Gottlieb_Rising_Mark

Mark Auslander on Adolph Gottlieb. Rising. 1962.
//"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."//

Physicist Robert Oppenheimer is said to have pondered these famous lines from the Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing the first atomic bomb test, Trinity, in the New Mexico desert in 1945.

I find myself recalling these lines as I look at Adolph Gottlieb’s powerful work Rising, from his Burst series. Created in 1962, at the height of Cold War tensions, the work was based on drawings Gottlieb had earlier made in the Arizona desert. Did photographs of te the many nuclear tests conducted in the southwestern deserts, as well as the remembered horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, help to shape Gottlieb’s composition? Does the rising red-orange glow evoke not only a desert sun but the expanding horror of a nuclear blast?

Does the work perhaps evoke as well the curious, terrible and savage beauty of Armageddon, a vision that haunted Cold War collective imaginations? Two years later, in Dr. Strangelove, T.J. Pickens would joyously ride the H-Bomb out of the B-52 bomb bay, setting off the doomsday machinge. Global apocalypse would be presented by Kubrick as a glorious montage of mushroom clouds. Is there any sense in which Gottlieb presents to us a vision of our final sunrise, glorious, savage, and seared forever in our retinas as a burning after image?