Letter to the Art Editor of the New York Times

The avant-garde painter Adolph Gottlieb was born into a Jewish family in New York City. As an art-obsessed teenager, Gottlieb fled to Paris; he learned painting, in part, though daily visits to the Louvre and by haunting museums and galleries all over Europe. In the 1930s, as his career flourished, Gottlieb was horrified by the rise of fascism; as a symbol of his defiance, he changed the spelling of his first name: Adolf became Adolph. Later that decade, Gottlieb demanded that the American Artists’ Congress repudiate Hitler and Stalin. When it did not, he resigned.

The American painter Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in the Pale of Settlement. Before becoming one of America’s best-known abstract expressionists, he attended Yale University. Rothko grew up speaking Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew; he was Markus Rotkovich when he attended Jewish school, learning Talmud. When his Orthodox family moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1913, the young Rothko was still engaged in Jewish communal life. As his artistic career flourished, Rothko drifted from Judaism, although some art critics still discern strong Jewish elements in his work.