“Gottlieb’s use of, his feelings for, color is remarkable… Gottlieb’s color in the abstract paintings tends to establish a solid surface, but one that is flexible and resilient. It is a brilliant modification of flat color that avoids both schematic two-dimensionality and the full three-dimensional spatiality that a free manual touch engenders. There are numerous paintings and passages in paintings in which color acts as a dimmed or glowing veil, but Gottlieb also expanded the scale of solid, permeable color to the total field of the canvas.”
Vibrant and energizing, Adolph Gottlieb’s Deep Over Pale from 1964 is an instantly recognizable and exceptional example from the artist’s acclaimed Burst series. Sublimely grand in scale and arresting in both composition and delicate color, Deep Over Pale epitomizes the elemental dynamism and tremendous painterly force at the core of Adolph Gottlieb’s celebrated body of work. A mature and fully realized example of a series begun in 1957, Deep Over Pale represents a powerful union of radically opposing forms. The luminous background which seems to radiate light is balanced by the ethereal orb of the deepest scarlet and tangled mass of pale green splatters. All suspended in dynamic symmetry the composition evokes the myriad dualities and dichotomies underlying Gottlieb’s abstraction to produce a composition that radiates with intensity. While conveying the artist’s prodigious command of both gestural painting and color theory, the work resists classification with the “Action” or “Color Field” paintings of Gottlieb’s contemporaries. The effect is powerful: transcendent simplicity colliding with expansive monumentality.
With tremendous graphic power and elemental force, Deep Over Pale exemplifies Gottlieb’s unique brand of mark-making, in which he juxtaposes two fundamental elements—the glowing orb and the eponymous “burst”—and unmoors them upon a monochromatic flattened space. A test.mes nt to its critical significance within Gottlieb’s oeuvre, the work was included in the seminal retrospective in 1981-1983 which traveled extensively across the United States and to Tel Aviv. Esteemed critic Brian O’Doherty described the development of Gottlieb’s signature language thus: “His motif has orbited into electrifying new fields of color, the horizon dropping away completely, the globes, usually single, now taking on a new radiance, raised with an almost palpable transgression of gravity as they dip and swim steadfastly over the explosive calligraphs below—writhing, kinking, hooked, twisted, contracted, precisely exploded—all the verbs are active in this extraordinary visual grammar” (in “Adolph Gottlieb: The Dualism of an Inner Life,” The New York t.mes s, 23 February 1964, p. 17).
Gottlieb was heavily influenced by psychological theories, particularly that of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. His interest in psychology led him towards an even deeper examination of the conscious and the subconscious, and Gottlieb used painting as a means to prompt exploration of this duplexity both in others and in himself. The artist saw painting as a means of personal discovery, explaining: “When I feel I am fully charged and ready to let go on the canvas, I’m not in a position to analyze and view myself in an objective way. I have to let my feelings go and it is only afterwards that I become aware of what my feelings really were. And for me, this is one of the fascinations and great experiences of painting, that I become aware of myself” (Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Manny Silverman Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb, Works on Paper: 1966 – 1973, 1990, p. 9). By casting two such monumental masses in opposition, Gottlieb creates the visual equivalent to Jung’s acclaimed theory of the ego and the unconscious: two mental selves, neither of which can exist without the other. Exploring these conceptual notions both through contrasting structures, depth of pigment, and tension between form and space, Gottlieb merges the psychological with the visual.
Through the employment of elemental and powerful forms, Gottlieb articulates the depths of his psyche in minimalist form. The pulsating energy in the present work parallels the tension experienced in the natural world. As the viewer is met with hovering orbs suspended above a black and white chaos of painted streaks framed by a bright red background, one must submit to the blissful balance between, form, movement, and self.
