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Through these startling compositions, via these signs and cabalistic writings we descend into the universal underworld. Here man is primitive. Here terrors and anguishes have for him a single source. He has been born into the world; is alone and separate. Gottlieb's mysterious paintings are aids to the contemplation of this most ancient and frightening Mystery.

Such contemplation is, of course, the essence of religion. And these paintings in their repetitive pattern are ritualistic. Yet is is useless to decipher them 'symbol by symbol' in the hope that the sum total will bring revelation. As in religion, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

The emotional impact of these totemic constructions is most surely experienced in the unconscious - where illumination and comprehension reside. How else explain, for example, the unholy awesomeness which the monumental "Premonition of Evil" commands?

But these works, when they are successful - and largely they are so - offer more than mystical experience. They evoke sensuous enjoyments which them solely from color, form, design, shock.

Gottlieb does not work in the popular mode of the day, the so-called international style. Neither is he an abstract painter nor a sur-realist. The fragments which he has unearthed in his excavations of our common underworld - an underworld which unites Mayan, Oceanic, Paleolithic and Atomic man - he has synthesized into a powerful and unmistakable signature.

Along with Klee and Miro, Gottlieb takes his place as a remarkable innovator, arresting and challenging. 

VICTOR WOLFSON

PAINTINGS
1 PREMONOTION OF EVIL
2 PICTOGENIC FRAGMENTS lent by the Museum of Modern Art
3 DEMON OF THE NIGHT
4 EVIL OMEN
5 INCUBUS
6 LINKS OF MEMORY
7 MARINER'S DREAM
8 SIGNS FOR DIVINATION
9 CHIMERA
10 MUTABLE OBJECTS
11 ANCIENT RITE
12 CAVE OF THE ORACLE
13 NIGHT VOYAGE
14 VOYAGER'S RETURN

GOUACHES
15 ANCESTRAL FIGURE
16 PICTOGRAPH
17 RETRUN OF THE MARINER
18 AMPUTATION RITUAL