“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different t.mes s require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and t.mes s are out of joint, our obsessive subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our t.mes .”
A captivating example from Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictograph series, Figure, executed in 1950 reflects a masterful culmination of the artist’s decade-long exploration of this distinctive visual idiom. Initially conceived as repositories for cultural, sociological and personal themes, Gottlieb’s Pictographs were at the t.mes a radical divergence from the traditional Western models of art history. In the 1940s, Gottlieb and his contemporaries, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, were looking towards new forms of inspiration, experimenting with totemic imagery, and looking towards primitive sources for a new language of abstraction. Seeking to communicate his experience of the modern world, one defined by the violence of war and rapid technological advancements, Gottlieb rejected figuration, instead drawing from the visual presentation of images from diverse sources including Native American, Oceanic and African Cultures. The Pictographs also represented Gottlieb’s distinctive solution for the most rudimentary goal of Abstract Expressionism: to instill a universal significance to paintings beyond the confines of culture, t.mes or place. In Figure, Gottlieb has replicated this thematic exploration in an intimate scale. Here, the heavily worked surface, with oscillating layers of burnt orange, dark rose and shades of grays achieves an uncanny compositional harmony as the geometric rigidity of the structured grid is counterbalanced by the biomorphic lyricism of oval outlines and curvilinear ideographs.
At the heart of Gottlieb’s Pictographs series and his oeuvre as a whole is the concept of duality, which ultimately finds its distillation in the dichotomous compositions of the Burst paintings from the 1950s onwards. In Figure, Gottlieb ingeniously synthesizes European art aesthetics with Native American art practices. As the viewer engages with the surface, they become aware of totemic presences that emerge, almost subliminally, from an active visual field and are then reabsorbed into it. In pairing an ordered space with a subjective and fluid content, Gottlieb attempts in Figure to acknowledge the dangerous forces at loose in the contemporary world by creating a new visual vocabulary and placing abstraction within a stable pictorial framework.
