De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Jewish Journal: See ‘Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: By the Sea’
By Ethan Forman | August 13, 2026
A gallery at the Cape Ann Museum for the show “Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: By the Sea.”/ETHAN M. FORMAN
GLOUCESTER — “Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: By the Sea” at the Cape Ann Museum for the first time tells the story of how the three artists and friends were influenced by the fishing industry, granite coast and tourist beaches of America’s oldest seaport where they spent several summers together in the 1930s and 1940s.
Two of these three great 20th century artists were Jewish, but that was not what brought them together, experts say. Instead, it was friendship, mentorship, and a love of Cape Ann.
The exhibition, which runs through Sept. 27, coincides with the reopening of the newly renovated Cape Ann Museum’s downtown campus thanks to a successful $23 million fundraising campaign in time for the museum’s 150th anniversary.
“Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: By the Sea” consists of 82 works that trace how Gloucester and Cape Ann may have informed the artists’ later abstract work.
Abstract expressionist painters Adolph Gottlieb, known for his pictograph paintings; and Mark Rothko, known for his large rectangular color field canvases, were both Jewish. Modern painter Milton Avery was not. Avery’s wife, Sally Michel Avery, however, was an artist who came from a Jewish family of immigrants from Brooklyn, according to a retrospective of her work at the Morris Museum (in Morris Township, New Jersey) in the spring of 2025 on jerseyarts.com.
Judaism did not play a role in their friendship, and the artists were not religiously observant, said the exhibition’s guest curator, Eliza Rathbone.
Their work transcended religion, she and others said.
“I don’t think that fact [that Rothko and Gottlieb were Jewish] had much to do with why they were friends,” Rathbone said. “They were friends because they were friends, and the two younger ones were quite entranced [with Avery].”
Milton Avery was 18 years older than Rothko and Gottlieb, and he became their enduring friend and mentor after they met around 1929.
Sally Michel met Milton Avery in Gloucester in 1924. They married in 1926. She worked as a commercial illustrator to support the family.
Gottlieb’s personal identity did not play a role in his art, according to notes for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 2002-2003.
“The idea of being a so-called Jewish artist is like being a professional Jew,” Gottlieb reportedly said. “I think art is international and should transcend any racial, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries.”
Rothko’s work is steeped in spirituality, mythology, and human emotions outside the confines of organized religion.
Rathbone said Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia, now Daugavpils, Latvia, came to the United States with his family at age 10 where they settled in Portland, Oregon.
In Latvia, Rothko was the only member of the family to attend a cheder, a Jewish school, where he studied Hebrew.
“I like to think about the fact that Mark Rothko … when he was still a boy in Latvia, he was the only one of his family to go to a traditional Jewish school,” Rathbone said.
After moving to the U.S, he turned away from organized religion, according to an October 2023 article in The Jewish Chronicle of London featuring an interview with Rothko’s son, Christopher.
“I think it was a significant factor for him and his inclination to be very intellectually inquiring and interested in the spiritual dimension of things,” Rathbone said.
This spiritual aspect of his work became “all embracing,” she said.
In April, Rathbone had just returned from Florence where there was a major Rothko exhibition, “Rothko in Florence.” She said it was co-curator Christopher Rothko’s idea to introduce five of his father’s paintings into cells at the Museo di San Marco with Renaissance frescoes by Fra Angelico.
“There’s this unprecedented juxtaposition of a work by Rothko in a cell with a fresco by Fra Angelico,” she said.
Growing up, Rothko earned a scholarship to Yale. He went there for two years before moving to New York to become an artist, Rathbone said.
In a 1982 oral history interview for the Smithsonian, Sally Michel Avery recalled Rothko telling her he was unpopular and unhappy at Yale.
“Well, he was very Jewish and Yale was very WASP-ish,” said Sally Michel Avery. “He was very bored with the curriculum. And he just felt like sort of an odd fish.”
In New York, Rothko taught at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center for about 20 years, according to his bio with the “Rothko in Florence” exhibit.
In 1935, he founded the artist group called The Ten, along with Gottlieb. Most of the artists in this group were Jewish.
Sanford Hirsch, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation’s executive director, said Gottlieb recognized “he was culturally and ethnically Jewish, but it didn’t inform his art in a direct way.”
Gottlieb did a few different projects for synagogues, two of which were stained glass projects, and two involved fabricating a Torah curtain and valance, Hirsch said.
“I don’t think of the work that I did for the synagogues as religious art because I’m not a religious person in the sense of practicing any form of religious beliefs,” said Gottlieb in an excerpt of a 1962 interview with Martin Friedman.
One of the projects Gottlieb worked on was a Torah ark at Temple Beth El in Springfield, Massachusetts. However, the temple suffered a fire in 1965, and the work was lost, Hirsch said.
In 1953, Gottlieb was commissioned by an architectural firm to create a five-story, free-standing stained-glass facade for the Milton Steinberg House, which at the time was the community center and offices for Park Avenue Synagogue, according to the Gottlieb foundation’s website. The work was dedicated in 1954 and dismantled in 1980, although individual panels still exist.
Gottlieb was born in 1903 and raised in New York City. Gottlieb’s parents had emigrated from Bohemia when they were both 5 years old, Hirsch said. Gottlieb was born on East 10th Street to parents who were assimilated. Gottlieb did not have a Jewish education growing up – Esther Gottlieb told Hirsch that Adolph Gottlieb “had to be bribed to be bar mitzvahed.”
Hirsch said Gottlieb changed the spelling of his first name from “Adolf” to “Adolph” in 1933 in response to Hitler’s rise to power.
Avery, who came from humble beginnings in Hartford, Connecticut, showed Gottlieb and Rothko they could pursue a career as an artist, and they responded to his work ethic, Cape Ann Museum Director Oliver Barker said.
“Their religion may not have always been at the forefront of their work, but it certainly very much informed everything that they were creating,” Barker said. Θ
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