Broad Sound

In Seeing Rothko, art historian John Elderfield argues that Mark Rothko’s works are “designed to deliver transcendence, to provide access to hidden but immanent truths of the universe—not merely to struggle with that transcendence, those truths (that would be a doubter’s way) but actually to convey them. For Rothko, in an interpretation we can scarcely fathom now, a picture could offer immediate access to the divine.” Rothko’s paintings contain an infinity, and it seems his trajectory toward the spiritual was an inevitable one. Pushing the limits of what modern art could accomplish through sublime minimalism leaves viewers plumbing the depths of their own souls when gazing upon his work. His last project before death, a chapel, offered him a permanent place among artists who have dared to reach toward divinity.

Rothko is most recognizable for his vivid and minimal color studies, which populated modern art discourse through much of the ‘50s. Although he was consigned to both, he claimed neither American Abstract Expressionism nor the Color Field movement. Never one to be pigeonholed, he often disregarded both praise and criticism in equal measure. Rather than being flattered when an acquaintance praised him as “a master of color harmonies,” Rothko took insult: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!” When a would-be buyer visited his studio asking to buy a “happy” painting featuring warm colors, Rothko responded, “Red, yellow, orange—aren’t those the colors of an inferno?” When talking about his work, Rothko often made juxtaposing statements, but one thing remains the same: his insistence on their potential to become “more” than the sum of their parts, their transcendence. In 1957, his focus shifted to darker experimentation.

Rothko came to have a strong distaste for the New York art scene during his career. A man of contradictions, he found it both too exclusive, allusive, haughty, and too pedestrian, vain, unenlightened. There was too much money and there were too many people. Too many collectors, not enough admirers. His work was highly sought-after but seemingly misunderstood. He grew tired. Although Rothko seemed to always have seeds of discomfort and a need for solitude, he was ultimately a lonely man longing for a space where he was understood and appreciated for his ever-evolving fickle nature, in art and in life. He wanted to separate himself from the academic or historical context of museums, artistic rivalry and bureaucracy, masses passing by slack-jawed on dates or field trips. He aimed for a purposeful place, elevated from the everyday and estranged from the general “art world.” Rothko first toyed with the idea of a complete painted environment in the late 1950s, when he created his Seagram Murals for the Four Seasons in New York City’s Seagram Building. This was also his first experiment with darker tones, intending to ruin the appetite of the wealthy patrons who dined there. After visiting the restaurant in which they were meant to hang, the reality—that he was not creating an environment for his work, but that an already-existing environment would simply be adorned with his creation—disturbed him. He abruptly withdrew his existing paintings, canceled the commission, returned the money he had received to complete the works, and placed the existing pieces in storage. A second trial of a complete painted environment was undertaken shortly after, this time at Harvard University. But again, Rothko was left unsatisfied. The environment—another dining room, in which the paintings were meant to overwhelm—was too manicured, populated by Harvard seals and chairs placed so close to the paintings that an obstacle was created when the chairs were pushed back. In addition to the unsuitable surroundings, the paintings were so maltreated that a mere three years after installation, they had faded and changed color. Rothko had lost interest and Harvard did nothing. Not until a report was made on the extensive damage were they removed and put into dark storage. It was another loss for Rothko: both the marketplace and bureaucracy had abandoned him—or if not abandoned, then disregarded his very being and the soul behind his work.

When he was approached in 1964 by Dominique de Menil, an eccentric, avid, and iconic art collector from Houston, Texas, it was an opportunity too perfect to pass up. He did not envision his Gesamtkunstwerk (a German term that roughly translates as “total work of art”) in the heart of New York or Paris; he wanted one “more out of the way, a destination, outside the city.” And so, it landed in a shady, manicured neighborhood, on the grounds of both a private Catholic university (University of St. Thomas, est. 1947) and, later, a historic tucked-away museum (The Menil Collection, est. 1987). Mrs. de Menil bought the entire surrounding neighborhood in 1972, painting it an anemic gray in contrast to the lush green of the massive oak trees lining each street, every low-lying, wood-paneled house matching the next one. The chapel itself is a low, conservative, stark brick building hidden behind a 90-degree wall of thin trees (once bamboo, but since replaced). A reflecting pond sits in front of it, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk standing erect in the water, just off center. Newman’s sculpture is dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and reads as static and cold, even sterile when viewed in the context of its placement outside of the chapel. This is also a complementary work, though. The warm rust of the corten steel, its dynamic thrust upward from the water, almost breaking in the middle, but conjoining two points instead. Broken Obelisk suggests the ideals of all that was MLK. The interior of the chapel is cool in contrast, shifting from the constraints of the world to something without. Rothko was not obliterating known form but striving to free his work from the mundane and profane, his work finally unbound by the confinement of messy dining halls and busy chambers. The adornment of public areas in exclusive environs did not suit his ultimate ideas of transcendence.

Walking into the space, after passing the small dim foyer, the eyes are immediately drawn to the three immense dark canvases on the north wall. At night, when the entire room basks in shadow, one could imagine walking straight into or through them, letting them envelop you. The second thing one notices is the silence. As if you’ve immersed yourself under water that has no current, somehow been made to sit completely still. Any sound is immediately disruptive: a pen drop, sneeze, cough—it echoes in your ears as if someone has stuck their hand in the pool and made waves. The chapel’s structure, originally conceived by Philip Johnson as a square (there was much turmoil between the men) and later completed by Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry, is that of an octagon. In 1967, Rothko completed the series of 14 paintings—divided evenly into seven canvases with black rectangles on maroon ground, and seven purple tonal paintings. Triptychs of paintings adorn the north, east, and west walls, evoking the holy trinity and encouraging the work to be read as divine. The southern wall displays the single painting most beholden to his previous color work: a dark rectangle set in maroon, the border thickening at the bottom like an undeveloped Polaroid, the placement meant to recall that of Last Judgment scenes he admired in churches on a previous trip to Italy. A stickler for lighting conditions, Rothko wanted the chapel to mimic the condition of his 69th Street studio in New York, which was largely cast in shadow, the only light streaming through the skylight in the center of the wood-beam ceiling. Rothko having recognized that the expressive nature of these blocks of color (or lack thereof) could only be fully enlivened by the right environment, his strokes and technique become visible when presented in a space that neither shines a spotlight nor dulls them. And so, too, the chapel is lit by a singular skylight at the center (with additional warm, low light circling the skylight at dusk or on cloudy days). This setting allows the paintings to come alive and shift with the changing light of the day. And shift they do. Figures form and fade, shadows cast by no discernible light source slink across your eyeline, silhouettes appear and disappear, ghosts. Despite being mere variants of the same color scheme, none of the paint looks as if it were placed on the various canvases the same way. Where one drips, sinking down the canvas, the next one’s strokes veer to the right or left. Rothko often said that he didn’t so much paint as breathe paint onto the canvas. This dissimilitude among such seeming simplicity is what imbues the work with a sense that patience pays off. The longer you sit among the paintings, the more reveals itself to you. When you breathe, they breathe with you.

“I’m not an abstractionist,” Rothko said in a 1956 interview. “I’m not interested in relationships of colors or forms or anything else…I’m interested in only expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.” Sitting in front of them, gazing upward like a child dwarfed by a towering father, one does experience those basic emotions. But I’m sure no small minority experience an extension of feeling, something beyond the cyclical norm of experiencing hope or defeat. Perhaps why people are so moved is because as the paintings themselves break free of known form, they also break free of the structure in which we as a society are taught to process ourselves and the world around us. A rebirth, perhaps, or maybe a confrontation. Rothko’s big, dark voids are anything but—they are doors, windows, to ethereal subjects and topics we simply don’t have words to describe yet. If they had the ability to break free, wash over us, ooze into our mouths, fill us up, and caress us from the inside before returning to their canvases, perhaps we would all be left with a little more darkness inside of us, but a little more grace toward all on Earth and beyond as well.

Many try to comment, solidify our overwhelming connection. But one of the most beautiful things about these paintings, and why people continue to fail to convey the feeling that washes over while standing before them, is that one can only know by being in their presence. And it is in this experiential nature that these paintings transform and create a world greater than themselves. They hold all knowledge, spanning before you as you gaze into these black wells, the history of the universe and everything to come. Somehow it seems that only you and Rothko are in on this secret. It’s as monumental and minuscule as a whisper between friends, a communion. As if in a waking dream, aware of sleep but experiencing the senses as reality—the illusion that you can touch, taste, hear—one can touch, taste, hear these paintings. There is an allusion present in Rothko’s work—not a reference, not a comment or hint, but an implication that we, as people, have nowhere near begun to explore the possible ways in which we can communicate meaningfully with things other than language or illustration. In this modern society, we are put into boxes and filed away under various labels to indicate worth to the world. Rothko utilized a way of speaking and being that is wordlessly pivotal, an ambient language overflowing with meaning waiting to be translated by the viewer and the viewer alone. In 1945, Rothko wrote in a personal statement for an exhibition that art “is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

I, myself, have had a lifetime of experience at the chapel. I fell in love there. Trailing behind a man over a decade my senior at 20 years old, the man I would dedicate my troubled early 20s to, I entered through the heavy steel doors and caught a glimpse of the back of his head. He was balding, just beginning to, and there was a very thin patch of hair, scalp visible underneath, only noticeable from the back. I remember furrowing my brow, then smiling. We walked in and sat together, and I felt it wash over me, surrendering myself to the newness of love. “If I ever get married, I want the ceremony to be held at the Rothko Chapel,” I remember him deciding on one of our many road trips. He got married not long after ending things; it did not take place at the Rothko Chapel.

I returned for the first time following a displacement from Houston by a natural disaster as I was in the midst of an abusive, long-distance relationship. I had trapped myself emotionally during the pandemic with a man twice my age who lived in Montreal. He had flown down and I had taken the bus; it was the first time we met in person. It immediately became hostile, and I was scared in a city that I didn’t feel was mine anymore, kept in a state of almost constant panic. On the grounds of the Menil, though, I was in a place that felt like home, and I became confident, discerning. We walked the museum briefly, but when he wanted to enter the chapel, I refused. In a moment of clarity that would lead to me gathering the strength to cut ties, I thought, “He doesn’t deserve it.” He pouted intensely, making sure to acknowledge that I was offending him by refusing to go. He brought it up often before I severed communication permanently, after a small sprint of stalking my whereabouts from thousands of miles away. I remember being a small child, accompanied by my parents, marveling at the sheer enormity of the space. Quite puzzled by the “paintings” on the wall, it was too much for me, overbearing and harsh. Anxious and tugging at the hemline of my father’s shirt, I begged to leave and emerge again into the fresh air. I imagine numerous moments like this in the lives of millions of people that have passed through, stepped foot inside of this chapel. How many lives were changed within this space? How many little moments will gather and nest in how many people’s memories? Children, adults, parents, newlyweds, widows, elders, orphans, chosen families, the wealthy, the impoverished, the lost, the found. How do these works, this space, rest in their minds, if at all? Some people walk into the main space and turn right around, no introspection for them.

On the morning of February 25th, 1970, the body of Mark Rothko was found in his studio. He had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade. Found in a pool of blood six by eight feet wide, wearing long johns and thick black socks, he left no note. He was 66 years old. Some academics have posited that his later work, his transition away from using bright colors, signals his suicide. Not only does this argument disregard the evolutionary nature of art and being an artist in general, it also bastardizes the trajectory of Rothko’s work. All art owes something to the internal emotional process of its artist, but in a lifetime of creative endeavors that pushed boundaries, to reduce an artist’s work before suicide to a “suicide note” not only signals a fundamental misunderstanding of suicide but also what Rothko wanted to achieve with his later paintings. The lack of color, the darkness, does not indicate depression or sadness, but radical experimentation with form and art as individual experience. If we take Rothko at his word—“I don’t prophesy the woes to come. I just paint the woes already here”—then the hypothesis of his later paintings being suicide notes is silly. There is no fate within these works that wasn’t there to begin with. Their universality and prescience is not otherworldly, but earthly. Their simplicity allows discovery, projection, and meditation eternally. By withholding light, he imbues this work with an understanding between artist and viewer—not a contract, mind you, as Rothko would never expect anything from his audience. You must be present in your witness to it, lest you miss something that was meant for you at that moment. It is strange to be within a space that is the culmination of a life’s work that was never occupied by the man himself. There’s an inkling of sadness that emerges whenever it crosses my mind. What would he think of all of this? One can only hope that he’d take solace in the mindfulness and enlightenment visitors experience here on a daily basis. With every visit, I feel differently. First stepping into the space after time away, I felt a blanket of peace swaddle me. It was dead silent; only a few others sat meditating. I was there with a purpose, to look at these monumental displays and document my feelings about them. But the more I returned, the more the darkness of the pieces overwhelmed me. They seemed to crush every thought I had that wasn’t about their immenseness, sitting brutal and burdensome. And now, over a thousand miles away, I long for them again. Somehow, in my mind, they have reverted back to comfort, something knowable in the abstract, my feelings about them in time and place distinct, but not at all permanent.