?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB Hieroglyph.
Drypoint printed in black on cream wove paper, 1944. 150x100 mm; 6x4 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 11/15 in pencil, lower margin. A brilliant, richly-inked impression of this extremely scarce, early drypoint.
Gottlieb referred to these early prints (the approximately 20 drypoints, etchings and woodcuts he made in the 1940s) as Pictographs, suggesting there were messages in the various signs and symbols that fill the grid-like compartments in the images. These early etchings show strong ties to the Surrealist prints of Joan Miró, Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy. Whether or not Jackson Pollock ever knew these early etchings by Gottlieb is uncertain, though there are certainly affinities with Pollock's 1944-45 intaglio works printed at Atelier 17 in New York.
We have not found any other Pictograph print by Gottlieb at auction in the past 25 years; the exremely small number of impressions that survive are mainly found in museums and private collections. Associated American Artists 17 (illustration page 7).
