Adolph Gottlieb
Artist
Biography
Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker and a leading figure of the New York School. An advocate of abstraction, he drew on automatism, Surrealism, and so-called primitive art. He first gained wide recognition for his Pictographs of the 1940s, which combine biomorphic and totemic imagery within compartmentalized grids, and went on to develop his Labyrinths, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts. In 1950 he organized the protest against an exhibition policy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that made him and his fellow artists known as the Irascibles.