American Art Collaborative

Adolph Gottlieb rebelled against his parents by taking art classes instead of joining the family's stationery business. When he was eighteen, he worked his way to Paris with no money or passport, and sneaked into art classes at the Acadmie de la Grand Chaumire. In 1922 he came back to America and studied painting at the Art Students League, learning to do things that were not exactly literal and to work from imagination and memory (1967 interview, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). He became friends with the painters Mark Rothko and Milton Avery and was a founding member of The Ten, a group opposed to the social realist painting of the 1930s. Gottlieb was involved in many artists associations and in 1950 was the principal organizer of The Irascibles, a group of artists who protested an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that had ignored recent abstract American art. (Alloway and MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, 1981