Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) attended lectures by Robert Henri and studied painting under John Sloan at the Art Students League (New York); he also attended sketch classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière (Paris), the Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union (New York). Gottlieb participated in his first group exhibition in 1926 and four years later enjoyed his first solo show in New York City. Early in his career, Gottlieb became a founding member of "The Ten," a group of artists devoted to expressionist and abstract painting, and began friendships with Milton Avery, Barnet Newman and David Smith. Gottlieb was also a founding member of "The New York Artist-Painters," a group of abstract painters established in 1943 including Mark Rothko, John Graham and George Constant. That same year, Gottlieb co-authored a letter with Rothko published in The New York Times which was the first formal statement of concerns of the Abstract Expressionist artists. The first American recipient of the Grand Premio at the 1963 Bienal de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Gottlieb received numerous accolades such as the American Academy of Achievement award (1965) and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1971). In 1959, Gottlieb was invited to exhibit at Documenta II (Kassel) and was honored with a retrospective exhibition in 1968 that was the first and only exhibition organized jointly by-and simultaneously exhibited at-the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). Recently the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation organized Adolph Gottlieb: A Survey, a traveling 2001 exhibition with venues including IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez (Valencia, Spain), Fundacion Juan March (Madrid, Spain), and the Von der Heydt Museum (Wuppertal, Germany).

Gottlieb's work belongs to numerous U.S. and international public collections including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Nationalgalerie (Berlin), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Tate Gallery (London), The Tel Aviv Museum (Tel Aviv), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).