Feeling stifled by the primacy of European art and the regionalism, social realism, and pure abstraction that dominated the New York scene, beginning in 1941 Gottlieb pioneered a new artistic model in works that came to be known as pictographs, including those on view here. Often featuring boxlike structures or grids, his paintings, drawings, and etchings offer a synthesis of material as diverse as classical mythology, modern psychoanalytic theory, Oceanic, Melanesian, Native American, and African visual cultures, and contemporary art and literature.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010-April 25, 2011.
