Equinox

Adolph Gottlieb painted Equinox in 1963 as part of his Burst series. Once he felt he had exhausted the myriad possibilities of his pictographs, Gottlieb began to simplify his symbols and composition in order to enhance themes of universality, looking for new abstract ways of representing emotion and feeling. He incorporated the use of surrealist biomorphic shapes into these paintings, which furthered his abstract ideals. By the 1960s, he was creating paintings like Equinox, in which the grid is reduced to an implied, although occasionally delineated, horizontal division that separates the image into two halves. Within each half, a few shapes—circles, squares, or calligraphic gestures—float against a field of color, vying for focal supremacy.

Duncan Phillips acquired the museum’s two examples of Gottlieb’s work soon after each was painted. Although no specific reference to Gottlieb appears in Phillips’s surviving writings, he could have had Gottlieb in mind when he professed in 1955, “I admire the aesthetic interpretations of the age we live in—even the symbols for the anarchy, the turmoil, and the inner tensions.”