125 Newbury will present Gottlieb/Rothko: The Surrealist Years, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by two of the central protagonists of Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Curated by Arne Glimcher, this sequel to Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years —presented at 125 Newbury in 2025—brings together works from 1941 to 1951, a pivotal decade in which the two artists broke from Realist figuration and forged a new language of Surrealist abstraction. During this time, Rothko and Gottlieb maintained a remarkably close artistic and intellectual dialogue, together turning to the language of myth, notions of automatism, and the power of the unconscious to uncover new ways of picturing a world that had been radically reshaped by the vicissitudes of history.
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.
Rothko and Gottlieb had been close friends and artistic compatriots since the late 1920s. In 1940, each began moving away from conventional representation: Rothko through mythic and biomorphic imagery, Gottlieb through a lexicon of pictographic forms. The paintings of both artists from the 1940s are defined by a shared interest in symbol, myth, and the possibility of excavating a new visual language from the deep fissures of the shared past. Their thinking was shaped by important encounters with the works of Picasso, Miró, Klee, and other European Modernists, as well as by the arrival of European Surrealist artists in New York during the war years.
125 Newbury