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood, cloth; 113/8x21/2x23/8 in.
1989.51.43.
Purchased Paris, 1935.
26. Baule, Ivory Coast. Mask, late 19th-early 20th c.
Wood, pigment; 12 1/2x81/4x6 in.
1989.51.15.
27. Baule, Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.25.
28. Baule, Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.27.
29. Baule, Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.28.
30. Dan, Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.22.
31. Dan, Liberia or Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.23
32. Dan, Liberia or Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.24.
33. Dan, Liberia or Ivory Coast. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.26.
55
Gabon Region
34. Fang, Gabon. Reliquary Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood; 21 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.
1989.51.18.
Purchased Paris, 1935.
35. Fang, Gabon. Reliquary Guardian Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood, metal; 16x4 3/4x3 3/8 in.
1989.51.46.
36. Kota, Gabon. Reliauarv Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood, copper, brass; 20 1/4 x 8 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.
1989.51.2.
Purchased Paris, 1935.
37. Kota, Gabon. Reliauarv. 19th c.
1989.51.21.
38. Kota, Gabon. Reliquary Figure. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.37.
Congo Region
39. Bauda, Central African Rep. Throwing Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.30.
40. Bembe, Zaire. Male Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood; 5 3/4 x 2 1/2 x 1 1/2 in.
1989.51.56.
41. Lokele?, Zaire. Double-edged Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.29.
42. Lokele? Zaire. Double-edged Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.34.
43. Mangbetu, Zaire. Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.35.
56
44. Mangbetu, Zaire. Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.33.
45. Nkundu or Mongo, Zaire. Knife. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.31.
46. Songe, Zaire. Parade Axe. 19th or 20th c.
1989.51.32.
47. Teke, Congo. Male Figure. 19th or 20th c.
Wood, shell, mud; 25 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 4 3/4 in.
1989.51.19.
Purchased Paris, 1935.
Cameroon/Nigeria Region
48. Bamileke, Cameroon. Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.36.
49. Yoruba, Nigeria. Figure Blowing Whistle. 19th or 20th
Wood, pigment; 8 1/16x2 1/2x2 1/2 in.
1989.51.59.
50. Yoruba, Nigeria. Rattle. 20th c.
1989.51.57.
OCEANIA
51. Australia. Dream Scene. 20th c.
Bark painting.
1989.51.8.
52. Australia. Male Figure. 20th c.
Wood; 14 x 1/12 x 2 in.
1989.51.52.
53. Australia. Hunting Scene. 20th c.
Bark painting.
1989.51.7.
54. Australia. Tapa Cloth. 20th c.
1989.51.61.
55. Maprik, Papua New Guinea. Bark Painting, n.d.
1989.51.9
(One of pair with 1989.51.10.)
56. Maprik, Papua New Guinea. Bark Painting, n.d.
1989.51.10.
(One of pair with 1989.51.9.)
57. Ramu River, Papua New Guinea. Male Figure. 20th c.
Wood, shell, fiber; 14 x 2 1/4 x 2 3/8 in.
1989.51.42.
58. Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Male Figure. 20th c.
Wood; 17 x 4 x 3 1/2 in.
1989.51.41.
59. Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Mortar. 20th c.
Wood; 9 1/2x4 3/4 x 3 1/2 in.
1989.51.58.
60. Trobriand Islands. Lime Spatula. 19th c.
1989.51.38.
THE AMERICAS
61. Eskimo. Mask. 20th c.
Whalebone.
1989.51.55.
62. Tlingit, Northwest Coast. Chilkat Blanket. 20th c.
Wool, cedar; 53 x 68 in.
1989.51.63.
Purchased New York, 1942.
58
63. Nayarit, Mexico. Seated Female. 100 BC- AD 250.
Clay, pigment; 11 x 7 3/4 x 4 1/4 in.
1989.51.64.
64. Nayarit, Mexico. Seated Figure. 100 BC-AD 250.
Clay, pigment; 14 3/8 x 9 x 5 1/2 in.
1989.51.65.
(One of pair with 1989.51.66.)
65. Nayarit, Mexico. Seated Figure. 100 BC-AD 250.
Clay, pigment; 13 1/2 x 9 x 5 1/2 in.
1989.51.66
(One of pair with 1989.51.65.)
66. Nayarit, Mexico. Seated Figure. 100 BC-AD 250.
Clay, pigment; 5 1/2 x 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.
1989.51.67.
67. Colima, Mexico. Female Figure. 300-100 BC.
Clay; 7 5/16 x 3 1/2 x 7/8 in.
1989.51.68.
68. Mezcala, Mexico. Mask. 300-100 BC.
Greenstone.
1989.51.69.
69. Teotihuacan, Mexico. Head Fragment. ca.45Q-65Q AD.
1989.51.70.
70. Mexico? Head Fragment. pre-Hispanic.
1989.51.71.
71. Western Mexico. Standing Figure. pre-Hispanic.
Stone.
1989.51.72.
72. Tucano, Brazil. Bark Mask. 20th c.
1989.51.62.
59
Brazil? Standing Figure. 20th
Terracotta.
1989.51.73.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Neighbors, Martha (author)

Core Title "It was in the air": Adolph Gottlieb, the pictographs, New York, and the Zeitgeist of the 1940s

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art History (Museum Studies)

Degree Conferral Date 1994-12

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art history,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format masters theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Larsen, Susan C. (committee chair), Harcourt, Glenn (committee member), Holo, Selma (committee member)

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