Mark Rothko and the Rothko case: notes, memories, observations

[Prefatory note: In September 1944 I had the good fortune to be hired as the managing editor of View, a magazine devoted to European artists—particularly the Surrealists and neo-Romantics—then in exile in New York. Until the magazine folded in 19471 was acquainted with Miró, Ernst, Matta, Lam, Seligmann, Tchelitchew, Berman, and many of the other European expatriate artists, their dealers, and their surrounding circle. View was concerned with both art and literature, and numbered among its contributors Meyer Schapiro, Paul Goodman, Marius Bewley, Harold Rosenberg, Parker Tyler, Lionel Abel, and Edouard Roditi. It was probably the first American journal to publish in translation the poetry and prose of such writers as Francis Ponge, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, and other contemporaries since become celebrated.

In 1951 I organized a gallery to exhibit new work by young...