Dawn 1965

Curator: Adolph Gottlieb’s "Dawn," painted in 1965, offers a striking interplay of simple forms. The piece showcases Gottlieb’s exploration of abstract expressionism through line and monochrome. Editor: My first impression? This evokes a sense of primordial tension. The raw black marks against the blank canvas feel stark and deliberate, like the barest essentials needed to convey a feeling of, well, a new beginning, perhaps? Curator: It's interesting that you key into "primordial" as the canvas size and monochrome palette allow viewers to focus entirely on form and the physical process of mark-making. It underscores how the hand shapes abstract feeling. One might consider this painting as indexical as it shows the pure labor involved. Editor: Labor perhaps, but to what end? The heavy crescent shape arches upwards almost hopefully. Above, the clustered shapes look like thoughts or seeds, possibilities just forming. There's a definite upward movement implied in this organization that speaks to aspiration or...evolution. Do you agree with the "Dawn" title? Curator: Dawn suggests optimism, but the shapes at the top, for me, carry a fragmented or unsettled feel; the monochrome reinforces this, making the "labor" involved less celebratory and more somber. I see not optimism, but rather, it speaks to the labor behind creative potential. Editor: A darker dawn, perhaps then? If you step back, the overall image does also resemble a cosmic egg cracking open. Gottlieb was very interested in myth and universal symbols and so I’m not surprised the monochrome lends the work gravity; perhaps he wanted to move beyond pure hope to examine birth's inherent struggle and power dynamic? Curator: Exactly. "Struggle" sums it up; by focusing on monochrome brushstrokes, on application, the painting confronts this sense of striving through visible mark making itself and points back towards his working method, it embodies an indexical reference and speaks to what abstraction offers in its barest, most visible forms. Editor: So perhaps it's the tension between hope and struggle that makes this painting so resonant and true to our human experience of starting over, time and again. I read aspiration; you see hard work. Different readings, same dawn. Curator: I find this dialectical interpretation exciting! Let's consider, "Dawn", then, not simply as the genesis, but rather a representation of working through to start anew.