From 1920 to 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.

[4] He lived in Paris for six 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 parts of Central Europe, visiting museums and art galleries.

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.

During that period Gottlieb made a living with a variety of part-time jobs and worked on the Federal Art Project in 1936.

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.

Here 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 like being at sea …Then there's the tremendous clarity – out in Arizona there's a tremendous clarity of light and at night the clouds seem very close.

They also exchanged copies of the magazine "Cahiers d'art" and were quite familiar with current ideas about automatic writing and subconscious imagery.

Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality.

Each image existed independently of the others, yet their arrangement on the same plane, along with relationships of color, texture and shape, allow the viewer to associate with them.

For Gottlieb, biomorphism was a way to freely express his unconscious mind, in which he had become fascinated via John Graham, Sigmund Freud and Surrealism.

Imaginary Landscapes are horizontal canvasses divided into two registers, one very active below a more contemplative upper one, set up a different approach to abstraction at mid-century.

He created "Burst" and "Imaginary Landscape" type paintings for the remainder of his career but, unlike some of his colleagues, he did not limit himself to one or two images.Discussion of Gottlieb's art is usually limited to mentions of "Bursts" or "Imaginary Landscapes", which detracts from the broad range of ideas this artist examined.

[15]A representative painting from this period is included in The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.

[16] In 1967 while Gottlieb was preparing for the Whitney and Guggenheim Museum exhibition he began to make small models for sculptures out of cut and painted cardboard that, he said, made him feel like "a young sculptor, just beginning".

In ways similar to his friend the sculptor David Smith, Gottlieb's background as a painter made it impossible for him to visualize objects without color.

Once he accepted this, He was compelled to use all the tools he had developed in his long painting career – touch, visual balance, surface quality and more – to make his sculptures, like his paintings, become "a vehicle for the expression of feeling… I feel a necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the particular shapes, carry the burden of everything that I want to express, and all has to be concentrated within these few elements.

In 1950 he was the primary organizer of the protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art that resulted in him and his colleagues gaining recognition as "The Irascibles".