Jane Gottlieb
American
Draped Bentley, 1999
hand-painted, cibachrome print
20 x 30 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by PhotoFutures
Jane Gottlieb - undated photo
"The ‘Joy Rides’ are symbols of the freedom that made Los Angeles such a special place to grow up in 50 years ago. Intensifying the colors creates an unreal world that reflects a lost, but not forgotten Los Angeles." - Jane Gottlieb
RESEARCH PAPER
Jane Gottlieb celebrated “LaLa Land” before the movie. Gold lame fabric draped over a car surrounded by saturated colors catches your eye and makes a statement about the “car culture” of Los Angeles in the 1960’s.
A story of mystery, fantasy and intrigue describe Jane Gottlieb’s photograph, “Draped Bentley.” Looking more closely, what is this fancy car doing in this ordinary neighborhood of clapboard houses? What is the artist saying with those dazzling colors? The photo creates a shadowy secrecy like “noir films” of the 1930’s and 1940’s but in living color of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Only in Hollywood could the glamor of a Bentley be outdone by the exuberant colors of the artist’s imagination.
In an archival Cibachrome photograph before Photoshop was invented, the scene is a real-life, unadulterated photo of a Los Angeles neighborhood. Gottlieb turns the ordinary scene into a super-charged fantasy of Los Angeles, the glamour of Hollywood and memories of her childhood in the 1950’s. The house colored blue and yellow is like an illusion. The artist turns the photo into a depiction of the American dream of wealth just out of reach, under-wraps next to a house “you grew up in.” The colors are intense and separate the gold fantasy of the car from the blue reality of the house. The colors do not fight each other; instead the vibrant colors work together to bring a smile and understanding of the power of memories, dreams and color.
Gottlieb traveled the world with her camera, capturing fleeting images of exotic landmarks and the mundane. On a trip to the Yucatan she saw houses painted in bright colors; she came home and painted her West LA house turquoise and hot pink. From that point she always lived in brightly painted houses, her own 3D live-in sculptures.
Gottlieb studied “color theory” but works intuitively. She transforms her travel photos into powerful dreamscapes of old cars, chairs, gardens, monuments, landscapes and buildings. She works in series. “Draped Bentley” is part of her “Joy Rides” series used in books, magazines, billboards and now printed on shiny aluminum. In 1960’s America a car represents freedom, adulthood and each automobile has an identity, shape and style. Her bold theatrical work captures this time and culture in Los Angeles, California.
Gottlieb started her career as a painter expressing her love of art with paint, shapes and colors while socializing with other LA photographers and painters in the 1980’s. With a day-job in advertising, she evolved into a full-time photographer. Gottlieb found a new magical way to “soup-up” her vision by hand-painting the archival Cibachrome* prints with vivid retouching dyes into each photographic print. “Draped Bentley” is one of these one-of-a-kind hand-painted Cibachrome prints. This painstakingly slow process soon led her to the Kodak School of Creative Imaging in Camden Maine as one of the first artists to learn the new digital techniques including Photoshop. As an early adopter of Photoshop, Gottlieb scanned and digitized her one-of-a-kind hand-painted Cibachrome prints and her library of thousands of 35mm Kodachrome color transparencies that she had taken over the previous 40 years. When computer printers invented archival paper and inks in the 2000’s, Gottlieb began manipulating her photographs on the computer using color, collage and digital brush to create her joyous worlds of color.
Gottlieb grew up in Los Angeles, CA; studied art at UC Berkeley and UCLA; spent a year in Florence before working in advertising in New York City. She returned to LA working in Hollywood as an artistic director/photographer/designer. She first painted her Cibachrome prints with colored dyes in LA. Cibachrome prints were the first archival color prints. At age 35, Gottlieb had a one-person show at the Laguna Art Museum and has been a full-time artist ever since. She was then one of the first artists to study with Kodak to learn to manipulate her photos on the computer. It took several years to find an archival digital printing process. In 2020 Gottlieb will install a large 14’x15’ mural in the UCSB Library with 8 panels printed on luminescent aluminum.
Jane Gottlieb’s ever-evolving work can be found in various private and international corporate collections including: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Carnegie Art Museum of Oxnard, Frederick R. Weisman Collection, Butler Institute of American Art, Brookings Institute, Cedar Sinai Medical Center, General Telephone & Electronics Corp, The Progressive Corporation Art Collection, Disney Headquarters, EMI/Capitol Records and many others.
Her art has been shown worldwide in many solo exhibitions including: Petersen Automotive Museum, LA, CA; LA County Natural History Museum, CA; Monterey Museum of Art, CA; Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NYC, NY; L’Image Gallery, Rome, Italy; Louis Stern Gallery, West Hollywood, CA; Wall Space, Santa Barbara, CA. In 2018 the UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum held a one-person show “Jane Gottlieb Photographs France.”
Presently you can see Gottlieb’s work at the UCLA Law Library, the UCLA Anderson School of Management and UCLA Charles Young Library and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s eight story stairwell and at the UCSB Gevirtz Center of Higher Education.
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Pattie Firestone, 5/25/2020
*Cibachrome, formally known since the last decade as Ilfochrome, is considered by many as being the most beautiful hand color printing process in the world of fine art photography. This process has become extremely rare. It’s a lost art in a world that has sacrificed for the appeal of speed and ease of digital! One of the advantages of Cibachrome print is the archival property that makes them extremely stable. This stabilization comes from using precious layers of raw silver metals within the paper’s photographic emulsion. Since it uses 13 layers of Azo-Dyes sealed in a polyester base, the print will not fade, discolor, or deteriorate for an extended time. The two main things that create risk for longevity of artwork are UV Light and atmosphere. But Cibachrome artwork doesn’t fade even after it’s put to a high intensity of sunlight and weather conditions for over a long period. This allows for the image to last for many generations without any noticeable loss of color or image quality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
https://janegottlieb.com/
https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/wwwjanegottliebcom?tab=about
https://www.artistsinfo.co.uk/artist/gottlieb-jane/
https://www.artpal.com/janegottlieb
https://www.saatchiart.com/account/profile/284529
http://womeninphotography.org/Events-Exhibits/YALE-WIPI-ARCHIVE/JaneGOTTLIEB/submission.html
https://la.curbed.com/2019/7/22/20699344/santa-barbara-home-tour-jane-gottlieb
Interview with Jane Gottlieb May 20, 2020 by Pattie Firestone.