With his pictographs from the 1940s and ’50s, Adolph Gottlieb wanted to change “accepted notions of what a painting should be.” He strove to create paintings that were directly connected to human experience, emphasized their status as objects, and made the viewer an active participant in the creation of meaning. With pictorial elements drawn from a wide variety of sources setting up a dialogue across roughly rectilinear grids, Gottlieb’s paintings achieved the flattening of the picture plane and the elimination of pronounced focal points. Like Hans Hofmann’s work, Gottlieb’s pictographs represent a critical link between European modernism and Abstract Expressionism in America.

Gottlieb studied at the Art Students’ League under John Sloan and Robert Henri, and then moved to Paris, where he was exposed to the art of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and the Cubists. He was also impressed by the art of African, Oceanic, and Native American traditions. Gottlieb’s temporary move to the Arizona desert in 1937 coincided with a major reassessment of his approach to painting, and the art of Native American cultures proved to be a very important factor in the conceptual development of Gottlieb’s work. The flattened space of the pictographs, emphasizing their objectness, is a radical departure, not only significant for Gottlieb’s painting but also for American art of the time as a whole. To achieve the two-dimensionality and balance of a painting like Forgotten Dream, Gottlieb tended to sacrifice contrast in color by using halftones and close values, while its linear grid organization established a strong awareness of the painting’s edges. Thus by further stressing the panel as an object rather than a window, Gottlieb helped to pave the way for the “all-over” look of the Abstract Expressionists.