In the freeze-dried version of the history of American art, the kind familiar from survey courses and gallery tours, each artist of the New York School is identified with a single signature image: Pollock with an all-over tangle of poured paint, Rothko with stacked blocks of color, Kline with overscaled black-and-white brushstrokes, Newman with the “Zip”—a single narrow line—and so on. The name of Adolph Gottlieb (1903–74) is synonymous with the “Burst”—a large, haloed disc hovering above an exuberant tangle of vigorous strokes. The equation is so neat that even among Gottlieb’s admirers, who should know better, Burst paintings are assumed to represent the artist best; I remember one serious collector telling me, moreover, that only the black, white, and red Bursts were worth considering.

But when Gottlieb made the first of the Burst pictures, in 1957, he was fifty-four and had been painting seriously since the late 1920s—more than half his life, at the time. Before he was out of his thirties, he had established himself as a highly accomplished, adventurous figurative painter with a ten-year history of regular exhibitions in New York, a respectable body of work behind him, and a couple of prizes to his credit. His circle of artist-friends included Ilya Bolotowsky, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Edgar Levy, and the charismatic catalyst of the New York art world of the day, John Graham. Gottlieb could boast, too, of a remarkable formation for an American painter of his generation—even, in those