Word: gottlieb
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...less interested in plot than in the smoky tang of Irish talk and in the embalmment of a cast of characters as Stereotyped as Mrs. O'Leary's cow-Father McGovern, an octogenarian priest who rejoices fiercely every time a parishioner precedes him to the grave; Al Gottlieb, a Jewish businessman who prattles like a borscht-circuit comic...
...that Gottlieb, along with Mark Rothko, published the credo that has guided his work ever since. True reality for the artist, he said, lies not in perishable externals, but in the timeless images within himself. A well-painted picture is not necessarily a work of art because "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing." Moreover, the proper subject matter for art comes from the world of imagination, which is "fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense." As Gottlieb added later: "If the models we use are the apparitions seen in a dream, or the recollection...
Pictographs & Bursts. In his "pictographs" of 20 years ago, Gottlieb cut up his canvas into rectangles filled with symbols and shapes that were for a time inspired by ancient myths and later by pure free association. Gradually the symbols were replaced by abstract shapes and squiggles that Gottlieb labeled "imaginary landscapes." Today, a Gottlieb canvas is apt to consist of two basic images-a circular shape floating over an exploding mass of calligraphy. These are called "bursts," and Gottlieb's most articulate champion, Director Martin Friedman of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, has called them "grandly conceived statements...
...imaginary landscapes," there was always some hint of earth and sky and the eternal tug of war between them. The "bursts," too, give a sense of suns over earth, but Gottlieb does not regard them as anything so specific...
They are, he says, contrasting versions of the same image-one controlled and disciplined, the other bursting. They neither draw the eye into spaces beyond or leap out to envelop it, for Gottlieb means them to be so flat that they will not violate the surface of the canvas and so sim ple that they can be absorbed at a glance. To Friedman, they suggest "the resolution of serene and aggressive elements" and hence "the paradox of civilized man." To others they are simply there, in all their stubborn purity-statements without any definite meaning and with little magic...