An Inside Look: Adolph Gottlieb and David Smith

 

Adolph Gottlieb and sculptor David Smith became fast friends in 1933, and remained friends through Smith's death in 1965.

In an interview in 1975, Esther Gottlieb describes Gottlieb and Smith's early relationship

"...We were living in Brooklyn Heights and no amount of conversation or suggestions on the part of anybody else made any difference.  David Smith was living on the next block.  I can’t remember where he met David, but they were very good friends, and in those days David was a painter.  There was a very close relationship between all the artists who lived in the area during the WPA days, because all these men were on what’s called the Easel Project.  They were allowed to paint at home, but they had to sign in everyday.  Someone suggested as an alternative that one artist’s studio be designated as headquarters so the men could walk to sign in and not have to spend the time and money to go to the center.  Adolph’s studio became the headquarters.  I don’t know why his studio—it just happened.

We lived on State Street around 1935.  State Street goes straight down to the river, and one block over was Atlantic Avenue, which goes down to the shipyards.  At that time, down near the waterfront, there was an iron works in connection with the ship-building.  Adolph and David would stand at the door and watch them working.  David would reminisce about how he was a sheet metal worker, way back.  One day they were talking about painting and sculpture and David had some great ideas for sculpture, if he only had facilities for doing them.  'What’s the matter with the Terminal Iron Works,' says he one day as they were walking along.  So they stopped in.  He told the man that he was a painter and worked in the neighborhood, and he had experience and knew how to acetylene torches, and that he wanted to do a little work.  So the man said okay.  David went around picking up stuff – all types of metal one could find.  With the scrap metal from the yard, David made his first sculpture."

- An Interview with Esther Gottlieb by Stephen Pearson, 1975

Gottlieb and Smith lost touch briefly in the 1940s when Smith moved away from New York City, but they reconnected later in the decade when Smith began making regular trips to New York. One of the ways in which they maintained their friendship was through regular correspondence.

A 1956 letter from Smith to Gottlieb, discussing the death of Jackson Pollock and Smith's frustration with the art world at the time.

"I'm not feuding with Whitney--I'm dropping them...The hell with them and any other person or institution which doesn't value my work as I do. With a family to support and sculpture to make I shouldn't have this attitude, but I suppose its my death defying acts like Jacks [Jackson Pollock]. I seem to be getting more this way--I want equal rights and I don't want museum people or the like to tell me what art is. I want art to be what I make--or not to hear from them."

- David Smith

 

A letter from Smith to Gottlieb, December 25, 1957

 

"Dear Adolph
This is a fan letter. Your show at the Museum was great. It was excellently chosen and some of the 1957 works I had not seen, even better. I hope you get some great sales from it. Anyhow for me it was wonderful to see so many over the period.

Seasons Greetings to you and Esther,
David"

a letter from Gottlieb to Smith, December 30th, 1957

"Dear David:
Many thanks for your very nice note. It seems that we have a mutual admiration society, which is a most unusual thing for old friends, and I am very pleased with that..."

Gottlieb Foundation Executive Director, Sanford Hirsch, describes a "sympathy between the two in how they approached material, color, and form." Close relationships can be seen in the paintings and sculpture that Smith and Gottlieb created over the course of their careers.

Adolph Gottlieb, The Sea Chest, 1942, oil on canvas, 26 1/16 x 34 3/16". Currently in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York

David Smith, Home of the Welder, 1945, steel, 533 × 438 × 356 mm. Currently in the collection of the Tate, London

Historian and art critic Karen Wilkin pointed out some similarities between Smith’s The Letter of 1950 and Gottlieb’s Pictographs of the same period.

Adolph Gottlieb, Letter to a Friend, 1948, Oil, tempera, and gouache on canvas, 47 7/8 x 36 1/4"

David Smith, The Letter, c. 1950, 37 5/8 x 22 7/8 x 9 1/4”. Photograph by David Smith

Later works by both artists continue to display many parallels.

Adolph Gottlieb, Spray, 1959, oil on canvas, 90 1/4 x 72 3/8“. Currently in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

David Smith. 7 Hours. 1961. Steel, paint, 84 1/2 x 48 x 18 in. (214.6 x 121.9 x 45.7 cm). Collection Onnasch, Berlin. Photo: Robert McKeever

All Artworks by Adolph Gottlieb ©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by ARS, NY, NY
All Artworks by David Smith © 2020 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

To see more works by Adolph Gottlieb, click here.
To learn more about David Smith, visit the website of the David Smith Estate.

 

A Closer Look: Andrew Hudson and Adolph Gottlieb

 
 

Photograph of Andrew Hudson and Adolph Gottlieb, from the article ''Adolph Gottllieb: An Artist Who Is
Surviving'', by Andrew Hudson, Arts Magazine, March/April,1978. Photo by Roger Tripp

 

Andrew Hudson was an art critic for the Washington Post, he is an artist himself, and he taught at the Corcoran School in Washington for over thirty years. In his role as a critic, Andrew conducted two lengthy interviews with Adolph Gottlieb, and he reviewed his art on several occasions and got to know the artist and his wife Esther.

We were lucky enough to recently interview him. We are currently working on the full-length video, but in the meantime, here are a couple video vignettes and excerpts from the interview.

 
 

"I wrote Adolph a letter asking for an interview, but before he even got the letter, I bumped into him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the lobby. So I went up to him and said, 'Hey Mr. Gottlieb. I’m Andrew Hudson from the Washington Post. I’ve just written you a letter to ask you if we can have an interview.' So he said, 'Well come to my studio the next time you’re in New York,' which I did; it was in the Flatiron building then.

And it was very interesting because when I arrived he led me into a small room with about nine or ten paintings on the walls, very good paintings. And I was sure that this was like a test, that if I responded ok to the paintings, he would give an interview, and maybe if I didn’t respond very well, he wouldn’t. But I obviously responded very well. So we had the interview, and I loved that interview! Since it was just the two of us in his studio, he talked a lot about 'making paintings.' And he had wonderful things to say about—sometimes a painting would happen all by itself like a miracle, but of course he was also very good at correcting things and seeing things in his paintings. That went very well."
 

Shown here: Adolph Gottlieb, Spray, 1959, oil on canvas, 90 1/4 x 72 3/8“⠀
Collection: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by ARS, NY, NY⠀

Andrew Hudson: Let me tell you something else Esther told me in East Hampton. Funny story about Hirshhorn, Mr. Hirshhorn. She said that people who were struggling financially had to sell their paintings to Hirshhorn at lower prices when he asked for lower prices, but Adolph didn’t have to do that. So Hirshhorn would come and say, 'How much is that painting?' And Adolph would quote a figure and Hirshhorn would say, 'What’s that, a telephone number?' But eventually would have to pay what Adolph was asking, because Adolph did not budge, which was very good for Adolph I think, heh!

Sanford Hirsch: It was and Hirshhorn had—has a number of really top paintings.

Andrew Hudson: Oh absolutely. I mean, when I did that article on the Whitney’s part of the museum show in New York, I was so happy about a painting called Two Discs which belonged to Hirshhorn because I knew they were going to have to come from Washington. But the curators only ever showed it within the first year of it being in the collection. It’s never been up, it’s been in storage. And I read an article complaining about that in a small magazine up in Washington because at the National Gallery someone like Rubens has something like four or five paintings. So someone like Adolph should have several paintings. And they’ve got the wonderful painting Spray which is usually up, but they should also put Two Discs up as well, in my opinion. They’re depriving the art world of seeing how great Adolph really was, or is.

 

Shown here: Adolph Gottlieb,Two Discs, 1963, oil on canvas, 90 x 108 "
Collection: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by ARS, NY, NY⠀⠀

 

"I bumped into Adolph in I guess ’66. Noland’s very first show of Stripe paintings at Emmerich Gallery. And they were large paintings with rows of stripes parallel, horizontal stripes, like there might be a dozen stripes of gray going across a white canvas. And they were kind of a bit monochromatic, monotonous, but they were something totally new at the time. And I met Adolph there and he said, 'These are just like bedsheets.' But then he came back to me seeing I wasn’t too pleased with his comment, because I admired Noland. He said, 'I was only kidding.' He said, 'He’s a good painter.' And that’s very much like Matisse...because Matisse was also very good at acknowledging that the artists that come after you are not going to be like you, they’re going to be rebelling against you."

"I felt very akin to Adolph in many ways even though I was trying to paint in a way where I didn’t see the composition at all. It was sort of going against him in that sense, but I always have felt I was closest to him as an artist than to the other painters I mentioned, Bush or Olitski. So he was very much a force in my life as an artist as much as someone I admired as an art critic.”

 

Shown here: Andrew Hudson in his studio, with print of Nadir in the background.
Adolph Gottlieb, Nadir, 1952, oil on canvas,42 x 72 "
©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by ARS, NY, NY⠀

 

To read more writings on Adolph Gottlieb by Andrew Hudson, click here.