The Syrian Bull

This painting, together with Gottlieb's "Rape of Persephone," was exhibited in 1943 at the Third Annual Exhibition of Modern Painters and Sculptors at Wildenstein Gallery in New York City, where they attracted the attention of Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times. Jewell singled them out as incomprehensible in a review in that paper, writing, "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.' "

Both paintings show the influence of European surrealism, the dominant aesthetic of the day. Rothko's work prefigures his later Color Field paintings, in its glowing colors, rectilinear organization, and ambiguous forms, while Gottlieb's is clearly part of his use of what he called "pictographs": flat forms, often floating on an undefined background, and influenced by tribal and archaic art.

Gottlieb and Rothko asked their friend Barnett Newman to assist them in responding to Jewell's review; their letter was published on June 13, 1943. It is a compendium of the principles under which the artists would work for much of the decade, and effectively laid out a first manifesto relating to the painting of the nascent New York School, which developed into Abstract Expressionism. They declared that abstract forms are the "simple expression of the complex thought," their commitment to "subject matter which is tragic and timeless," their "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art," and that the meaning of a painting must come about through a "consummated experience between picture and onlooker."

For his assistance in crafting the response, Gottlieb and Rothko gave their paintings to Newman, whose wife Annalee Newman subsequently donated them to the AMAM in honor of Professor Ellen Johnson. Johnson's relationships with many New York artists, particularly in the 1960s and '70s, were fundamental for the enlargement and quality of the AMAM's late twentieth century art collection.