Lawrence Alloway

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The colour organization of No. 2 (1949), though the forms are scattered, is organized by a firm system of containment: red surrounds brown, brown surrounds blue; orange within black, black within brown, brown within red, an order which holds good for each appearance of any of the colours. Like the colour code of a map, the colours occur only in certain relationships. The painting is like a map that is turning back into a substantial reality; not a key to somewhere else, but itself a land. Another visual effect, which depends basically on the creation of an expanding surface, occurs in No. 3 (1951), where a blazing yellow plane is ripped by erupting blues and oranges, mineral hard within Still's amazing surface.
In 1941 Gottlieb 'adopted the term Pictograph for my paintings, out of a feeling of disdain for the accepted notions of what a painting should be'. He was strongly influenced by Torres-Carcia's paintings of the early thirties and, in his turn, he influenced other painters, such as Tomlin. For artists in the early forties who were dissatisfied with cubism's 'by then mannerist iconography, with geometric abstraction's denial of signification, and with the spookiness and sexiness of late surrealism, but who regarded art as a means of communication, primitive arts were useful. Sign language, as Torres-Garcia and Klee showed, combined an eloquent power of making references with a profound respect for the picture surface (that constituent fact); sign language was, in fact, a semantics of the surface, close to the wall. Gottlieb's compartmented space carried symbols of varying referential power. Accusations of privacy, once levelled at these works, are, like so many twentieth-century attacks on modern art, a symmetrical inversion of the truth. These rows and tiers of symbols can, perhaps, be called 'information painting', as Gottlieb's pictographs dramatized art as a means of communication.

His ribbon forms influence Tomlin who took them further in the direction of a calligraphy; however, his pictures typically keep a chunkiness which, for all its elegance, echoes Gottlieb's compartments and never dissolves into a fluid continuum like Tobey's calligraphy. Tomlin's calligraphy is haunted by symbolism, whether we can decipher it or not. The display of marks, though esthetically governed, projects a lyrical pretence of antique messages, the challenge of symbols not yet decoded. His play with mystery triggers curiosity and makes decoders of us all (call it 'the Gold Bug complex'). (No space to pursue information painting in America any further beyond noting that Jasper Johns is its newest practitioner.) Gottlieb's latest work, the fine Burst series has carried him into the surface as space territory. However, it is interesting to note that he retains, though not on a huge scale, something of his earlier symbolism: in this case, the chopped-in black mass is terrestrial, the swimming red blob above it solar.

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