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The Regenerative Art Of Adolph Gottlieb
By Finley Eversole
"And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness." -Dostoevsky
"The light, the light, the seeking, the searching, in chaos, in chaos." -A Maori Text
"My favorite symbols were those which I didn't understand." -Adolph Gottlieb
THE contemporary western artist, says Jacob Landau, has made "repeated attempts to eliminate all contraries from the image" in an effect to abolish "ambiguity and pain." Those artists who have successfully recreated "ambiguity and pain" in their art-Blake, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Mozart, Goya-are few in number in comparison with their importance for western art.
Among contemporary painters who have achieved "a certain kind of ambiguity and mystery,"1 Gottlieb is the most important and successful of his generation. Mark Rothko gives us ambiguity and mystery, but from a different visual base. Ecstasy and the demonic are to be found in Rothko's work, but rarely if ever in the same painting. Every work by Gottlieb is a combination of polarities, a union of opposites, a dialectical painting. "Life," says Gottlieb, revealing the non-esthetic basis of his art, "is a mixture of brutality and beauty." Speaking of the compositional problems he faced when he moved from his "pictograph" period into the Imaginary Landscapes, Gottlieb says:
Finley Eversole is Executive Secretary
of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture, 921 Madison
Ave., New York, N. Y. 10021. He is the editor of the symposium Christian
Faith and the Contemporary Arts (1962). The present critique grew out of
the recent Retrospective Exhibitions of the work of Adolph Gottlieb at the Guggenheim
and Whitney Museums in New York.
1 From an interview with the artist on WBAI, May,
1967; reprinted in Arts Magazine, February, 1968, pp. 30-31. See also F. Eversole's
article, "Man's Extremity and the Modern Artist," THEOLOGY TODAY, Oct. 1963,
pp. 370 ff.
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the problem which I was involved in was dividing a canvas into two parts, and then having disparate images in each area, which is a problem that I've always been involved in, which is the juxtaposition of disparate images. And the painting stands or falls on whether these things are unified. There has to be a complete unity. But obviously unity and oneness doesn't mean anything unless you have some sort of polarities. In other words, there has to be a conflict. If there is no conflict, and a resolution of some sort of opposites, there's no tension and everything is rather meaningless.2
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition (Feb. 14-Apr. 7, 1968) contains the works of Gottlieb's pictograph period from 1941 to 1956. The special compositional problem on which Gottlieb worked during these years was the problem of all-over painting inherited from the cubists. In all-over painting, every part of the canvas is given a uniform value. The center of the canvas is no more visually important than its limits, and the illusions of depth and perspective are abandoned. In a manner which suggests the influence of Mondrian and which grows out of the Arizona period (1937), when Gottlieb was creating still-life boxes containing dried cactus and gourds, the artist began to break down the canvas into a series of "boxes" or grids containing isolated or overlapping images. The dialectic of Gottlieb's art manifests itself compositionally in the contrast which exists between the geometry of the visual space and the irrational, surrealistic association of images which are at work in that space.
I
One could cite the influence of other artists such as Miró and Klee, both in terms of composition and imagery, in such works as Pictograph, 1946; Pendant Image, 1946; and Sentinel, 1951. More important, however, is the unique contribution which Gottlieb makes as a dialectical painter. Gottlieb, whose name has long been associated with such artists as Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Motherwell, and Rothko, has been the subject of much less publicity. It is my thesis that no one has yet recognized how far removed Gottlieb's art is from that of his contemporaries-a difference which is lost if one looks at these artists only in terms of their treatment of compositional problems and their achievement of an abstract imagery. In post-war Europe, the existential influence of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud began to make itself felt in the work of sensitive
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intellectuals like jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Paul Tillich. In America, a rediscovery of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville accompanied the influence of European existentialism. However oblique the relationship, it was this same set of cultural conditions which led to Pollock's "art of the broken center," Gorky's agony of impotence and suspended animation, de Kooning's ambiguous women, Rothko's preoccupation with mystery, the demonic and human isolation, and, finally, Motherwell's images of death. During this period one American painter, Adolph Gottlieb, was painting his way into a new dimension of human experience-the experience of rebirth. Gottlieb's dialectical art is an art of regeneration, of perpetual descent and return.
The roots of the regenerative image, most clearly revealed in the "burst" series begun in 1957, are already present from the beginning in the pictographs. (Gottlieb rightly insists that his art contains no "literary message," but he himself poses the question of meaning in the quotation about unity and conflict cited above. I shall venture, therefore, into the question of meaning-that most essential and precarious task of art criticism-by reference to the Dasein, the indescribable being there, of the paintings themselves.)
Let us refer briefly to those contrasting images which repeat themselves throughout the pictographs-images which any psychologist of symbolism can tell us stand for opposites in experience. I refer to the contrasts of eyes and teeth /in Expectation of Evil, 1945; The Alkahest of Peraculsus, 1945), of serpentine, spiral, and breast forms with arrows, triangles, spikes, and horns (in Evil Omen, 1946; Pictograph, 1946; Sorceress, 1947; Sorcerer, 1948; Hidden Image, 1950), of fish (the waters below) and birds (the air above) (in Pictograph, 1942; The Red Bird, 1944; Expectation of Evil, 1945; Pursuer and Pursued, 1947), of male and female (in Vigil, 1948; Man Looking at Woman, 1949; Male and Female., 1950; Symbols and a Woman, 1951), of circles and curved forms with crosses, plus and minus signs, and jagged lines (in Sounds at Night, 1948; The Seer, 1950; Untitled, 1951; Blue at Noon, 1955; Composition, 1955; Hot Horizon, 1956). These contrasting forms symbolize the whole range of contraries in human experience-light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, male and female, life and death, good and evil, order and violence, etc. It is this iconography of contraries, explicit in the symbology of the pictographs and Imaginary Landscapes, which gets taken up
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into the more abstract, universal, and immediate imagery of the "bursts."
II
The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition (Feb. 13-Mar. 31, 1968) covers the period of the Imaginary Landscapes, the "bursts," and the recent "units," which date from 1951 to the present. We shall pass over the Imaginary Landscapes, noting only their importance for Gottlieb's reconception of his visual space. Their content is to reappear time and again in the bursts and units.
Burst, 1957, marked the beginning of a new and simplified image, which I shaIl refer to hereafter as the "blast" image (Blast I, 1957, the second work in this series, is perhaps the most subtle and powerful painting of Gottlieb's career). For the past eleven years, Gottlieb has worked with a single image, exploring the limitless range of its meaning and possibilities. It is this constant exploration which keeps the blast image from becoming a mere symbol like the Chinese Tao.
In Burst, 1957, a magenta "sun" is seen poised above a black form, symbolic of chaos. The spatial location of the disk creates a sense of ambiguity as to whether it is rising or falling. ("All things are in process," says Lao-tze, "arising and returning.") The disk or sphere, which both in nature and as a symbol in the human mind, represents the greatest possible order and concentration of energy, stands in contrast to the broken image below. In Blast II, 1957, the red disk has been replaced by a gentle green sphere, reminiscent of those photographs of the earth since taken from outer space. The sensation of life, of creation, is dominant. In Crest, 1959, a black ellipse, which has achieved a point of apogee, invokes the image of a burned-out "sun" or "planet" about to plummet downward. Another form of descent is suggested by Black Black, 1961, in which a dark "sun" at low ebb appears ready to drop into a heavy black tarn. The mood is Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. By contrast, Mist, 1961, partakes more of the moonlight world of Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane. In Return, 1962, two bright spheres descend from right to left (from consciousness to unconsciousness), into the awaiting darkness. The serpentine, uroboric, and labyrinthian qualities of the lower regions of Gottlieb's paintings can be detected in such works as Dialogue Number 1, 1960; Sign, 1962; Trinity, 1962; and Excalibur, 1963.
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The translation of irrational forms into rational forms begins to manifest itself in Above and Below, 1964-65, and in Conflicts, 1966. In the former, the symbolic chaos has been replaced by a sharp-edged calligraphy, and in the latter the disks begin to become sliced and squared. The process of rationalization reaches a kind of culmination in Units II, 1965, and Units III, 1965. Here the top half of the picture has been filled with a series of balls and bars or "minus signs" all laid out like rows of cobblestones, neatly isolated by the background space. It is the division and compartmentalization of thought. Have we not here reached the apogee of reason? Is it not the unified green field in the lower half of Units II which offers the "ground" and possibility of renewal? From the pictographs where units of space were divided by grid-lines, we have come now to units of form divided by the "grid" of background space. From the vital energy of the bursts or blasts, we have arrived at that subtler violence of thought, of rational order, isolated from its ground of being, and isolating all that comes within its grasp.
III
Gottlieb is the only western artist I know who has approached the dialectical contradictions of western experience with anything like a total perspective. Carl Jung, referring to the equally valid claims of the creative and destructive forces in man, and to our inability to make "concessions to both worlds," wrote:
Unfortunately, our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, nor even a name, for the union of opposites through the middle path, that most fundamental item of inward experience, which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.
In Gottlieb's art, brutality and beauty, creation and destruction, male and female, light and darkness, psyche and thought, entropy and synergy, yang and yin come to meet us, revealed in the iconography of the modern "abstract" image. "Truth," says Heidegger, "is the opposition of lighting and concealing. . . . It is the opposition of the primal conflict . . . within which what is stands." Within the work of art, truth is revealed. And by our response to it, we renew our being or stand exposed to the corruption of our own consciousness which, says R. G. Collingwood, is "death."