Mark Rothko is now almost inseparable from floating rectangles of color.
Adolph Gottlieb is remembered for his Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and later Burst paintings.
That familiarity can make the early 1940s look like a transitional corridor both artists simply passed through on their way to Abstract Expressionism.
A new exhibition argues that the corridor deserves to be treated as a destination.
Rothko/Gottlieb: The Surrealist Years opens at 125 Newbury in New York on November 13, 2026, and runs through January 9, 2027. Curated by Arne Glimcher, the exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper made between 1941 and 1951, when Rothko and Gottlieb were moving away from realist figuration and toward myth, automatism, biomorphic forms, archaic imagery, and the unconscious.
The official Rothko/Gottlieb exhibition describes this decade as the period in which the two artists forged a new language of Surrealist abstraction.
That description complicates the usual origin story of Abstract Expressionism.
Before New York supposedly displaced Paris as the center of modern art, American artists were already absorbing some of Surrealism’s most radical ideas.
Rothko And Gottlieb Were Thinking Together
Rothko and Gottlieb were not simply two painters who happened to experiment with similar ideas.
They were close friends.
Rothko met Gottlieb in 1929, and by the late 1930s they were discussing what they believed contemporary painting lacked.
By 1941, both had turned increasingly toward mythology.
The timing was hardly accidental.
Europe was at war.
Fascism had transformed the political map.
European artists were arriving in New York as refugees and exiles.
For Rothko and Gottlieb, ordinary modern subjects seemed insufficient for what was happening.
They began searching for images capable of expressing fear, violence, mortality, and human vulnerability without becoming straightforward illustrations of current events.
Myth offered one route.
Surrealism offered another.
European Surrealism Arrived In New York At Exactly The Right Moment
World War II forced important figures connected with Surrealism out of Europe.
André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, and other European avant-garde artists spent significant periods in the United States.
Their presence changed New York.
American artists encountered Surrealist theories about automatic creation, dream imagery, irrational association, and the unconscious more directly than before.
Rothko and Gottlieb did not become orthodox members of Breton’s movement.
They took what they needed.
Of particular importance was automatism: the attempt to reduce conscious control and allow unexpected forms to emerge through spontaneous marks and associations.
That principle would later become fundamental to Abstract Expressionism.
But before it became associated with heroic American gesture, it had a Surrealist history.
Rothko’s Early 1940s Paintings Look Nothing Like “Rothko”
Consider Antigone, around 1941.
The painting contains strange bodily fragments and mythic references rather than floating color rectangles.
Rothko was drawing on Greek tragedy while breaking the human body into partially abstracted forms.
Other paintings from the period contain creatures that seem part human, part animal, and part plant.
They often inhabit horizontal zones that resemble underwater environments or archaeological layers.
Today these images can look surprising because the late Rothko is so dominant in cultural memory.
We expect glowing fields of red, orange, black, maroon, and violet.
Instead we find monsters.
Oracles.
Biomorphic creatures.
Fragmented anatomy.
Surrealism gave Rothko permission to stop treating visible reality as painting’s necessary starting point.
Miró And Masson Offered Another Kind Of Freedom
The National Gallery of Art notes that Rothko’s paintings from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s reflected his interest in mythology, archaic art, and Surrealist artists including Joan Miró and André Masson.
Their importance was not simply stylistic.
Miró demonstrated that floating signs and biomorphic forms could suggest life without describing recognizable bodies.
Masson showed how automatic drawing could loosen conscious control.
Rothko absorbed both possibilities.
His forms became less representational.
The line became more fluid.
Images began suggesting biological or mythological life without settling into fixed identities.
That ambiguity would eventually help him move toward abstraction.
Surrealism was not an interruption before Rothko’s mature career.
It was one mechanism that made the mature work possible.
Gottlieb Turned Surrealism Into A System Of Signs
Gottlieb followed a related but distinct path.
Beginning around 1941, he developed the works now known as his Pictographs.
These paintings use compartmentalized grids filled with signs.
Eyes.
Spirals.
Shell-like forms.
Masks.
Bodies.
Arrows.
Invented symbols.
The images can resemble archaeological tablets from a civilization that never existed.
Gottlieb was interested in myth, ritual, psychoanalysis, and what he hoped could become a universal symbolic vocabulary.
His sources ranged widely, including ancient and Indigenous art as well as European modernism.
That borrowing needs to be understood critically today, particularly because mid-century artists often detached Indigenous objects from the cultural contexts that produced them.
But Surrealism provided another crucial ingredient.
Gottlieb could treat a symbol as psychologically active without requiring it to have one stable meaning.
Gottlieb’s Apparition Shows How Strange The Pictographs Became
Apparition (1945) demonstrates that process clearly.
The Museum of Modern Art connects Gottlieb’s Pictographs to Surrealist biomorphism, psychoanalytic thinking, mythology, and his search for what he and Rothko called subject matter that was “tragic and timeless.”
The MoMA record for Gottlieb’s Apparition explains that his Pictograph series eventually encompassed more than 300 paintings and 25 prints produced between 1941 and 1952.
That scale matters.
Surrealist influence was not a brief flirtation.
Gottlieb spent more than a decade developing an image system in which signs appeared to emerge from psychology, myth, and invented archaeology.
Their 1943 Letter Rejected “Painting About Nothing”
One of the clearest documents of Rothko and Gottlieb’s thinking appeared in June 1943.
After a critic attacked their work, Rothko and Gottlieb, with assistance from Barnett Newman, responded in a letter to The New York Times.
Their argument was emphatic.
They rejected the idea that painting could be meaningful simply through attractive formal arrangement.
For them, subject remained essential.
They wanted art concerned with tragedy, mythology, and universal human experience.
That position is particularly interesting in retrospect because both artists would later become famous for radical abstraction.
The familiar story says abstraction removed subject.
Their 1940s thinking suggests something more complicated.
They were trying to make subject less literal.
Surrealism Helped Them Escape Realist Narrative
Before this period, Rothko had painted subway scenes and urban figures.
Gottlieb also worked through recognizable figurative subjects.
Surrealism provided a method for leaving narrative realism without abandoning meaning.
A fragmented creature did not have to illustrate a specific myth.
It could carry the emotional force of myth.
An invented symbol did not have to belong to an actual ancient language.
It could feel archetypal.
A biomorphic shape did not need to identify a recognizable organism.
It could suggest life itself.
This distinction became central to the emerging New York School.
The painting could become abstract without becoming empty.
Jung Helped Move Myth Into The Unconscious
Rothko and Gottlieb were also interested in psychological theories associated with Carl Jung.
Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious seemed to offer a way of explaining why ancient myths and symbols might retain psychological force across cultures and historical periods.
That idea fitted their ambitions.
They wanted to escape topical illustration while retaining serious human content.
Myth could become universal rather than anecdotal.
Surrealism similarly encouraged artists to search beneath ordinary conscious thought.
The two approaches were not identical, but together they allowed Rothko and Gottlieb to imagine a painting whose subject might be psychologically powerful without being immediately recognizable.
Rothko’s 1945 Exhibition Still Looked Surrealist
In 1945, Rothko received an important solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York.
The paintings displayed there were still deeply connected to the biomorphic, mythological language of his Surrealist period.
This fact can feel strange beside the retrospective image of Rothko as the supreme painter of silent rectangular color fields.
The distance between those bodies of work appears enormous.
It becomes smaller when viewed as a process.
Surrealist biomorphism weakened recognizable anatomy.
Forms became increasingly independent.
Mythological references became less explicit.
Eventually, the figures disappeared.
What remained was atmosphere, scale, tension, and emotional intensity.
The “Multiforms” Did Not Appear From Nowhere
Around 1947, Rothko began eliminating recognizable Surrealist and mythological imagery.
The transitional paintings often called Multiforms replaced biomorphic creatures with floating areas of color.
This is usually treated as the beginning of the Rothko everyone recognizes.
But the transition did not erase the earlier problem he had been trying to solve.
How can painting communicate fundamental human emotion without simply illustrating a story?
The mature rectangles offered one answer.
The Surrealist works had offered another.
The goal remained surprisingly consistent even while the imagery changed completely.
Gottlieb Simplified His Symbols Too
Gottlieb followed his own route toward reduction.
After the Pictographs came the Imaginary Landscapes, generally divided horizontally between different zones.
Later, his famous Burst paintings reduced composition even further.
A disk floats above an explosive mass of gestural paint.
The visual vocabulary seems much simpler than the Pictographs.
Yet the basic tension remains recognizable.
Order against chaos.
Sign against gesture.
Sky against earth.
Conscious structure against emotional eruption.
The later Gottlieb did not simply abandon his earlier Surrealist concerns.
He compressed them.
Abstract Expressionism Inherited Automatism
This is where the historical stakes become larger than two artists.
Surrealist automatism became one of the most consequential European contributions to emerging American abstraction.
Jackson Pollock transformed bodily gesture into poured and dripped painting.
Robert Motherwell maintained direct intellectual connections with Surrealist circles.
William Baziotes explored biomorphic forms.
Rothko and Gottlieb moved through mythology and psychic imagery toward increasingly abstract languages.
The history normally called Abstract Expressionism therefore grew partly from ideas that Surrealism had already been testing.
New York did not simply defeat Paris.
It metabolized Paris.
The Triumph Of Abstract Expressionism Hid The Transition
By the 1950s, the story changed.
Abstract Expressionism became associated with American cultural confidence, large canvases, individual freedom, spontaneous gesture, and New York’s emergence as a global art center.
Artists acquired powerful mature identities.
Pollock dripped.
Rothko produced luminous rectangles.
Newman painted zips.
Gottlieb painted Bursts.
Those identities became so recognizable that the transitional 1940s could appear merely preparatory.
That is the “erasure” in the title.
Surrealist paintings were not literally removed from museums or archives.
Their historical importance became overshadowed by what followed.
The mature style became the artist’s identity.
The messy Surrealist route toward it became easier to forget.
Surrealism Was A Tool, Not A Destination
Neither Rothko nor Gottlieb wanted simply to become American Surrealists.
That is important.
They borrowed automatism without submitting to Breton.
They drew upon myth without illustrating specific myths conventionally.
They explored psychoanalysis without treating painting as an exercise in dream transcription.
Surrealism functioned as a device for breaking open possibilities.
Then they moved elsewhere.
Readers interested in how another artist transformed Surrealist ideas into an intensely personal symbolic system can explore thesurrealists.org’s verified article on Remedios Varo’s science, magic, and enigmatic worlds.
Varo remained much closer to recognizable Surrealist imagery, but the comparison reveals the movement’s flexibility: different artists could take its techniques toward completely different destinations.
The Surrealist Years Restores A Missing Chapter
Rothko/Gottlieb: The Surrealist Years opens at 125 Newbury, 395 Broadway, New York, on November 13, 2026, and runs through January 9, 2027.
It follows the gallery’s 2025 exhibition Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years and concentrates on the pivotal 1941–1951 decade.
That framing corrects a persistent distortion.
Rothko did not leap from subway scenes directly into fields of transcendent color.
Gottlieb did not suddenly invent simplified postwar symbols.
Between realism and mature abstraction came myth.
Biomorphism.
Automatism.
The unconscious.
Archaic imagery.
Surrealism.
Those experiments were not embarrassing early detours that Abstract Expressionism later outgrew.
They were part of the machinery that produced it.
The evidence was never truly erased.
Rothko’s rectangles simply became so famous that we stopped looking behind them.