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The New York Times

Adolph Gottlieb with works in his studios at East Hampton, L.I., in 1965

Adolph Gottlieb, Abstractionist, Dies

by LEE DEMBARDT

Adolph Gottlieb, a founder of the New York School of abstract expressionism and a major figure in American art for more than 30 years, died yesterday in Beth Israel Hospital. he was 70 years old and lived and worked in studios at 380 West Broadway and in East Hampton, L.I.

Mr. Gottlieb, whose paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, had suffered a stroke in April of 1971 but had continued to paint and have exhibitions in this country and in Europe.

Though he was confined to a wheelchair, Mr. Gottlieb had a show at the Marlborough Gallery on East 57th Street in December, 1972, and as recently as last fall he had shows in Toronto and Detroit. In 1968, the Whitney and the Guggenheim simultaneously mounted exhibitions of his work. 

Suspended Sunlike Orbs

Mr. Gottlieb, a colleague of such other abstract expressionists as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Willem de Kooning, worked in his later years on canvases as large as 14 feet by 12 feet, on which he painted variations of his "Bursts" series.

These works typically included sunlike orbs suspended over exploding masses of red and black against a light field. "Disparate images having no relations to each other," Mr. Gottlieb once said.

"They are vital images to me," he told an interview 15 years after starting the series. "I continue to project them as I feel them." 

In an earlier period Mr. Gottlieb had painted what he called "pictographs," gridlike works whose compartments contained squiggle and squirls and suggestively Freudian images. Later the Freudian symbols became more abstract as he explored their ambiguity. 

Mr. Gottlieb explained that he had used the terms "pictograph" and "bursts" so that "critics have an easier time pigeonholing my work." 

In 1954 he used the checkerboard pattern of the pictographs in designing the stained-glass facade of the religious school of the Park Avenue Synagogue, 50 East 87th Street.

Disparaged 'Success'

Mr. Gottlieb, who went from struggling artist to commercial success, had scorn for contemporary culture and its appurtenances. Of his neighbors in East Hampton he once said:

"They respect me only because I'm successful in their terms. They don't know my work, but they see I have a big house, beautiful grounds, two cars, a sailboat. These are the value that dominate American society.

"It doesn't discourage me. I'm too cynical for that. It just gives me a laugh. Suddenly I find myself in the position of having all this nonsense they think so important."

Mr. Gottlieb was born on March 14, 1903, near Tompkins Square, a son of parents who had emigrated from Hungary. He enrolled in Stuyvesant  High School but dropped out to work in his father's wholesale stationary business and to study art at night at the Art Students League where he still painted in realistic style and Cooper Union.

At 17 he left for Paris, studied art there, and returned to New York three years later to finish high school and paint.

In 1930 he had his first show—at the Dudensing Gallery, which no longer exists, and two years later, he married Ester Dick, who survives him.

A trip to Europe in 1935, work as an easel painter paid for by the Works Progress Administration and a sojourn in the Arizona desert in 1937 completed his training as a painter. The Arizona images—ovoids, disks and horizons—would be found in his paintings throughout the remainder of his career.

During the Depression he joined "The Ten," the group of painters that included Rothko, de Kooning, Lee Gatch and Ilya Bolowtowsky who have left their mark on American art.

But, Mr. Gottlieb once explained, they never felt they had a common esthetic, they merely believed they needed one another for "mutual protection." He said they felt like "outcasts in the art world, struggling against the Establishment." 

In the nineteen-forties, Mr. Gottlieb painted pictographs drawing on Freudian and Indian influences, and in the early fifties he moved into his imaginary landscape series, which dissolved into the Burst painting of his last period.

Opposed Pop Culture

He had nothing good to say about Pop art and the other styles of the sixties. "I'm against popular culture in any form," he once said. "It's all on the level of Disneyland."

Mr. Gottlieb won the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Bienal in 1963 and was a member of the Art Commission of the City of New York.

Besides his wife Mr. Gottlieb leaves a sister, Mrs. Rhoda London.

A service will be held tomorrow at 1 P.M. at Frank E Campbell's Madison Avenue and 81st Street.


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