On June 2, 1943, Edward Alden Jewell, arts critic for The New York Times, wrote a review of a recent gallery show of contemporary American artists. He was skeptical of the work he saw, writing, “You will have to make of Marcus Rothko’s ‘The Syrian Bull’ what you can, nor is this department prepared to shed the slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gottlieb’s ‘Rape of Persephone.’”

If these names or titles sound at all familiar, it is because our own Allen Memorial Art Museum houses these two very same works. If you have ever found yourself wandering the Allen, it probably didn’t cross your mind that the creators of these two works were two of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century.

Gottlieb and Rothko were founders of Abstract Expressionism, a uniquely American art aesthetic which radically altered the field of modern art not only in America, but worldwide. The New York Times’ early skepticism of their work was proved drastically wrong, as Picasso, Dalí and the European modern art movement stepped aside for Gottlieb and his contemporaries.

The Allen is currently exhibiting a show of Gottlieb’s early prints, put together by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. The exhibit opened on Nov. 7 with a lecture on the artist and his work by Sanford Hirsch, a close friend of Adolph and Esther Gottlieb and the executive director of the Foundation. 

As one begins walking down the short aisle in which the exhibit — “Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation” — is displayed, one of the first works one sees is a woodcut Gottlieb made in 1938, “Untitled (Arizona Landscape).”

On a chalky black background, large, dancing cacti are etched in bold white lines into the center of the piece, while a white clapboard house and fence are to the side. The cacti stretch their big arms toward the black expanse of the sky, seeming almost to dance. The juxtaposition of the familiar, suburban image of the clapboard house with the alien dancing cacti, depicted in bold white cuts, evokes the melancholic beauty of the desert — the nostalgia of loneliness.

In this, as in his other work on display, Gottlieb uses the simplicity and charm of child-like and tribal imagery to impart darkly complex emotional messages, as a way to respond to the political and cultural upheaval that he lived through. 

Gottlieb was born in 1903 in New York and began painting in high school.  He started his career painting single-subject figures (a prime example of this work being “Rape of Persephone”), but after a vacation on Cape Cod in the 1930s, he began to use a grid, a visual motif that permeated his work until he returned to the single-subject in the 1950s. 

While walking on the beach on the Cape, he collected shells and other sea debris, which he arranged into partitioned wooden boxes. He then sketched his boxes (a few of these early etchings are on display in the Allen’s exhibit), and these sketches led to his exploration of printing techniques (such as aquatint, etching, wood printing and linoleum cuts) and the development of his “pictographs:” prints that utilized the grid to compartmentalize surreal and mythological images.

Living as he did through the Depression and the following World War, Gottlieb’s art reflects the general cultural horror and anxiety in a world run amok. In one piece at the Allen, “Apparition,” one gets a sense of the individual isolation and confusion of the times. 

Faceless figures emerge from their gridded expanse, while smaller figures hang abstractly in the back, surrounded by circles and cages in other squares. Gottlieb’s delicate scratches and careful carvings into linoleum or wood eloquently and subtly communicate the horrors and pains of war.

Gottlieb’s prints are visually arresting and emotionally evocative. The exhibit, while small, provides a solid sense of his early development as an artist. The works themselves are often funny and charming, as giant blobs almost appear to dance and geometric faces stare quizzically out of their wooden frames.

Underneath such joyful simplicity, however, is an underlying sense of anxiety and isolation. Gottlieb ingeniously captures the layered complexity of human emotion through the cut of his etchings and scratch of his pencil. The exhibit is one to check out, and maybe one to spend a little extra time on — the more you look at these prints, the more they have to say.