Skip to Content

From Midnight to Dawn

Showing 1 of 1


  FILTER RESULTS
Image of

Art © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY


From Midnight to Dawn

1956
oil and enamel on linen
72 in. x 96 1/4 in. (182.88 cm x 244.48 cm)
Currier Funds, Rosmond deKalb Fund and Gift of the Friends, 1979.16

Adolph Gottlieb
American
1903–1974

ON VIEW

An important figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, Adolph Gottlieb postponed high school to devote himself to art training. Besides attending courses at most of New York City's leading art schools, he also studied in Paris, Berlin, and Munich. During the 1930s Gottlieb painted in an expressive figural mode influenced by the French school and the Surrealists. His mild modernism won respect in government circles, and after some years as an easel painter in the WPA Federal Art Project, Gottlieb was commissioned by the Treasury Department to provide a mural for the post office in Yerrington, Nevada.

As Gottlieb's style became more emotional and symbolic in nature, he began to experiment with pictographic images. Others had begun to move in similar directions, and by 1943 Gottlieb was a founding member of the New York Artist Painters, an early group of abstractionists. As Abstract Expressionism gained momentum during the decade, Gottlieb emerged as one of its key figures, participating in several important forums and conferences. His style continued to evolve, and in 1957 it culminated in the first of the Burst paintings, perhaps Gottlieb's best-known works. Reaching the height of his career in the 1960s, the artist continued to paint even after suffering a debilitating stroke in 1971. Gottlieb died in New York in 1974.

Painted in 1956, From Midnight to Dawn is a large composition incorporating a series of differentiated black marks arrayed on a blue field. Like a line of archaic script, most of these marks run just below the top edge of the canvas, where they are faintly illumined by haloes of white. One other mark, larger and more prominent, grandly asserts itself in the center of the painting. Yet while Gottlieb's marks read as "text," the smoky blue field of the painting conveys a strong sense of illusionistic space.

Gottlieb never abandoned illusionism in his work, no matter how abstract it became. From Midnight to Dawn belongs to an important group of transitional paintings known as the Imaginary Landscapes. In an attempt to break from the restrictions of his pictographic grid paintings of the 1940s, Gottlieb about 1950 began to open up and simplify his compositions. Critics saw landscape referents in the new work, and the artist readily agreed. In the Imaginary Landscapes, a horizontal division typically serves as a "horizon" dividing two distinct zones of the canvas. Often the two zones take up contrasting motifs: in some paintings, dense layers of gestural brushstrokes seethe below simple forms floating in space; in others, such as the Currier example, tight bands of calligraphic characters hover above a largely empty field. Supporting the notion that the works represent landscapes at least in part, their titles and color schemes occasionally allude to climatic conditions and times of day. With its colors of deep blue and black, From Midnight to Dawn is redolent of nighttime mystery and the memory of vanished day.

Like other Abstract Expressionists, Gottlieb was fascinated by the primitive and mythic. Perhaps attempting to evoke the cyclopean monumentality of the earliest civilizations, Gottlieb combines "ancient" text with a sense of vastness and darkness suggestive of the temporal distance that separates prehistoric times from our own era. In the same vein, From Midnight to Dawn may be read as an expression of the human subconscious, considered by Gottlieb and others to be a place where the power of the primitive exists just below the orderly patterns of rational thought. As with the Currier example, a number of Gottlieb's paintings invoke the imagery of night, together with its associations of dreaming. A gateway into the subconscious, dreaming for many Abstract Expressionists raised the possibility of tapping into hidden reservoirs of inspiration.

From Midnight to Dawn was first shown at New York's Martha Jackson Gallery in 1957. In 1968 it was included in Gottlieb's first retrospective, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Currier Museum of Art acquired the painting in 1979.

VSD

REFERENCES

Lawrence Alloway, Sanford Hirsch, Charlotta Kotik et al. The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc., 1994.

Robert Doty and Diane Waldman. Adolph Gottlieb. Ex. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1968.

Miriam Roberts. Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings 1921-1956. Ex. cat. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, 1980.


Exhibition
1957 Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY, "Adolph Gottlieb." Jan. 29 - Feb. 23.

1959 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, "New York & Paris, Painting in the 50's." Jan. 16 - Feb. 8.

1959 French and Co., New York, NY, "Summer Gallery Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture." July - Aug.

1968 "Adolph Gottlieb." Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenhein Museum. Traveled to: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Feb. 17 - March 31; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, April 26 - June 2; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Sept. 9 - Oct. 20.

1977 Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY, "Adolph Gottlieb - Paintings 1945 - 1974." Jan. 29 - Feb. 23.

1980 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Accessions of the Fiftieth Year." Jan. 12 - March 2.

1980 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Adolph Gottlieb: Retrospective." March 9 - April 27.

1984 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Friends of The Currier Gallery of Art: 25 Years of Acquisitions." Jan. 8 - Feb. 12.

2005 Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY, "Adolph Gottlieb 1956." Sept. 25 - Dec. 11.

2010-2011 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "The Secret Life of Art: Mysteries of the Museum Revealed." Oct. 2, 2010 – Jan. 9, 2011.


Your current search criteria is: Object is "From Midnight to Dawn".