Mark Rothko - Vidal

Chapter 11 The Rothko Chaptel

“I wanted to paint both the finite and the infinite.”

“I was always looking for something more.”

Mark Rothko

^“A Sacred Place, Open to All, Every Day”

Rothko never had the satisfaction of seeing the building that bears his name reach completion. When the Rothko Chapel was inaugurated in February 1971, he had been dead since a year. Nevertheless he was able to accomplish his work for the Chapel under what he considered to be ideal conditions.

“The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.”

For this I thank you [he wrote to Dominique and John de Menil in 1966]. […]

How the Chapel Came to Be

[…] The de Menils were strongly impressed by the Seagram Building series, which they discovered on the occasion of a visit to Rothko in 1960. The tragic grandeur of Rothko’s abstractions seemed to them precisely what was needed for the Houston Chapel. Through their friendship with the French Dominican priest, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, who had taken them earlier on a tour of the churches at Vence, Assy, Audincourt, and Ronchamp, the de Menils had discovered the aesthetic and spiritual virtues of combining modern religious architecture and modern art. Father Couturier, who had been instrumental in commissioning works from such avant-garde artists (as they seemed in the fifties) as Matisse, Leger, and Corbusier, was committed to ending the “absurd divorce” that had separated religious art from living art in the nineteenth century. The way to do this, he felt, was to “call on the greatest [living] independent artists, irrespective of their private convictions,” to create art for radically new churches.

In much the same spirit, the de Menils approached Rothko in 1964 and, assuring him that he would be given complete freedom to paint as he saw fit, asked him to do a series of pictures for the Chapel. Responding enthusiastically to their invitation, Rothko worked on the project for three years--years which held moments of deep frustration and despair. […]

The Paintings and Their Setting

[…] The Chapels octogonal plan serves several purposes. Usual in early Christian as well as Orthodox churches, the eight-sided structure, which combines two Greek crosses, encloses you in an almost circular space. Stand at its center and you find yourself at an equal distance from the eight sides, each one of which displays a mural panel. Natural light, attenuated by a canopy, filters in from a central skylight.

Aided by his assistants, Rothko spent three years working on the Chapel paintings, devoting much care to the choice of colors and to the proportions of these compositions. He set up a full-sized model of the Chapel in his vast studio at 157 East 69th Street--his last studio. To replicate the lighting in the Chapel, he hung a parachute beneath the skylight. Painting the huge panels was a hard physical task, though it was nothing compared to the psychological strain Rothko was under. He destroyed many panels before being satisfied with his compositions. The process of painting and re-painting, interrupted by long stretches of reflecting, seemed endless.

In the end, Rothko delivered three triptychs and nine panels. The triptychs and five of the panels are now in the Chapel; the four other panels are in the nearby De Menil Foundation. The Chapel paintings were installed with rough symmetry, as can be seen in the adjoining plan. When visiting Italy, Rothko had been impressed by the twelfth century Byzantine basilica of Torcello, Santa Maria Assunta. He wanted the Chapel to repeat the stunning effect produced by the mosaic of the Last Judgment above the entrace and the heavenly vision of the Virgin and Child in the apse.

The first thing you see after your eyes have adjusted to the dim light in the Chapel is the north apse triptych. Then you begin to notice the other triptychs and panels. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this arrangement of monumental paintings. The north triptych and the four panels are strictly monochrome: black, with brown and purple reflections--a black inhabited by red. The south panel and the east and west triptychs each consist of a sharp-edged black rectangle on a brown field.

The Chapel’s architecture and the paintings are linked by symbolic numbers: 8 for the octagonal plan, 1 for each of the panels, 3 for the triptychs. It would be a mistake to assign definite symbolic meanings to these strictly evocative numbers: each viewer will interpret them according to his own culture and sensibility. […]

A Metaphor of Sacrifice

Rothko has denied that the fourteen paintings (three triptychs and five panels) for the Chapel stand for the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Still, it seems difficult not to associate the series with suffering and death, all the more so when we recall that when Rothko was given the commission to decorate the Chapel it was still meant to be a strictly Catholic place of worship. Nor was Rothko unfamiliar with Christian themes: in a sense, the Chapel paintings are non-representational extensions of the symbolism of such early canvases as Crucifixion and Gethsemani. Sacrifice and burial were major pictorial themes of his Surrealistic output, as we already seen.

In deep tones of anguish and bereavement, the paintings seem to be uttering their all-too-human laments to each other. “Voices in an opera,” Rothko called them. […]

Around the same time that Rothko was working or the Chapel paintings, another friend, Barnett Newman, was painting his Stations of the Cross--Lema Sabachtani series, which consists of fourteen paintings of uniform size (1958-1966, 150 x 120 cm). In each one, thin black, gray, or white vertical stripes stand out against a light ocher background. Newman’s series actually includes a kind of epilogue, a fifteenth painting, entitled Be II: It is bisected by a reddish-yellow line symbolizing the Resurrection of Christ.

The parallels between Newman and Rothko are striking. Both artists were Jewish and both seemed to have wanted to paint a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust; they were both agnostics too. […]

The Spirit of Darkness

There’s something extraordinarily heroic about the way Rothko dedicated himself to the spirit of painting, a spirit which grew darker as the years went by, until in the end it was almost invisible. The dividing line between death and spirituality got thinner and thinner, and ultimately there was hardly any difference between them.

As Dominique de Menil observes, “real creators, always working at the limit of their perception, may reach spiritual regions bordering on the sacred.” Two non-believers, Matisse and Rothko, have given us those masterpieces of religious art in our century, the Vence and Houston chapels. “Somewhere in [Rothko] was the lover of the absolute,” wrote Dore Ashton. Many visitors to the Houston Chapel have commented that they felt they were in the Presence of God.

In the address she gave at the Chapel’s inauguration, Dominique de Menil said:

“Images which were never acceptable to Jews and Moslems have become intolerable to all of us today [...] we cannot represent Jesus or his apostles any more. […] We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine. […] Rothko was prophetic in leaving us a nocturnal environment. Night is peaceful. Night is pregnant with life.” […]