Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

signed, titled, and dated 1960 on the reverse oil on canvas Dialogue II is a quintessential example of Gottlieb's dynamic integration of subject matter and form that would characterize his entire oeuvre. Mythic, archaic images and symbols arranged on a flat, arbitrary, yet consciously conceived ground are the epitome of Gottlieb's style, from his early Pictographs to his mature Bursts and Landscapes. Along with his colleagues in the American vanguard of the 1940s and 1950s, Gottlieb fashioned a personal style from the major strains of the modern tradition. Influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, post-war American artists pronounced their stated goal of ``the simple expression of a complex thought." (R. Doty and D. Waldman, Adolph Gottlieb, New York, 1968, p. 14). This phrase, from a famous letter wirtten to the New York Times (June 13, 1943) by Mark Rothko and Gottlieb (with some assistance from Barnett Newman), encapsulates the objective of young artists pulling away from the banalities of American scene painting and the excessive formalism of pure abstraction in Europe. Gottlieb's personal dialogue regarding artistic expression centered on the tensions of compositional order versus the intuitive gesture. Although Gottlieb thought that ``the act of painting must be rational, objective and consciously disciplined'', the action across the surface of his pre-planned, conceptualized canvases would include the accidents and instincts of the painterly process. In Gottlieb's first major series, the Pictographs begun in 1950, a grid determines the composition, and a single `symbol-as-form' populates each delineated rectangle or square. While the grid brings linear discipline to Gottlieb's paintings, an element of automatism is prevalent in his intuitive choices of individual forms and their random placement within the grid. In the Pictographs, Gottlieb imposed equilibrium between linear structure and abstract shapes by restrictng