In Paris in the early 1950s, Copley
developed a unique, ribald
figurative style that bucked prevailing trends toward abstraction, taking inspiration from Surrealist painting, American, cartoon and silent - movie
imagery.
The early Pictographs were created with a defined grid structure in order to organize theimages, often
figurative and fragmented, in a utilitarian manner.Around 1948, Gottlieb began deconstructing the grid in an effort to find an alternative way to balance nature's interrelated forces: order and chaos.The earliest work on view, Inscription to a Friend, 1948, is an example of Gottlieb's initial attempts to integrate abstract forms that could still be relatable to a larger universal language, without the help ofthe grid.Inscription, 1954, demonstrates Gottlieb's further progression into purely abstract
imagery using an evocative and highly
developed lexicon.