On 6 June 1943 critic Edward Alden Jewell singled out Mark Rothko's The Syrian Bull and Adolph Gottlieb's Rape of Persephone in a review of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors third annual exhibition. Jewell confessed "befuddlement" and wrote that "this department" could riot "shed the slightest enlightenment" on cither work. Rothko and Gottlieb responded in a letter which Jewell published in his column for Sunday, 13 June. The letter, not intended to be a defense, was, however, a kind of manifesto stating the thinking behind the nascent and still unnamed Abstract Expressionist movement. They listed five "aesthetic beliefs" that they were trying to demonstrate in their work:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common...