Adolph Gottlieb - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich

  • Exhibited


    New York, Marlborough Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1971-1972, November 1972

  • Literature


    Marlborough Gallery, ed., Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1971-1972, New York, 1972, pl. 2 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    One of the most celebrated colorists of Abstract Expressionism, Adolph Gottlieb refers to a natural landscape with a striking field of color and stripped down forms so elemental in Black Note. The painting is an informed example of the Burst Series, Gottlieb’s signature motif during the 1960’s and 1970’s which he continued to work on despite suffering immobility from a stroke in 1970.
     
    Black Note highlights Adolph Gottlieb’s interest in using color as a symbol. Robert Doty, the Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968, who, with Diane Waldman of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum co-curated the first retrospective of Adolph Gottlieb’s work understood the process as an expression of gesture:
     
    …at a certain point intuition becomes operative as well, and the choice of a certain color may be dictated by impulse. This is the point at which feeling takes over from rationality. Gottlieb supported the discourse by adding, “I use color in terms of emotional quality, as a vehicle for feeling…feeling is everything I have experienced or thought.”
    Adolph Gottlieb in R. Doty and D. Waldman, Adolph Gottlieb, New York, 1968
     
    Over the years Gottlieb’s painting has become monumental. As his concepts developed, they simplified. The culmination of Gottlieb’s schematic arrangement was reached in the painting Burst. It was immediately hailed as a milestone by the critic Clement Greenberg: “What makes such a picture difficult- difficult in the best sense is its monumental simplicity, which seems more than the conventions of easel painting can tolerate.
    R. Doty and D. Waldman, Adolph Gottlieb, New York, 1968

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTION

127

Black Note

1971

Oil on canvas.

60 x 48 in. (152.5 x 122 cm).
Signed, titled, dated "Adolph Gottlieb 1971 Black Note" and stamped by the Estate of Adolph Gottlieb on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $338,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York