Amorphous 1973

Adolph Gottlieb made this painting with a reductive, yet powerful vocabulary of sun, land, and horizon, painted in candy colors, like ice cream you might get at the beach! I imagine the canvas lying flat, the artist hovering above, looking down, deciding where these shapes want to land. That ochre yellow is really doing it for me – it's so alive with subtle variations of tone and saturation. I can see the movement in it, like cloud shadows over a field. Then that red sun or moon shape above, that kinda floats. I want to touch it. It reminds me of Rothko's stacked rectangles, but Gottlieb is doing something else here – an openness, a lightness of touch. This feels very American to me, even though he's channeling European abstraction. It's not just about the forms themselves, but how they sit together, like a conversation between color and space. Like two old friends meeting on a beach, knowing glances and understanding, even in silence.