Adolph Gottlieb was an Abstract Expressionist painter whose subjects and forms were derived from sources including African and Native American art. His series of Pictographs (1941–51) related to the beliefs and myths of these cultures, from which he created a unique visual language. Premonition of Evil, painted just after the end of World War II, depicts fragments of the human body in divided areas of the composition. Searching eyes stare out at the viewer through the windows in Gottlieb's informal grid.
