Paintings That Recall Their Time, Now Gone




"With Gottlieb, we have art that is more of its own moment; it looks dated. Yet while Gottlieb's painting may not have aged well, the show is still interesting for the light it shines on a period of tremendous creative ferment . . .
In 1970 Gottlieb suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side, but he continued to work until two weeks before his death in 1974. His last canvases have a wan lyricism. Today, in a world of post-Modernist irony and multicultural complexity, the beliefs that Gottlieb stood for - art as a heroic quest, abstraction as a universal language - are no longer as popular. To revisit Gottlieb is to go back to a time when the fate of the world's soul seemed to hang on the shadowy alchemy of abstract painting." [NYTimes:Arts]

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