Adolph Gottlieb (American, 1903-1974)
Labyrinth #3, 1954
Oil and enamel on canvas
©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

By the end of the 1940s Gottlieb felt the need to change his paintings, even though they were aesthetically and commercially successful. His initial impulse was to separate the Pictographs into two component parts-image and grid-and examine each separately. These paintings became the Unstill Lifes (such as Sentinel of 1951, and The Couple of 1955) and Labyrinths (such as Labyrinth #3 of 1954).

Labyrinth #3 is the largest in the series. Its immense scale coincided seamlessly with the new, heroic proportions of American abstract painting of the 1950s. The quality of the lines moving across the picture plane reflects the influence of Jackson Pollock's all-over drip paintings, but Gottlieb's control of line, composition, and symbolic imagery distinguishes this painting from the purely gestural work of some of his colleagues.

Gottlieb began a third type of painting in 1951 that he called Imaginary Landscapes (such as Sea and Tide of 1952 and Red at Night of 1956). In these paintings, Gottlieb divided the plane of the image into distinct upper and lower halves. He placed these halves in opposition by using different imagery and methods of paint application. Still exploring the emotional complexities of the Pictographs, Gottlieb pushed his art further toward pure abstraction.

In 1956, the various ideas Gottlieb explored in these paintings converged and took the form of his most popular image, the Burst. Typically, a Burst painting, such as Ascent of 1958, is a vertical canvas in which a cohesive disc in the upper register coexists with an irregular, explosive mass in the lower half. Gottlieb's achievement was to make a vital and complex whole from these apparently contradictory forms.