Adolph Gottlieb (American, 1903 - 1974)

  Born in New York City, in 1935 he was a founding member of The Ten, a group devoted to abstract art, and he became a major exponent of Abstract Expressionism whose painting style is linked to Marc Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnet Newman. A major theme in his painting was the challenge to humans to resolve dualities within the universe, the pressure of opposites: male and female, chaos and order, creation and destruction, order and chaos.

He studied at the Art Students League with Social Realists John Sloan and Robert Henri and in the 1920s in Paris where he worked at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere. Returning in 1923, he lived in New York and also developed an interest in primitive sculpture.

He was a WPA mural artist and from 1937 to 1939 was in Arizona, which influenced his subsequent "pictograph" series that occupied him the remainder of his life. The pictographs involved grid divisions of the canvas, primitive iconography, and imaginary landscapes. For him, the time in the Arizona desert was a time of transition from expressionist landscapes to highly personal still lifes of simple desert items such as gourds and peppers.