Thank you to Michael Miller for a very articulate review. It is valuable to have stressed the steadiness and continuity with which Gottlieb's painting retained its pre-verbal symbolic value from the moment he embarked on the Pictographs through to the end. Thank you to Marc Chabot for his comment--I will swiftly obtain Rushing's book. There is no doubt that if one exhibition leads to another, with different lines of enquiry and new light to shed, this gives rather serious purpose to exhibition-making. Lawrence Alloway once used the phrase 'the thickness of history'. One way of interpreting this phrase is to pay attention to lesser known artists who may or may not qualify as minor, who have not been through the mill of accumulating bibliographical notoriety by constant mention in surveys and textbooks, nor of hype in the art market. These are the tens of thousands of artists who constitute the body of culture, of which artists whom consensus classifies as major are only the shiny surface. A look through the list of exhibitions given by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery (1942-47) in New York--easily consultable in Angelica Rudenstine's catalogue raisonné (1985, Abrams) of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection--reveals that she gave solo shows to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, Charles Seliger, Richard Pousette-Dart and Clyfford Still but also to many others such as, with reference to Chabot's list above, Peter Busa (March 9-30, 1946) and Sonia Sekula (May 14-June 1, 1946).

A fine review Michael; it makes me wish I could travel to Italy to see this comprehensive retrospective of Gottlieb's work. Perhaps your review may spark some stateside curators to collaborate on bringing this show to the U.S., particularly New York where the potential for comparing Gottlieb's achievement with for instance, the Indian Space Painters group, (Wheeler, Daum, Busa, Barrer, Barrell, Lewin, Collier), Barnet, who taught several of them at the League, and lesser known artists like Sonia Sekula, and Edward Renouf for instance, might benefit from formal consideration and comparison. Having recently finished reading W. Jackson Rushing's "Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde",
I for one would enjoy the opportunity to see these and other artists work not mentioned considered for what sources their work was drawn from, what they shared in common, and what their individual visions and contributions to American culture were and are.