Mythic themes and symbols derived from Jungian psychoanalysis dominated Gottlieb's rectilinear "pictographs" of the 1940's and early 1950's. In his series of "imaginary landscapes" and "bursts" which began in the mid 1950's, the duality of an earthbound realm and transcendent cosmological one are fixed in contrast. Gottlieb, like his fellow Abstract Expressionists, constantly sought inspiration from the subconscious and "the simple expression of the complex thought." Late in his life his art increasingly became painting about painting, meditation on the process of applying liquid pigment to canvas.