Letter to the Art Editor of the New York Times
June 7, 1943
Mr. Edward Alden Jewell
Art Editor
New York Times
229 West 43 Street
New York, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Jewell:
To the artist, the workings of the critical mind is one of life’s mysteries. That is why, we suppose, the artist’s complaint that he is misunderstood, especially by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace. It is, therefore, an event when…
Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko wrote this letter to the New York Times to rebut a scathing review by the art critic Edward Alden Jewell, who had disparaged an exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and had denigrated Gottlieb’s The Rape of Persephone and Rothko’s The Syrian Bull. Through their letter, the artists distanced themselves from two major American movements: Regionalism and Social Realism. By doing so, they established the groundwork for the New York School and aligned themselves with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism.
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