American artist Adolph Gottlieb was a pioneering abstract expressionist painter. His work was influenced by surrealism, automatism, and Jungian psychology. Gottlieb was born in 1903 in New York City and attended the Art Students League and Cooper Union college.

Gottlieb is known for his pictographs—paintings of familiar and invented symbols arranged in grid form. He also developed works he described as “Imaginary Landscapes,” which feature horizontal canvases divided into two portions. His later “Burst” paintings simplified form even further, often to a brightly colored disk hovering over a mass of dark brushstrokes.

The painter was associated with prominent New York painters Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, and his work reflects their influence. Gottlieb achieved notable success. In 1968, he was the subject of a retrospective presented at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He died in 1974 at age 70.