![]() ![]() The setting is one that viewers can relate to and van Gogh´s swirling sky directs the viewer´s eye around the painting, with spacing between the stars and the curving contours creating a dot-to-dot effect. Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.The night sky depicted by van Gogh in the Starry Night painting is brimming with whirling clouds, shining stars, and a bright crescent moon. In the stillness of the Rothko Chapel, all are invited to have peace or silence, with the paintings providing an enigmatic portal to contemplation. It is planned to reopen this June with a revamped skylight, entryway, and lighting to enhance how illumination interacts with the paintings, as well as upgrades to protect the art so that it will continue to be as Rothko intended. Last March, the chapel closed for renovations as part of a capital project called Opening Spaces aimed at preserving this unique sacred space. The Rothko Chapel still serves the spiritually diverse community of Houston, from religious services to private prayer and meditation. Cain observed in the Southwest Review that it is said of these canvases that they “ are saturated with death they are representations of the void, stark and remorseless but, somehow, uplifting evocations of emptiness: they absorb us into themselves the longer we gaze at them.”įor those who take the time to really look at them, the paintings offer quiet reflection. Others, however, have perceived in the paintings hints of Rothko’s personal darkness, which in his final years included upheaval in his family life and his health. “Among the comments written in the guest book kept in the chapel’s foyer, the most frequently used word is ‘peace,’” writes the late Rothko biographer James E. A common question over the years has been: “Where are the paintings?” Many have found in the Rothko Chapel a meditative calm. While Rothko did not offer any religious context for the paintings themselves-although the repeated use of triptychs echoes the Holy Trinity-he “did tell Dominique de Menil about his intense emotional experience during this visit.”įrom its opening, some visitors were baffled by this chapel of strange darkness. Marian Assunta in Torcell,” explains philosophy of religion scholar Wessel Stoker in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. For instance, in positioning one painting at the entrance across from another in the apse, “ Rothko wanted to reproduce the tension that he had experienced during a visit to the Byzantine basilica church of St. Rothko had very specific ideas of how he wanted visitors to feel in the space. He initially worked with architect Philip Johnson, another leading figure of American modern expression, yet they conflicted over the design, so the angular structure was completed with architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. His paintings were to hang by themselves in a space he had designed, and they would be viewed in a context that would emphasize humanistic meaning over abstraction.” ![]() In Perspectives of New Music, music historian Steven Johnson writes that Rothko “regarded his Chapel commission as the major event in his career. In 1964, he agreed not just to contribute paintings to the chapel but to collaborate on the architecture that would hold them. The Menils were most interested in how Rothko engaged with the spiritual in his art-the “Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times,” as he once put it. Step by step, the field was enlarged, leaving only a narrow margin of color. At first, the field occupied only the central part-an opening in a wall into the night. A careful look at any of the black fields reveals successive stages. Within the severe limitations he had set for himself, Rothko worked relentlessly. ![]() He killed himself a year before the chapel was dedicated in 1971 as “a sacred place open to all, every day.” That year, Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the chapel with her husband John (together they also founded the neighboring Menil Collection), considered how the late painter created such depth with a sparse palette in Art Journal: It was among the last works finished by the artist Mark Rothko. The non-denominational space is both a respite and a masterpiece of modern art. Rothko “regarded his Chapel commission as the major event in his career.”
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