Yellow Ochre

Rendered in an ethereal cream and dark amber with cerulean blue, deep green and ruby red orbs, Yellow Ochre is part of a limited body of work that includes twenty-five works on paper that Adolph Gottlieb stretched on a redwood strainer, all from 1970. The year is important and telling because it is the only year in which the artist created these types of stretched works on paper. Perhaps the series was done as an homage to his friend and fellow artist, Mark Rothko, who had commit suicide in February of that year. Rothko was known to use the same water-soaking technique with his works on paper. The technique involved saturating each sheet with water, then attaching it to a strainer so that the paper was evenly spread but not under pressure. As the paper dried, it shrank to tension, resulting in the panel which was then painted with acrylic paint with brushes and palette knives, resulting in a luscious yet smooth surface. As seen in Yellow Ochre, Gottlieb sometimes abraded the paper in specific areas to create more texture. What is left is a remarkable and delicate manipulation of color and texture. Yellow Ochre is presumably one of the only three known works from the series that is still mounted as the artist intended, making it an incredibly rare work from an emotionally-wrought and meaningful time period in Gottlieb’s career.