The Seer by Adolph Gottlieb
A quick analysis of Adolph Gottlieb’s The Seer. Enjoy!
Gottlieb was a first-generation artist. He was born to Jewish parents who had immigrated to New York City. He was not born into a lot of wealth, but he knew that at an early age he wanted to be an artist. He took lessons at one of the few modern art schools in New York City of that time called the Art Students League. In the early 1920s, he decided that he wanted to be taken serious in his pursuit of art. Adolph Gottlieb was one of the most well-traveled of the Abstract Expressionists. A number of them never studied art in Europe, but he did during the interwar period. He was for about six months in Paris and went to the Louvre every day then traveled around Central Europe and then returned before World War Two started. His mature painting style usually is associated with his interest in his intuition. His interest in creating a universal language that he felt everyone could understand and the idea of archetypes. The mature style of Gottlieb can be described as painting objects in great light compartments. He was influenced quite a bit by the ancient art he saw in the ancient cuneiform writing from the civilians and hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptian writing. The late style of Adolph Gottlieb was called bursts. In 1942, a cuneiform which was the earliest form of writing was interpreted, and it came out of Mesopotamia with the beginnings of civilization in 3000 BCE. It recorded the agricultural storage units and the first laws that civilization was ruled by.
The Seer, took everything out of time and place. This was painted during World War II. The horrible aftermath where concentration camps were revealed. Photographs were circulated. The United States had dropped the atom bomb and two of it was in Japan. There was an economic upturn in the United States after World War II. Everything in the Abstract Expressionists world seemed very receptive to wars that’s why they preferred to go back to the ancient subject matter rather than to reference these particular current events. Adolph Gottlieb is making grids on his canvas and then placed within those grids different signs and symbols known only to itself. Those aren't something that he was copying exactly with intended interpretation, but it was triggered also by a necessary move to the Arizona desert outside of Tucson. His wife had a respiratory illness that doctors felt would be helped by a drier climate. For less than a year, Gottlieb and his wife, Esther, lived in the desert, and he would come across these ancient worn bones on the desert floor. He was exposed to Native American pictographs. He couldn’t understand this kind of language so he started to arrange the objects in organized grids called the seers.
I hope you enjoyed this quick analysis. And I will see you next Sunday!
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