From the Archive: Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko — Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation

"During the thirties and forties, Mark and I used to get together and talk. He was one of the few guys who was articulate because in those days painters were sort of silent men."
–Adolph Gottlieb in an interview with Dore Ashton, February 4, 1972

Shown: Adolph Gottlieb (left) and Mark Rothko (right) at an unknown art opening, March 6, 1961. Photographer: Fred McDarrah.

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko first met in the late 1920s and remained close friends throughout their lives. Through a selection of archival documents, interviews, and artwork, we are highlighting several important moments in their lives and practice.

"I first met Mark at the Art Center Gallery on 56th street, one of the little galleries introducing new artists. We both used to go to the Opportunity Gallery around 1928 or 1929. Every month they used to show young artists and they usually got some well-known artist to judge, such as Kuniyoshi or Alexander Brooke. Mark and I and Milton Avery frequently got into those shows."
–Adolph Gottlieb in an interview with Dore Ashton, February 4, 1972

"We all went to Gloucester together and once we went to Vermont. And Adolph and Esther came up and took a house near us. But in Gloucester, Rothko came up and Gottlieb came up. They were about ten years younger than Milton, but they all respected him a great deal and they used to hang around, as we'd say. You know, in the City, actually, Rothko lived across the street from us and he'd be at our house almost every night. And Gottlieb would come in very often. And, you know, they'd bring their girlfriends and finally they'd bring their wives when they had them and it was like a close-knit family really. We were very close."
–Sally Avery, recalling the decade of the 1930s, in a 1982 interview with Tom Wolf

Shown: Adolph Gottlieb, *Mark Rothko*, c. 1933-35, gouache, 20 x 16 inches.

Mark Rothko, *[Seated man],* 1937/39, graphite on bond paper, 5 1/2 x 4 inches, (possibly Gottlieb).

After meeting Avery in 1929, Gottlieb often visited him with Mark Rothko, first at the Averys' studio in Lincoln Square, then at 72nd Street where they moved around 1930. Gottlieb and Rothko were greatly inspired by Avery's practice and often worked in Avery's studio, sketching each other and working from the same life models.

Gottlieb viewed myth as an alternative to realism, which he wanted to avoid. He recalled saying to Rothko around 1941, "'How about some classical subject matter like mythological themes?' And we agreed... Mark chose to do some themes from the plays of Aeschylus, and I played around with the Oedipus myth, which was both a classical theme and a Freudian theme."
–A passage from "Adolph Gottlieb, A Retrospective" Exhibition Catalogue

1943: Letter to the Times

Adolph Gottlieb, *The Rape of Persephone,* 1943, oil on canvas, 34 3/16 × 26 1/8 inches, Collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Mark Rothko, *The Syrian Bull*, 1943, oil and graphite on canvas, 39 3/8 × 27 13/16 inches, Collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

"We were having a show at Wildenstein’s, the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors around 1943 and Edward Alden Jewell reviewed the show. He said he couldn’t understand two of the paintings. I called him up and asked that if we’d explain them would he print it. He said yes so I called up Mark and we were close to Barney (Barnett Newman) and Barney was a bit of a writer. So Barney drafted an introduction to our statement."
–Adolph Gottlieb in an interview with Dore Ashton, February 4, 1972

In June of 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko exhibited new paintings in an exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Edward Alden Jewell, senior art critic at the New York Times, published a lukewarm review of the show. Jewell wrote, "You will have to make of Marcus Rothko's The Syrian Bull what you can; nor is this department prepared to shed the slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gottlieb's Rape of Persephone." In response, Gottlieb and Rothko wrote a letter that was published a few days later in the New York Times. This letter served as the first formal statement of concerns of the artists who became known as the Abstract Expressionists.

Edward Alden Jewell's review in the New York Times, June 1943.

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko's response to Edward Alden Jewell's review in the New York Times, June 7, 1943.

"We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power."
–Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in their response to Edward Alden Jewell, June 7, 1943

Shown: *The* *Rape of Persephone* (left) and *The Syrian Bull* (right) installed at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2017.

1943: WNYC Interview

On October 13, 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko defended their use of myth and abstraction in their paintings in a radio interview titled The Portrait and the Modern Artist.

Adolph Gottlieb, *Eyes of Oedipus*, 1941, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 25 inches.

Mark Rothko, *Leda*, 1940/41, oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches, © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

"Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man's experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man's experience becomes his model, and in that sense, it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea."
–Mark Rothko in The Portrait and the Modern Artist," from a broadcast on Art in New York, Radio WNYC, October 13, 1943.

"I think that anyone who looked carefully at my portrait of Oedipus, or at Mr. Rothko's Leda will see that this is not mythology out of Bulfinch. The implications here have direct application to life, and if the presentation seems strange, one could without exaggeration make a similar comment on the life of our time. [...] All genuine art forms utilize images that can be readily apprehended by anyone acquainted with the global language of art. That is why we use images that are directly communicable to all who accept art as the language of the spirit, but which appear as private symbols to those who wish to be provided with information or commentary."
–Adolph Gottlieb in The Portrait and the Modern Artist," from a broadcast on Art in New York, Radio WNYC, October 13, 1943.

The WNYC interview "was helpful because they [Gottlieb and Rothko] both felt that they were sort of outcasts and the public was not interested in them. And that opportunity that first time at WNYC. I think they both felt very much that they lived isolated from the general public and I believe they did have a great deal of satisfaction out of being able to tell the world."
–Esther Gottlieb in an interview with Phyllis Tuchman on October 22, 1981

1950: The Irascibles

In 1950 Gottlieb organizes a protest against an exhibition jury at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through which Gottlieb and his colleagues, including Mark Rothko, became known as "The Irascibles." The group is pictured below in the famous Life Magazine photo taken by Nina Leen.

Irascibles photo for Life Magazine, November 24, 1950. Photographer: Nina Leen. Gottlieb is pictured in the top row, second from left. Rothko is pictured in the front row, seated at the right.

The Gottlieb/Rothko Friendship

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko were life-long friends although very different personalities. They shared a number of experiences and stayed in touch with one another until shortly before Rothko's death in 1970. These two friends, who had collaborated on historically important actions earlier in their careers, jointly discussed and developed the idea of forming foundations that would utilize part of their estates to establish grant programs for mature artists. The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation continues to administer two grant programs for artists and it maintains an archive of the artists' papers that is available to scholars.

"We stayed friends. I felt that we all had had a difficult struggle which we shared to a large extent. We’d been together out of a need for mutual support. In the last few years when he was ill, it was hard to get him out of his studio. We’d usually go have lunch near his studio, Chinese food."
–Adolph Gottlieb in an interview with Dore Ashton, February 4, 1972

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness."
–Mark Rothko

“The very nature of abstraction, the very nature of abstract thought is to reduce the complexity of all of life and to bring it down to something very simple which embodies all this complexity.”
–Adolph Gottlieb in a 1962 interview with Martin Friedman