like being at sea …Then there's the tremendous clarity – out in Arizona there's a tremendous clarity of light and at night the clouds seem very close.” When these Arizona works were exhibited in New York after Gottlieb's return they created a break with Gottlieb's former circle of colleagues, several of whom condemned his new work for being “too abstract”. 1940s–1950s Gottlieb and a small circle of friends valued the work of the Surrealist group that they saw exhibited in New York in the 1930s. They also exchanged copies of the magazine "Cahiers d’art" and were quite familiar with current ideas about automatic writing and subconscious imagery. Gottlieb painted a few works in a Surrealist style in 1940 and 1941. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series “Pictographs” which spanned from 1941–1950. In his painting Voyager’s Return , he juxtaposes these images in compartmentalized spaces. His images appear similar to those of indigenous populations of North America and the Ancient Near East. If he found out one of his symbols was not original, he no longer used it. He wanted his art to have the same impact on all his viewers, striking a chord not because they had seen it before, but because it was so basic and elemental that it resounded within them. In 1941, disappointed with the art around him, he developed the approach he called Pictographs. Gottlieb's Pictographs, which he created from 1941 to 1954, are the first coherent body of mature painting by an American of his generation. Gottlieb spoke of his concerns in a 1947 statement: "The role of artist has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time". In May 1942, his first "pictograph" was displayed at the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, located at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York In his Pictographs, Gottlieb introduced a new way of approaching abstraction that included imagery drawn from his subconscious but which notably departed from the idea of narrative. To meet this goal Gottlieb presented images