The Brooklyn Rail

Before art is shaped by culture, it emerges from human development. This holds true for all great artists: Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portraits were informed by his childhood studies of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, just as Jackson Pollock’s non-objective painting followed a foundation laid during his time studying under Thomas Hart Benton. This trajectory is especially pronounced among modernist artists. How else could they so dramatically depart from conventional representation if not for a deep understanding of the fundamentals first? By that logic, how can we, as viewers, understand these works without first understanding the artists themselves? Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years, on view at 125 Newbury, Pace’s Tribeca gallery, offers that very opportunity, bringing together forty-five formative works that reveal the disciplined beginnings behind the artists’ later breakthroughs.

An émigré from the Russian Empire, Mark Rothko made his way to New York City after dropping out of Yale. He studied briefly at Parsons and later at the Art Students League under Max Weber. Adolph Gottlieb, a native New Yorker, had recently returned from an influential trip to Europe, spent in the museums of Paris and Berlin. The two artists met in the late 1920s and quickly developed a close friendship rooted in shared artistic ambitions and intellectual curiosity.

Though their works from this period are visually distinct, the exhibition tracks a somewhat parallel arc between the two as they grew and learned from one another. For Rothko, a self-portrait from 1936 offered a chance to invoke the legacy of Rembrandt—echoing the old master’s moody palette and hand gesture—while pulling the image to the present through loose brushwork and two bold swipes of dark blue to suggest eyeglasses. In Gottlieb’s work, we see another interpretation of tradition, a linear, bright, and clear depiction of his likeness holding paintbrushes to signify his craft. We’re also given a glimpse into the artists’ shared visual language through their choice of subject matter: in the early 1930s, each depicted the other seated with a mandolin, an artistic trope explored by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Picasso alike. Though created two years apart, both portraits reveal a mutual exploration of flattened pictorial space and bold contours. In Rothko’s version, that experimentation is heightened by a sketchy, expressive quality that hints at the abstraction to come.

Though both artists painted street scenes, their interpretations of modern life diverge dramatically. Gottlieb’s South Ferry Waiting Room (ca. 1929), with figures clustered around a newsstand, captures the everyday bustle of the city with a nod to the brisk urbanity of Gustave Caillebotte’s Parisian bourgeoisie. Rothko’s series of subway scenes, by contrast, presents a more disquieting vision: elongated, spectral figures drift through an anonymous space, disconnected from one another and from their environment. The vibrant energy of the 1920s gives way to pale, solitary forms—“wan creatures,” as Rothko historian Diane Waldman described them—that seem to belong to a world just beyond the real.

Rothko and Gottlieb both studied under American painter Milton Avery, through whom they met a cohort of soon-to-be Abstract Expressionists including Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, and Louis Schanker. The group regularly vacationed together in Lake George, New York, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Avery’s independent vision—rooted in observation yet edging toward abstraction—had an important impact on both Rothko and Gottlieb, guiding their early experiments with color, form, and the balance between representation and modernist expression. Avery’s influence is evident in Rothko’s beach scenes, in which human figures begin to dissolve into geometry, primarily rectangles with softened edges, rendered in pale ivories and muted oranges. These early abstractions quietly anticipate the luminous color fields that would come to define his later work. Gottlieb, however, took these teachings and models in a different direction. In his series of nudes from 1934, Gottlieb reveals an interest in structure, depicting the body with precision and realism. Though stylistically different from his later work, these works retain a compositional clarity and discipline that would evolve into the bold, schematic imagery of his pictographs and “Burst” series.

Many of Gottlieb’s works focus on marking a social art history: portraits of Japanese artist Thomas Nagai, his wife Esther, musician Max Margulis, and photographer Aaron Siskind serve not only as intimate studies of his contemporaries, but also as a record of the artistic and intellectual community that shaped his early development. Rothko’s engagement with history, by contrast, often took a more symbolic and art historical route. In Portrait of Mary (1938–39), he draws on Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (ca. 1666–68), echoing the original’s iconic blue dress and window light. Yet Rothko modernizes the scene, stripping it of its ornate setting and imbuing it with psychological weight: Mary, hand resting on her stomach, becomes less muse than mystery, perhaps hinting at a pregnancy.

Taken together, these works reveal two artists in dialogue with each other and with the world around them. Though their styles would eventually diverge vastly, the foundation of their mature work can be traced to this shared moment: a period of experimentation, influence, and friendship that shaped American modernism in lasting ways.