Scope and Contents Rothko could be high minded. He dumped his gallerist Sidney Janis because Janis represented that twerp Warhol. And he butted heads with architect Philip Johnson over the Rothko Chapel’s design. Rothko’s need to control his paintings’ presentation caused Johnson to depart the project. Why uptight? As a philosopher priest of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Rothko believed art’s dead serious purpose was to transform the viewer and evoke transcendence and the sublime. For John and Dominique...

Scope and Contents eceptively simple and emotionally charged, Mark Rothko’s abstract canvases are known to induce a contemplative, almost spiritual experience when viewed in person. In 1964, at the height of the artist’s fame, patrons Dominique and John de Menil commissioned him to create a multisensory space in Houston where visitors could be fully immersed in the painter’s world. His response was Rothko Chapel, an ecumenical sanctuary lined with 14 site-specific panels meant to inspire a meditative silence....

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An extensive renovation of Houston’s Rothko Chapel aims to honor the original vision of its creator, Mark Rothko.

Scope and Contents The Rothko Chapel Renewal and Campus Expansion (Phase One) HoustonThe Rothko Chapel is 50 years old this February, and it has never looked better, thanks to a studious update by Architecture Research Office. For those unfamiliar with the project, it is an essential part of one of the great high-low culture visitor experiences in Houston: an afternoon wandering the Lancaster Place subdivision, with its dreamlike collection of bungalows (all painted grey, with white trim), taking...

Scope and Contents Hearing VoicesAs a librettist, I thought the idea of setting an opera in the Rothko Chapel seemed preposterous. The much hallowed place in Houston, considered by many to be one of the greatest achievements in mid-twentieth-century art, doubles as a gallery exhibiting Mark Rothko's paintings and as a sanctuary of quiet and contemplation. It is where the merest whisper can incur the most censorious sneers from fellow visitors. Setting an opera in the chapel seemed almost...