Note: NCE Catalog Title: Three Jewish Artists Course No. Z250-P18 Register at: (617)559-6999 or at newtoncommunityed.com Registration is now open!

Adolph Gottlieb, MArk rothko & bArnett newMAn: CoMMuniCAtinG the horrors of Anti-seMitisM, fAsCisM, And the holoCAust

Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 7-9pm Newton South High School, 140 Brandeis Road, Newton Center Presented by Robert Solomon, Art Historian, MFA Tufts University, BFA Pratt Institute

A 1939 Gallup Poll showed 61% of Americans were against the Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY)/Rep. Edith Rogers (R-MA) bill that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children to emigrate to the U.S. In fact, the question asked in the poll proposed only 10,000 children.

New York School painters Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman were most certainly aware of this majority negative attitude toward Jews through their own experience with mounting anti-Semi- tism in the United States through the 1930s.

With increasing media reporting from Europe about Hitler-ordered vandalism and violence against Jews, such as Kistallnacht in 1938, Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman––each struggling with their own sense of Jewishness––bonded as friends amidst the noise of hatred surrounding them.

Meeting at Gottlieb’s Brooklyn home, each turned away from a seem- ingly undirected range of work in order to assess their reawakening to their common heritage. Infuenced by Surrealism and the philoso- phies of Jung and Nietzsche, they agreed to implement Greek mythol- ogy, and American Indian and Christian iconographies to illuminate in their work what they couldn’t verbalize about the of anti-Semitism horrors of fascism and the Holocaust.

In this interactive lecture, we’ll consider together the artists’ personal struggles with their Jewish heritage, and we’ll evaluate their work be- tween 1940 and 1946 to determine how well they communicated their fears Jewish tradition would end with the Holocaust.