Painter Adolph Gottlieb was a member of the emerging New York school with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, among other artists. In 1935, together with William Baziotes, Rothko, and others, Gottlieb founded the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and expressionism that exhibited until 1940. He was also instrumental in forming the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors, a nonpolitical organization for emerging painters dedicated to new modes of expression.

Gottlieb’s early works were paintings of American scenes, rendered in a style influenced by Milton Avery. After briefly working for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project’s easel-painting division, he spent two years in the California desert, where he created Surrealist-inspired images such as The Sea Chest (1942), which inserted incongruous elements into a desert landscape. His contact with European Surrealists exiled in New York during World War II led him to experiment with archetypal abstractions of animals, eyes, and spirals (as in the Pictograph series (1941–51)) and bolstered his belief that evocative art has its roots in the artist’s subconscious. The Pictographs featured invented symbols reminiscent of African, Oceanic, and Native American art. If, however, Gottlieb discovered that a symbol had a recognizable meaning within either Western or tribal art, he immediately removed it from his painting vocabulary as part of his quest for a collective unconscious.

His next series, Imaginary Landscapes (1951–57), placed his symbols within a definitive foreground and background but without suggesting any regional landscape in particular. Burst (1956–74), the iconic series that followed, comprised paintings with a radically simplified image pattern: a red disc above a volatile black mass near the bottom of the canvas, as in Blast I (1957). The forms suggested both the spatial relationship of landscape and the elemental struggle of history painting.

Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum