ART REVIEW : A New Take on Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictographs at Silverman

Adolph Gottlieb was among the original New York Abstract Expressionists. After his death in 1974, his reputation as a bulwark of this seminal school frayed despite a traveling retrospective that visited the County Museum of Art in 1982. Later works tended to be little more than slick reworkings of a formula that included planet-like orbs hovering portentously over a horizon line or a Zen-style paint explosion. A bit too controlled and mannered for an art based on spontaneity.

In the beginning, Gottlieb had the virtue of a certain candid awkwardness. Unfortunately, we see his early work so rarely that a local gallery exhibition of the artist’s so-called “Pictographs” is something of a connoisseur’s event. It consists of 14 small easel paintings. They come from the Gottlieb Foundation and have not been seen publicly for 40 years.

A patina of authenticity accumulates on art from the heroic beginnings of great movements. In the ‘40s the Abstract Expressionists wrestled with the problem of transforming the visual and mental heritage of world culture into an art that would speak to the American present. They were fascinated with everything from classical myth to tribal lore, from Mondrian’s grid to surrealist obsession with the subconscious.

Gottlieb put it all together in compartmentalized compositions. Some zones were empty, others occupied by enigmatic signs or shorthand renderings of recognizable images, especially bits of human anatomy such as eyes, noses, legs and faces. The rhetoric that grew up around the work is reflected in an essay by foundation director Sanford Hirsch in a very nice small catalogue that memorializes the show.

Rationale for the pictographs centered around the notion that their imagery had burbled up dream-fashion from the mysterious depths of the artist’s mind. Thus each viewer would have his own fresh gestalt of the meanings and portents of the images depending on his own cerebral baggage.

Four decades ago the art’s sheer newness may have made the work appear mystifying and a little ominous. But time has a way of clarifying matters once thought deep and arcane. Read T.S. Eliot when you’re 18 and he’s as profound and dense as the sphinx. Read him at 58 and he’s just a real good poet.

Today Gottlieb’s pictographs seem more like lyric play than occult riddle. How could it be otherwise in paintings with formats resembling comic strips? How could anyone have failed to get the point when Gottlieb even provided open-sesame titles?

“Cockfight” appears a literal montage. We see two birds face off. A spectator watches. A bird falls. The eyes of the crowd react. Some look away, some are appalled by the bloody spectacle. Everybody goes home.

Could this be a metaphor for an act of ritual violence or a sexual encounter? Sure. Its Northwest Coast Indian style suggests the former, its title the latter. Everything is subject to more than one interpretation.

The point is that Gottlieb was ebullient in these works. In “Minotaur” the fabled monster is a bored cartoon businessman lost in a labyrinth of his own making. Habit. Routine. “Morning” submits willingly to the idea that it’s about nothing more heroic than stumbling out of bed and trying to get your day on track.

In these works Gottlieb displays a character that has the gentleness of his old friend Milton Avery, the wry visual wit of Paul Klee and the nimbleness of Lionel Hampton improvising. It’s very likable stuff. Its unpretentious intelligence and decorative elan stands in sobering contrast to the pretentiousness of later work. It’s art with a lesson for anyone inclined to take their own myth too seriously.