The painter’s final statement — his darkest paintings — under new light
The Rothko Chapel in Houston opened 50 years ago, on the weekend of February 26, 1971. Lots of events are planned throughout the year to celebrate and contextualize it, and deservedly so. The tiny building is not decorated by Mark Rothko’s last work, since “decorated” suggests that the art augments the chapel. Rather, the building is a mere stage for a suite of religious paintings, though “religious” isn’t precise, either. You won’t find angels on the walls, or divinities of any kind, and don’t go there to get answers. Rather, the paintings are intensely spiritual. “Intense” and “spiritual” seem right. The chapel has just been sensitively renovated so, of course, I visited when I was in Texas after Christmas.
The Rothko Chapel can, and the emphasis is on “can,” move the senses and spirit to a realm beyond language. That’s what great art does. It delivers us to places poetry or drama or even music can’t. The chapel’s a sensual space but not a buoyant or opulent one. It’s more poignant, even heart-rending, and it’s austere. I can’t call it an acquired taste any more than I can call the afterlife an acquired taste. The chapel proposes thoughts of that gravity.
I’m an icy Vermont Methodist and like my religion biblical, which means narrative, but it also means tragic, ecstatic, with a soupçon of doom. Of course, these days I have to take it with lachrymose Bolshevism, but that’s the nature of the clerical class. Oh, and there’s no clergy at the Rothko Chapel, and no services. It’s just you and God, or you and Allah, Osiris, Vishnu, Odin, or Zeus.
What is it? It’s a small, octagonal nondenominational chapel decorated for the space by Rothko (1903–1970). He was commissioned for the project by John and Dominique de Menil, avant-garde collectors and art patrons living in Houston. Between 1964 and 1967, Rothko created 14 paintings for the unbuilt but conceptualized space. He was involved, at times exactingly, in the design of the building, feuding with Philip Johnson, the architect. Johnson left the project in the late ’60s.
Three walls display triptychs and one painting fills each of the other five walls. The biggest are about 18 by 24 feet, the smallest, 11 by 15. The sanctuary is 50 by 50 feet. It’s empty except for the art on the walls and a few simple, backless wooden benches. A separate vestibule is 13 by 50 feet. It’s empty except for a long table with about a dozen books, each a spiritual text from a world religion. That’s it, and that’s a hushed, dreamy, immersive space.
The paintings, as everyone who’s been there knows, are dark. If a visitor is in a touristical state of mind and enters with a bucket list and “Rothko Chapel” to be checked off, he might insist they’re inscrutable black masses and go for lunch. There’s lots of color and brushstroke there, though; but the paintings are totemic, reductive, and quiet.
It’s all intense, but whether it’s soothing or hypnotic or grim or traumatic depends on personality and mood. Let’s just say it’s an otherworldly place.
Architecture Research Office (ARO) designed the renovation. It’s a New York firm, and their work on the chapel is pitch-perfect. The project has three phases. The first is the work on the chapel. There, their touch is so subtle but so comprehensive, it’s near to divine. A lot needed doing since it’s a 50-year-old building, but the visitor barely perceives their work. That’s a labor of love and creative self-abnegation. I spoke to Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell, the two principals who worked on the project. They’ve got a soothing, Zen presence.
Every system behind the walls was modernized, from reinforcing the concrete blocks behind the brick façade to retrofitting the HVAC system, enhancing security, and improving the wiring. The chapel got a new roof. The exterior brickwork was repointed. There’s new soundproofing, too. I’ll write more on the chapel’s lighting, which was an extraordinary challenge. I always look at floors and ceilings when I’m visiting buildings of aesthetic distinction. They cover lots of space. I love the floors. They’re made of the same asphalt pavers that are on many of the walkways in Central Park. Rothko selected them, as he did almost every other detail, down to the doorknobs.
ARO also designed a one-story Welcome House across the street from the chapel. It’s a nice, small, cozy Arts & Crafts–style building that now houses visitor-services functions such as ticket taking, as well as a tiny bookshop and visitor bathrooms. This new space allowed the vestibule of the chapel to be unencumbered. The chapel is in a modest residential neighborhood of bungalows and looks like the village church, though a modern one.
The next phase of the project is the construction of a small third building for lectures, classrooms, and archives, and the creation of what I think will be a lovely park. The Rothko Chapel was always intended for ecumenical reflection, though the Menils originally commissioned it for the grounds of St. Thomas University, a Roman Catholic college in Houston. The college and the Menils agreed to disagree, and the chapel went to its own site. It’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The campus will keep its human scale. The very beautiful and moving Menil Collection is a short walk from the chapel.
Since the early ’70s, the chapel has hosted a variety of social-justice programs and causes, all entirely peaceful as opposed to the “mostly peaceful” protests, also called riots, where neighborhoods are looted by Black Lives Matter and Antifa types and hundreds are injured. Past programs featured the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Jonas Salk. The total cost of the three phases, including endowment, is $30 million. The programs aren’t my cup of yak milk, but they’ve got a seriously intellectual program, and they’re spending the money wisely.
Rothko’s chapel paintings are a challenge. For readers who want Rothko situated in the history of art, he is an Abstract Expressionist, though his style is utterly different from Jackson Pollock’s, Barnett Newman’s, or Willem de Kooning’s — the three other artists anchoring a movement that both made American art internationally famous and lasted in robustly creative form from around 1945 to the ascent of Pop Art in the mid 1960s. By the early ’70s, these figures, each a revolutionary in his way, were either dead or, in de Kooning’s case, senile, though painters Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, among others, gave the movement they started a second wind.
Rothko’s signature style depicts big, standing rectangle canvases primed with crimson over which he floats three to five thin, painterly, cloud-like bands of color. He’s a brilliant, subtle colorist, sometimes juxtaposing orange, blue, and white in pictures that are luscious and serene, and sometimes red against orange for an effect so jarring the viewer hears a boom-boom-boom beat.
The small chapel houses the darkest paintings Rothko did. I’ve sometimes written about end-of-life pictures, done by great artists such as Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya in old age and expressing thematic or stylistic essentials, not necessarily constants over a long career but the last word on what really matters to the artist. Rothko always considered the chapel his final statement. Some artists die young or suddenly, so the end-of-life phenomenon doesn’t exist. Old artists know death is coming. Rothko killed himself in February 1970 after a long period of reflection and deepening despondency, during which he focused on the chapel project.
From the mid 1950s, Rothko gradually darkened and limited his palette. When he wanted pictures with colors with enough contrast to stimulate, he preferred gray, mauve, blue, or reds and purples so dark that they seem black. This palette, austere and narrowed but still velvety rich, darkened more in the 1960s, to rust, black, plum, slate, and brown. Rothko’s work gets bigger, too, as if he wants to create a separate world that draws us in by its visual mystery — his palette darkens to the point where colors shift subtly — and leads us slowly to another world.
Seven of the paintings are black rectangles with hard contours painted on red the color of wine. His paint’s thin enough for us to see the dark red as we’d see a ghost, not a friendly Casper type or a scary Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come but a more elusive, shadowy ghost. Seven are tonal paintings using plum and crimson.
Rothko did not do all the painting himself, using two studio assistants to apply the final coat of the darkest paint. Rothko and his assistants used standard house-painter brushes. There’s nothing wrong with this, and his process points to Rothko as a conceptual artist like Sol LeWitt, whose art is as much the design as the finished wall painting. Rothko made all the design decisions. He cooked the paint, using dry pigments boiled in rabbit-skin glue, polymer, and an egg-and-oil emulsion to get the exact colors and textures he wanted.
What is Rothko seeking? He gives us an aesthetic space to experience emotions well beyond what our mundane world of clock time, consumption, machines, and noise can deliver. He wanted, as did the Menils, an ecumenical space, a chapel serving all faiths. Some biography helps. Rothko is an American artist in that he was an American citizen. He and his family, middle-class, educated, Latvian Jews, came here in 1913, settling in Portland, Ore.
He went to Yale on a scholarship but left after his freshman year, finding the place stuffy, bourgeois, and anti-Semitic. He considered working as a labor-union organizer in the 1930s. By that time, he was living in New York. In his early days as an artist in the late ’30s into the 1940s, he was part of the circles of John Graham and Max Weber, like him immigrant Jews. Both were Svengalis to a hodgepodge of young avant-garde artists. The soon-to-be heavyweights among them were Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Newman. I would describe Rothko in his early years as a Surrealist. His work in the ’40s depicted glyphs and stylized figures that look like animals, even monsters, set against fields of color. I call this body of work “Rothko before Rothko.” He landed on the formula that made him famous around 1950.
Culturally Jewish, he wasn’t observant and seems never to have gone into a synagogue as an adult. He described his paintings for the chapel as religious but wasn’t specific, nor should he have been. Only the most mediocre artists have to tell us what their art is about.
Yet Rothko was always profoundly mindful of God and what, if anything, comes after death. He was a mensch and a worldly man, affected emotionally and intellectually by the tumult of his lifetime. He and his family left Latvia on the eve of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. He lived through the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War — all times when epochal traumas occurred, traumas of the complexity and magnitude of ancient Greek drama, which he knew thoroughly. He was well aware of the Holocaust, but, in his view, the history of humanity is one Holocaust after another.
Rothko worked on the paintings between 1964 and 1967, excluding almost all other painting projects. So, this is Sixties art. Rothko was only in his early 50s but a natural sense of gloom — he’s a European Jew, remember — thickened during the time he spent teaching for a semester at Berkeley. There, Rothko felt isolated. He was famous, with a branded style like Pollock’s, but he was also a high-minded intellectual artist in a milieu of young people for whom irreverence and irony were the preferred social currencies.
Rothko found them light and pampered. He couldn’t understand their optimism and worship of convenience. Compared to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rothko, via the chapel paintings, looks like a Puritan. One of the many reasons he didn’t like Johnson was the architect’s Manhattan love of glamour and polish. Rothko thought he was a dilettante and a snob.
I can’t say the space itself is depressing. It’s a place for pondering, but it’s not ponderous. It feels like Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel in Florence, which is a small sea of gray, austere for the days of the early Renaissance but absolutely decorative compared with what Rothko gave us. Rothko thought about small Italian churches, which, like the Pazzi Chapel, are frankly rigorous. He also thought about big Italian altarpieces, which are immersive, as gaudy as they sometimes are.
In thinking about the Rothko Chapel, I compare it to the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. It’s a similar scale and freestanding. Rothko wanted the octagonal form to evoke early Byzantine churches and both the fundamentalism of early Christian thinking and its ecumenical mood. Early Christianity was simple but inchoate, 300 years after Jesus’s death a free-floating amalgam of Judaism, Greek mysticism, and the New Testament. Galla Placidia’s tomb is also immersive, with almost every surface except the floor covered in mosaics, some abstract representations of a night sky.
Galla Placidia’s tomb was, ironically, a light-bulb moment for me. Rothko’s paintings are, after all, nocturnes, which explained to me why Dominique de Menil thought they were reassuring, even inviting. “Night is peaceful,” she said at the dedication in 1971. “Night is pregnant with life.”
Curators secretly believe that the best artists with whom to work are the dead ones, and the worst nightmares are dealing with the widows. For architects, I’d say the best clients are the collaborative ones — collaborative, not controlling or crazy — while the biggest challenges are the dead ones. Though the chapel is a functioning nonprofit with a board, and the board is a collaborative client, Rothko hovers over the renovation project because he died before the building was finished and, for that matter, never visited Houston.
Rothko painted the 14 canvasses in his studio in New York, building a rudimentary lumber model of the walls. Correctly, he obsessed over lighting. His pictures were dark, with the subtlest tonal transitions, so good lighting was imperative, but he wanted natural light. Rothko worked heroically to adjust the light in his studio to show the paintings as he wanted, but Texas light and New York light are different propositions.
He quarreled with Johnson over lighting, and the two never agreed on what worked best. Johnson also wanted, as architects sometimes do, more building, specifically a more expansive, evocative sanctuary and a central, 80-foot-tall spire shaped like a truncated cone with an oculus admitting light. Dominique, seeing the design, thought it looked like a crematorium, and Rothko thought it was too high and massive to the point of triumphalism.
After Johnson left the project, Dominique and Rothko got the squat, unobtrusive oculus-lit octagon they wanted, but lighting was never resolved and never right. Rothko’s death in 1970 left it looking and feeling like unfinished business. Texas light is indeed harsh, and after a few years, everyone agreed it made the paintings look like black holes. Experiments with baffles to block and filter glare were unsatisfactory.
The architects hired George Sexton, a lighting magician, to engineer the lighting, using technology that didn’t exist in the 1960s. There’s a new skylight with angled louvers, each oriented exactingly to distribute light over the paintings. On a cloudy day or late in the afternoon, digital projectors concealed in a ring around the skylight provide subtle illumination. It works. I visited on a cloudy day and thought the lighting was perfect. Now visitors can see Rothko’s subtle colors, his brushwork, and the reflectivity of his painted surfaces. The old light bleached these qualities from view.
To me, the chapel, for all its ecumenicalism, is an Old Testament place. Jews have many opinions of the afterlife, but they’re best reduced to “the Lord keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust.” Total effacement, a black velvet, might follow death, and Rothko’s work suggests that point of view. I read them as presenting the afterlife as a mystery, not in a foreboding way, but surely not in a happy-clappy way. I know some people visit the place and sob, but my ice-cube heart and composed Yankee brain suggest to me that these people sob a lot.
I think an act of discipline is required before visiting the chapel. “This is a time for reflection,” I thought, and I did rouse memories of the last few funerals I attended. I can do this. I learned from college theater to cry on demand. What I’m saying is that the only failure of the place is intrinsic and operational. Tickets are timed. Visits are limited to 30 minutes. I’m not sure that’s the best environment for catharsis. With 60,000 visitors a year, the timed tickets and visiting limits are unavoidable, especially during the current crisis. When life’s more normal, visitors can stay as long as they like. The backless wooden benches are minimalist and in keeping with the aesthetic but I’m one of those seekers after comfort whom Rothko couldn’t understand when he was at Berkeley. I wanted to sit on a sofa.
Dominique, the canny heroine of 20th-century aesthetics, said the chapel made her think of the second temple in Jerusalem after the Romans finally seized it in a.d. 70. Soldiers were shocked to find, in the holiest room, nothing, which, for Jews, is the invisible presence of God. “It’s a kind of tightrope walking,” she said, “to express the infinite with the finite,” or the vocabulary of painting and architecture. “Isn’t walking on a tightrope what a great artist does?”
