Tiresias

The few public statements issued jointly by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in the early forties make it abundantly clear that the Second World War affected their thinking about art. They suggested on several occasions that their paintings related to the turbulence of their times. It is therefore tempting to point out a correspondence between their mythic imagery—which mingles references to Greco-Roman tragedies with a surrealist style—and the violence of the war. Neither artist, however, went …

IN 1945, JEAN-PAUL Sartre observed of Americans, “It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable and most American; it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest. . . . The peculiarity of the American, on the other hand, is that he regards his thought as universal.” In fact, the belief that the individual is the source and the repository of all social rights and human creativity was a legacy of the great eighteenth-century revolutions in the West. To …