Germination III,

1969

Adolph Gottlieb was a defining voice—as an artist and a critic—of the twentieth-century avant-garde; he championed abstraction as an artistic language that could reach beyond the limitations of representation to express contradictory psychological forces, specifically the simultaneity of traumatic uncertainty and economic optimism in postwar America. This lithograph is a variation on a composition Gottlieb explored over decades, in which the picture plane is divided between a top register with floating patches of color and a frenetic bottom register filled with drippy gestural brushstrokes. Each element encapsulates opposing expressions—the colored spheres in the top register levitate upward and are weighed down while green gestures establish a ground that also writhes with motion.