Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb (January 29, 1903 – March 4, 1974) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker who became one of the pioneering figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Born in New York City, he studied at the Art Students League of New York and traveled extensively through Europe in the early 1920s to immerse himself in classical and modern art. Upon returning, Gottlieb co-founded "The Ten," a group of artists dedicated to expressionist and abstract art, which protested the dominance of American Regionalism. His artistic breakthrough came in the 1940s with his celebrated Pictographs series, which utilized grid-like structures filled with mythological symbols and biomorphic shapes to explore universal human psychology.

By the late 1950s, Gottlieb shifted toward his most famous and influential body of work, the Burst paintings. These simplified, large-scale compositions featured a dense, focal orb hovering above a chaotic, gestural splash of paint below, capturing the post-World War II tension between order and chaos, cosmos and earth. Alongside his close friend Mark Rothko, Gottlieb co-authored a famous 1943 manifesto in The New York Times asserting that art should express timeless, tragic, and eternal subject matter. Over his career, he achieved massive international acclaim, winning the Grand Premio at the São Paulo Bienal in 1963 and becoming the first American artist to receive the honor. Today, his works are held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.