Beschreibung:

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB (1903-1974)Cadmium Red Disc 1971 signed and titled on the reverse oil on canvas 60 by 48 in. 152.4 by 121.9 cm. This work was executed in 1971.FootnotesProvenance Marlborough Gallery, New York Private Collection, Philadelphia Knoedler & Co., New York Private Collection, Florida Rosenfeld Gallery, Miami Acquired directly from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Marlborough Gallery, Adolph Gottlieb Paintings 1971-1972, 1972 Pulsating with a burst of forceful red on a stark monochrome ground, Adolph Gottlieb's Cadmium Red Disk (1971) is veritable force of a painting from the artist's iconic Burst series. Impressive in scale with a hypnotic composition, the present lot offers collectors a rare opportunity to acquire an iconic work by one of the most significant figures in American art to date. A leading pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement alongside Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning Adolph Gottlieb is one of the most celebrated artists of the Twentieth Century. Born in New York in 1904 to Jewish Czech parents, Adolph Gottlieb experienced the Great Depression and bore witness to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. These, amongst other determinative cultural moments, are essential contexts in understanding Gottlieb's interest in transcendence, feeling, and human experience. Through poetic, abstract compositions, Gottlieb made visual the fleeting and very real emotions of human experience in the face of insurmountable trauma. Gottlieb and many of his peers found that Realism did not encapsulate the existential qualms of reality in such a historic, war-torn and financially turbulent period. Gottlieb, along with other New York Abstract Expressionists like his friend and fellow artist Mark Rothko continually challenged the notions of traditional painting, taking on the schism between meaning and form in their practice. Though Gottlieb had an already flourishing career, his notable style began to take form with his series of Pictographs, whose primitive and dynamic compositions conveyed "life [as] a mixture of brutality and beauty" (the artist quoted by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Making Art in Challenging Times: Gottlieb's Pictographs, www.gottliebfoundation.org). Gottlieb's historic pictographs launched him into a new era of artistic exploration which came to fervent fruition in the artist's Burst series that consequently cemented his artistic legacy and unequivocally personal vernacular. The present lot is an exceptional example of Gottlieb's Burst series. In this body of work, Gottlieb simplified his compositions to reflect only a few cardinal gestures resulting in a simple, direct and aesthetically hard-hitting visual lexicon. In Cadmium Red Disk, a stark red circle hovers above an endless and absorbing black ground. A separate but intertwined duality is manifested within the work, creating separate but connected polarities. These dualities of darkness and light, line and space, object and expanse, yield a myriad of interpretative possibilities. As Gottlieb states, "I try, through colors, forms, and lines, to express intimate emotions...My paintings can represent an atomic bomb, a sun, or something else altogether: depending on the thinking of whoever is looking at it" (the artist quoted in Pepe Karmel, Adolph Gottlieb Self and Cosmos, New York, p. 17). Gottlieb's mention of the sun is particularly compelling with the present work in mind. The vibrating red orb seems to be rising against a night sky, or slowly setting at the close of the evening. As René Magritte did in his Surrealist masterpiece The Banquet (1958), Gottlieb seems to be playing with ideas of light at certain moments of the day, questioning our sense and understanding of time. The red sphere vibrating against the endless black ground creates a never-ending sense of time everlasting. Gottlieb has created a boundless galaxy, drawing the viewer into a mesmerizing universe of his own infinite m