The Rothko Chapel

Letter of Recommendation

By JACQUI SHINE AUG. 23, 2017 Continue reading the main story Share This Page

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Photo A quiet, lonely place to share the grief of solitude. Credit Thomas Struth for The New York Times

Last March marked the 10th anniver­sary of my mother’s death. Her short life was difficult, and she was, too; still, I was devoted to her. Inconsolable losses eventually take the form of ordinary pains, like joints that ache when a storm is coming, but sometimes I’m caught by surprise. This year, feeling stranded in my grief and sadness made for a long winter and a hard spring.

Even as the days lengthened, I felt unreachable. It was as if I’d waited for a tide that, commanded by some physics of loneliness, pulled away before it could even reach the shore. It occurred to me one morning in April that I might want to visit the Rothko Chapel — you know, someday. Then it occurred to me, a little wildly, to just go. Right then. Twelve hours later, I was in Houston.

The chapel is both a nondenominational place of worship and a site-specific artwork, an installation of 14 canvases by the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. In 1964, the Houston art collectors and patrons John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Rothko’s work for the interior of a space to be designed by the architect Philip Johnson. (When Johnson clashed with Rothko, the project was turned over to the Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry.) The de Menils, observant Catholics, were influenced by their friend the Rev. Marie-Alain Couturier, who believed that modern artists could reinvigorate sacred art. The chapel, which opened in 1971, sits next to the campus of the Menil Collection, the museum that now houses the couple’s art. It has been open to the public nearly every day since.

Rothko’s canvases are studies in color relationships, assemblages of two or three rectangular blocks set against a contrasting field. But he chafed at the label ‘‘abstractionist.’’ The subjects of his paintings, he said, were ‘‘basic human emotions,’’ expressed in the color values he wrested from layered pigment. The results are visceral, charged, provocative. It’s rare to be unmoved by them, whether to rage or joy. Despite, or because of, their simplicity, Rothko’s paintings have been known to bring viewers to tears. Rothko was proud of that; it was a sign of his success. I wanted very badly to be moved.

Whims beget surprises. When I arrived, I found out that I had envisioned the wrong thing, the wrong kind of place, entirely. These canvases are nothing like his more luminous color studies, paintings so full of depth and light that it almost feels as if you can enter. The Houston canvases are dark purples, maroons, black: the colors of old sorrows or ageless ones. I had wanted something I could disappear inside, but these colors seemed to come from inside me. According to James Breslin’s biography of Rothko, he set out to paint something difficult to look at. Continue reading the main story Letter of Recommendation Celebrations of objects and experiences that have been overlooked or underappreciated.

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See More » Recent Comments LilBubba August 27, 2017

As a Houstonian, I'm quite proud to have the Rothko Chapel play such a prominent part in our arts and cultural life. The Rothko and the... Wolfie August 25, 2017

What did he see that made it too painful to continue? We will never know. Or maybe he put all his pain in those panels then found he... Bh August 24, 2017

On 9/11, in my confusion, sorrow, and horror, it was the only place in which I could feel grounded and safe. I felt drawn there immediately...

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The chapel is lit only by a skylight, designed to match the one in Rothko’s New York studio, where he built a partial mock-up of the chapel interior to work from. No matter where you stand, the room’s irregular geometry seems to thrust you into its center. Comforts are few. There are usually two tidy rows of backless benches in the center of the room, a handful of meditation cushions on the brick floor. It is quiet but rarely silent. It is not an easy place. Nothing tells you how to see. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story The New York Times Magazine

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In this place, purposeful looking becomes an exercise in failure. My initial diligence seemed to yield only backaches, but I gamely sat for a couple of hours each morning and afternoon. For a long time the paintings refused me, but slowly, resonances materialized. A swirl that looked like the graceful curve of a spine rose from a purple field. I thought about bruises and hematomas. My eyes moved over the sharp geometry of black giving way to maroon, and it was the color of my mother’s exhaustion when she died, of everything life had wrung out of her. I wanted to tell someone, point to it and show them where I’d found her, but then I realized that no one else would be able to see. No one could see anyone’s ghosts but his or her own.

Time passed, but I couldn’t tell you how much. Eventually my knees were achy and I was hungry. As I stirred and stretched, it occurred to me that this might be the thing we share, this grief for our many solitudes. We go to the chapel to see, and to know that we can’t. Perhaps it can only be this way: Rothko committed suicide in 1970, a year before the project was completed. He made the paintings in New York, under light we will never know; he never saw what they would look like under Texas’ expansive sky. There is no right way to gaze upon the paintings, no ideal set of conditions.

Sitting there alone, I suddenly felt happy for everyone around me, moved by the tenderness I knew was inside them. I was glad for what they could see, even if it was hidden from me. I think this gentle affection for not knowing might be what we really mean by empathy. Perhaps this is what Rothko meant when he told a group of art students that he included in his paintings a measure of hope: ‘‘10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.’’

The Rothko Chapel is a lonely place. We need lonely places, but it helps to know that they’re lonely for everyone. We all have mothers, and we all lose them, though never in the same way. I watched shadows move across the paintings and the floor and our bodies. This felt, for a minute, like relief.