American Art Collaborative

Adolph Gottlieb was one of the postwar artists in New York who launched the revolutionary movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism. One of his contributions to this artistic style was to devise a mechanism known as the “pictograph,” designed to ensure the free or automatic association of images in compositions such as Untitled. More specifically, the pictograph was a primary component in a technique in which the canvas was divided into a grid. Gottlieb would then insert into its compartments a nonhierarchical array of arbitrary imagery and shapes, ranging from the figurative to the purely abstract. He explained: “I didn’t want to control the imagery, and I set up a system on the canvas whereby I would let random images appear next to each other.” The symbols in this particular pictograph recall the familiar yet mysterious quality of hieroglyphics; these indefinable characters reflect the artist’s intent to establish a universal visual lexicon that transcended language and time.