“Ten Americans After Paul Klee” is now on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington,

“Ten Americans After Paul Klee” is now on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. 

The exhibition includes five Adolph Gottlieb paintings which span from 1941 to 1950, representing early and late examples of what Gottlieb called “Pictographs.” On “Pictographs,” art critic Lawrence Alloway writes, 

“Gottlieb’s Pictographs explored a broad range of symbolism, but without exceeding the then-traditional small scale of American easel painting. Nonetheless within these limits, he showed an unquenchable inventiveness.

…The grid, for all its flexibility, ceased to satisfy Gottlieb by the late 40’s. Color expanded without linear intervention, as in Sounds at Night, 1948, in which there are no walls to hold the scattered pictographs. In Labyrinth I, 1950, there is a conspicuous grid, but it is in negative, produced by peeling tape from already painted areas; in retrospect we can see this as a part of Gottlieb’s interest in continuous planes of color.”

— Lawrence Alloway, “Adolph Gottlieb and Abstract Painting,” from “Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective” (1981).

The exhibition will be on view at the Phillips Collection through May 6th, 2018. 

Get more information on the Phillips exhibition.
Read the entire Lawrence Alloway essay here.