Green, Ochre, Maroon 1969

Curator: Adolph Gottlieb’s 1969 acrylic on canvas, "Green, Ochre, Maroon," pulls us into a space that’s both playful and profound. Editor: My first impression? It feels like a cosmic fruit salad gone rogue, those orbs floating above a cryptic playground. There is a delightful tension between control and chaos. Curator: Definitely. The floating orbs, signature of his "Burst" series, are intended to suggest celestial bodies—sun, moon, planets—archetypes of universality. Notice their imperfections. They are imperfectly circular and painted with loose, gestural brushstrokes. Editor: Precisely. And those raw edges—they feel primordial, like memories surfacing. Look at what's happening below... that swirling gray mass. It has some letterforms, fragments... A broken language. Curator: The lower portion, the ‘ground,’ teems with an eruption of spontaneous markings—dashes, blots, strokes. Here, Gottlieb embraces chance and instinct, countering the controlled clarity of the orbs with impulsive gestures. Gottlieb used these gestures as an exploration of pure painting. Editor: Absolutely! The contrast evokes this dichotomy: spirit versus matter, order versus disorder, conscious versus unconscious. I even sense echoes of ancient alchemical symbols here and there. The plus signs... suggesting transformation and confluence. This pushes beyond decoration, suggesting some ancient collective memory or subconscious. Curator: That fits nicely with Gottlieb's ambition to capture universal human experiences through abstraction. He strips down recognizable imagery to access a deeper realm of emotion. To engage in a non-verbal language to create some kind of raw emotional exchange. Editor: The pastel background softens the contrasts. This reminds us these weighty ideas are still within something soft and nurturing. A pink sky containing it all, I would suggest. Curator: Gottlieb created such a fantastic painting. I think "Green, Ochre, Maroon" is more than just colors on a canvas—it’s an open-ended question, isn't it? One of the oldest questions in history? Editor: A beautiful invitation to ponder the universe within us, rendered in splashes of color. It gives a face to the word “sublime”.