The Gottlieb Foundation donates Adolph Gottlieb’s rare 1936 painting to the Cape Ann Museum

The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation has donated to the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Adolph Gottlieb’s painting “Untitled”, c. 1936, oil on Masonite, 18×24 inches (about 46×61 cm). The news was announced last week and reported on October 2, 2026, as the Boston Globe reports, in an article signed by Mark Feeney.

The painting was among the more than 82 works of the exhibition “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea”, which closed on September 27 after being visited by more than 25,000 people. Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the Gottlieb Foundation for 50 years, said the gift is gratitude for the museum’s extraordinary efforts and for those of curator Eliza Rathbone in organising the exhibition; the foundation usually does NOT make such institutional donations, so the gesture is rare.

The work is a transitional painting based on the sketches Gottlieb made of the Gloucester piers during his summers in Cape Ann; it depicts a lone figure on a pier, in sombre tones, created in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression. This is the SECOND gift linked to the exhibition: in August, Christopher Rothko (Rothko’s son) donated to the museum his father’s 1934 watercolour “Untitled (wharf, Gloucester, Massachusetts)”, according to the museum‘s announcement of October 2, 2026.

The exhibition now travels to The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. — the first time an exhibition of the Cape Ann Museum goes to a national museum. The exhibition tells the story of three New York artist friends — Gottlieb, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Milton Avery (1885–1965) — who spent their summers in Cape Ann for more than three decades. The museum’s director, Oliver Barker, called the gift “unexpected and much appreciated”.