Gottlieb was a central figure in the development of New York Abstract Expressionism, and his Pictograph series of the 1940s — grids of compartmentalized symbols drawing on Jungian archetypes and Northwest Coast Native American imagery — helped establish the vocabulary of mythic abstraction that he, Rothko and Newman articulated together in a famous 1943 letter to the New York Times. Torah Curtain is part of a series of works commissioned by the architect Percival Goodman working in tandem with a visionary Rabbi to adorn Temple B’nai Israel in Millburn, New Jersey, where the actual curtain was woven by the women in the congregation based on this study. Here Gottlieb integrated his developing abstract language with the functional and liturgical requirements of a Jewish ritual object. Other works commissioned for and installed in the synagogue include a large mural by Robert Motherwell and a monumental sculpture by Herb Ferber.
