Rothko/Gottlieb

The works in the exhibition center around 1942–1946, a time when the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust profoundly altered the material and psychological landscape of Western culture. The impact of the war on artists was deeply consequential. Faith in progress, reason, and classical humanism had been shaken. Artists faced the challenge of addressing a reality that seemed increasingly beyond conventional forms of representation. For Rothko and Gottlieb, myth, archaic imagery, and invented signs offered new ways to explore deep human experience—a pre-industrial psyche, untainted by the sins of modernity.

As Gottlieb and Rothko absorbed key ideas of the Surrealist movement—automatism, myth, dream, and the unconscious—they made them their own. In 1941, Gottlieb began developing paintings composed from stylized, abstracted, and simplified figures, animals, and symbols within an irregular grid. This exhibition includes a selection of these Pictographs, including an early example from 1941. Gottlieb would continue working in this idiom, evocative as much of carved ancient glyphs or runes as of the paintings on the inside of prehistoric caves, for the next decade and into the mid-1950s. At the same time, Rothko’s assault on classicism took a more organic, biomorphic turn. In Gethsemane (1945), a highlight of the exhibition, Rothko pictures the pathos of the biblical story of Christ’s betrayal and final hours in a psychologically charged yet entirely abstract form.

The closeness of Gottlieb’s and Rothko’s thinking during the decade is echoed in two jointly authored statements published in 1943. In “Rothko and Gottlieb’s Letter to the Editor,” published in The New York Times on June 13, the two artists responded directly to the critic Edward Alden Jewell’s dismissal of their work. “We favor the simple expression of complex thought,” they wrote, famously going on to call for subject matter in modern painting that could be both “tragic and timeless.” Later that year, in the October 13 WNYC broadcast of “The Portrait and the Modern Artist,” the two artists expounded on the role of myth in uncovering new possibilities for modern painting, declaring that “the whole of man’s experience becomes his model.”

Rothko/Gottlieb: The Surrealist Years returns to this moment when the familiar world had become strange, when painting was searching for a new language to grapple with the reshaping of reality in the wake of war. Across both artists’ works, fragments of mythic form hover between recognizable and unknown. Rothko and Gottlieb remain bound together in this epic quest, each finding his own way forward. The abstractions that would come later are already embedded somewhere here—but so is the strange, unsettled world from which they emerged. They presage what was to come, but the works of the 1940s also stand on their own: mysterious, searching, and charged with the uncertainties of their time.