Adolph Gottlieb (March 14, 1903 – March 4, 1974) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker. Early life and education Adolph Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York in 1903 to Jewish parents. From 1920–1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which, having determined to become an artist he left high school at the age of 17 and worked his passage to Europe on a merchant ship. He traveled in France and Germany for a year. He lived in Paris for 6 months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He spent the next year traveling in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other part of Central Europe, visiting museums and art galleries. When he returned, he was one of the most traveled New York Artists. After his return to New York, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, and the Educational Alliance. 1920s and 1930s Gottlieb had his first solo exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries in New York City in 1930. During the 1920s and early 1930s he formed lifelong friendships with other artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Milton Avery, and John Graham. In 1935 he and a group of artists including Ben-Zion, Joseph Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Harris, Mark Rothko, and Louis Schanker, known as "The Ten", exhibited their works together until 1940. During that period Gottlieb made a living with a variety of part-time jobs, and he worked on the Federal Art Project in 1936. From September 1937 to June 1938, Gottlieb lived in the Arizona desert, outside of Tucson. In those nine months, he radically changed his approach to painting. He moved from an expressionist-realist style to an approach that combined elements of surrealism and formalist abstraction, using objects and scenes from the local environment as symbols to remove temporality from his work. He transitioned from this into more Surrealist works like the Sea Chest, which displays mysterious incongruities on an otherwise normal landscape. It is then that he conveys to the viewer the expansiveness he must have felt looking at Arizona desert sky, although he distills this expansiveness into a more basic abstract form. "I think the emotional feeling I had was that it was