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| Left: Robert Motherwell, The Walls of the Temple (1952) © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, |
Arrogance isn’t a characteristic peculiar to twentieth-century American artists, but the New York School had a special knack for it. The acute inferiority engendered by the achievements of European modernism elicited an overweening, chip-on-the-shoulder mien to Ab-Ex pronunciamentos—as if the cosmos shifted every time Mark Rothko went to the hardware store to buy a gallon of turpentine. All that heavy breathing can be a bit much, but it’s to the New York School’s credit that its finest achievements were powered, rather than burdened, by high-flown pretensions.
I was reminded of Abstract Expressionism’s bombastic bent, as well as its saving graces, upon visiting “Modern Art, Sacred Space: Motherwell, Ferber, and Gottlieb,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum focusing on the relationship between advanced art and religious traditions. In 1951, the architect Percival Goodman commissioned three artists—the painters Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell, and the sculptor Herbert Ferber—to create artworks for the Congregation B’nai Israel synagogue located in suburban Millburn, New Jersey. Goodman’s design for the synagogue was boxy, streamlined, and nothing if not High Modernist. It was, in fact, a radically new take on religious architecture, as well as an emblem of the increasing integration of Jews into American society.
Goodman’s building was a conscious
