A surprising number of commissions for ecclesiastical decoration went to major European painters and sculptors in the years following World War II- perhaps a response to the mediocrity of religious furnishings in the previous hundred years. Reestablishing the long tradition of using master artists in such projects, churches and synagogues commissioned Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and Henry Moore, among others, to execute stained glass, vestments, liturgical objects, and other embellishments.
Adolph Gottlieb's Torah curtain is an American expression of this revival. During the postwar boom in synagogue construction, sweeping redefinition of synagogue design began. Based on a modernist aesthetic, it rejected historical references. Many architects considered symbols appropriate only on liturgical objects in the sanctuary. Sparse decoration was standard practice.
In a bold step, Percival Goodman, architect for the Millburn synagogue, charged three emerging, avant-garde artists with commissions to decorate that building. Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Herbert Ferber, each of whom has since become a major figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, supplied a Torah curtain, a lobby mural, and an exterior sculptural relief, respectively. Gottlieb's design for the curtain (actually executed by the women of the congregation under the supervision of his wife, Esther) is a late example in the development of his influential pictograph paintings of 1941-53. It directly reflects these compartmentalized canvases, which in turn were influenced by the grid-based works of Mondrian and by the sectional arrangement of religious narrative cycles of the early Italian Renaissance.
The forms contained within Gottlieb's compartments, and the meanings of these forms, are related to unconscious expressions associated with African, Oceanic, and Native American art as well as with Carl Jung's writings about symbols and the "collective unconscious." Gottlieb's pictograph style was therefore easily adaptable to the creation of a ritual object using symbols of Jewish collective consciousness. In this curtain, he abstracts such basic elements of religious belief as the Tablets of the Law, the twelve tribes, the Temple, and the Ark of the Covenant. He also includes stylizations of objects developed for synagogue use (Torah mantles and Torah shields) and emblems that have become synonymous with Judaism (the Lion of Judah and the Star of David).
Gottlieb's pictographs have been noted for the frequent appearance of sexual references and his predilection for visual puns. In this Torah curtain, he intended the W-form pictograph at the lower right corner to represent a "breastplate" (a common term for Torah shield). It seems to depict the chain by which that ornament is hung over the Torah staves. There can be little doubt that these two pendulous shapes, generally associated in Gottlieb's work with female breasts, are an international pun on "breastplate." However, the serpentine outline can also be perceived as the artist's usual visualization of the male symbol. This combination of the male and female in one image is a common Jungian reference to the life force, and in this case embodies Gottlieb's ideas of the universality and continuity of human existence. It also relates to Jung's standard interpretation of the anima and animus as well as the dual readings of positive and negative spaces.

Ultimately, this avant-garde adaptation of traditional symbols becomes an expression of the viable continuum of Jewish ceremony and community, a significant concept after the devastations of World War II and the Holocaust.