Marc Rothko's Chapel

By Author: Candice Christie
Total Articles: 2
Comment this article

In the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Art surrounds you here. Oil paintings on a majestic scale dominate each of its eight walls. There is little to interrupt their power, just the bare plaster, a few benches, and a couple of cushions on the floor. Their presence simply adds to the eeriness of this place, illuminated only by a skylight that softens the fierce afternoon sun. The Rothko Chapel was designed to house the oil paintings of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, but it is also a sacred space, a non-denominational place of worship.
The chapel houses one of the two greatest cycles of Rothko oil paintings. On February 25 1970, the Tate took delivery of an astonishing gift: eight mural-sized oil paintings created by Rothko for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building, but judged by him to be totally inappropriate for the superficial, noisy, distracting setting of an expensive restaurant. Motivated by complicated reasons of his own - which included his pursuit of a tax break, his desire to insult New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and his admiration for the Tate's Turners - Rothko gave his ...
... most accessible, moving and enduring oil paintings to Britain. The day the Tate took delivery of the oil paintings, they also received some horrible news: Rothko had killed himself in his Manhattan studio, slicing open arteries in both arms and bleeding to death.
Rothko had painted the Seagram murals at the end of the 1950s. They herald a new darkness - literally - in his oil paintings, which had previously exhibited such brightness and vibrancy. While still marvels of colour, they feature deep shades, reds, purples, blacks, with frame-like forms painted over bloody depths, as if the canvases were windows on to the birth or death of the cosmos. Rothko believed that all serious art was about death, and the chapel was his last word, his crowning achievement.
In 1964, Texas art collectors and oil millionaires Dominique and John de Menil commissioned Rothko to create a cycle of abstract oil paintings for a chapel in Houston. Rothko built a full-size mock-up of the space in his Manhattan studio and painted 14 canvases to be set in various groupings around its walls. He used a pulley to adjust their height, allowing him to decide their exact locations. The only thing needed now was the building. But Rothko didn't wait around. He killed himself before the chapel was finished. It finally It finally opened, with everything done as he wished, a year after his death.
Rothko did not paint his cycle of dark oil paintings for the Menils' chapel because he was a religious man. He leapt at the chance to create a chapel because it was the type of cultural space that came closest to his ideal of making a "place" with art. Tell that to Houstonians. To spend a couple of days at the Rothko Chapel is to be at once impressed and silently troubled. Locals use this place. In fact, they love it. They come not just as tourists but to meditate, pray, and talk sombrely. They see it as a religious place and the art as spiritual. It is called a chapel, after all, and most Americans believe in God.