Rothko Chapel / Menil Collection

I finally made it to the Rothko Chapel. I learned about this site in my first "art" history class in college, a 300-level course on modern painting, sculpture and architecture, but I had never been there until Wednesday. Before visiting the chapel I went to their website, where I learned two important pieces of information: entry to the chapel is free, and no photography is allowed on the interior. Here's an image of the exterior:

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was an abstract expressionist painter best known for his images of floating rectangles in oil on canvas, usually very large canvasses. For example, Orange and Yellow from 1956, in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which is over seven feet tall:

(I should acknowledge that I downloaded this image from the Internet. All other photos in this blog are by me, unless otherwise noted.)

The abstract expressionists (Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, Rothko, et al.) were all about exploring subconscious psychological states and expressing them through (usually) nonobjective compositions. Of course, they were also working out the transformation of western painting from optical naturalism to abstraction and ultimately to the radical reduction of painting to simply paint on canvas. So that whether or not you buy the part about the expression of inner states, you can at least appreciate the work of these painters as a plausible extension of the modernist approach to painting, which had its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century in the works of painters like Courbet and Manet and was developed most famously by Cezanne in the late nineteenth century and Picasso in the early twentieth century. As I tell my students, you don't have to like these paintings, but you should at least understand why they happened.

Rothko wanted the viewer to stand close to his iconic late paintings and immerse herself in the emotional content of the color. It was perhaps this "spiritual" aspect of the pictures that inspired John and Dominique de Menil to commission him to decorate the interior of an ecumenical chapel they were planning to build in Houston. One of the cool things about Rothko's paintings is that the fields of color can either be experienced as hovering just above the surface of the canvas or receding indefinitely into the distance. Which is why I was a little disappointed with the canvasses in the chapel. They don't have the blurred edges of the iconic paintings, and in most cases they don't even have the floating rectangles. In every case but one, they are simply vertical rectangles of monochrome color. Some of them have a painted border about five inches wide, but this border is hard-edged and nearly the same tone as the primary field of color. Here is an interior of the chapel that I stole from the Internet:

Near the Rothko Chapel is the world-famous Menil Collection, which of course I had never visited before either. Here's a photo of the exterior:

This collection is amazing. Dominique de Menil was an heiress to the Schlumburger fortune, and the collection she and her husband put together and opened to the public in 1987 is justifiably famous for being relatively small but of extraordinarily high quality. Before I was informed that photography is not allowed in the Menil Collection as well, I was able to snap this picture of a group of Cycladic sculptures: 

I say that the collection is small, but they've actually got over 17,000 objects. What is relatively small is the exhibition space, so only a small percentage of the collection is on view at any given time. The main floor of the museum consists of a long hallway running on an east-west axis the length of the building, with six or seven self-contained exhibition spaces. I toured most of the galleries, but I'm especially drawn to modern painting, of which they have a great collection. (Though they don't have a Pollock; this road trip is turning into a search for a Pollock. NCMA didn't have a Pollock; the High didn't have a Pollock; yesterday I went to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, and while they had some great examples from the New York School, they didn't have a Pollock, not that they were showing anyway. The Menil Collection actually has a Pollock, but it wasn't on display when I was there. I'm sure I'll find one in California, but what if I don't?)

After I was told that there was no photography allowed in the collection, I snuck another picture, this one of a Barnett Newman situated at the far end of three galleries:

I don't know who the white works in the near gallery are by, but the dark canvasses in the middle gallery are Rothkos. They are early versions of the program of paintings for the chapel, and interestingly they do have the floating rectangles with the rough edges, so one is able to get an idea of what the chapel interior would have looked like if it had been filled with iconic Rothkos. We see studies for finished works all the time in "art" history, usually drawings or sketches for finished paintings. But here we have a study in real space for a finished architectural space, and just a few hundred yards from the finished work itself.

The Menil is also known for its collection of surrealist paintings. I'm a big fan of Magritte, and they had some amazing ones, including this one:

Evening Falls (1964; downloaded image).

And this one: 

The Glass Key (1959; downloaded image). This painting was used for the cover of one of my philosophy books from college, The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus.

Here are a couple more images of the exterior of the chapel:

This is Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk in the reflecting pool facing the entrance to the chapel. It's kind of hard to see, but perched atop the sculpture is a dove, which I flushed when I walked toward the obelisk. I thought it was fitting that the dove lighted on the sculpture since the general theme of the place is peace.

  
This is the east facade, with a door that is usually locked. I just thought it was interesting that the black rectangle of the door echoes the black rectangles on the interior.

An interesting thing happened when I was sitting in the chapel. First of all, they have all sorts of sacred texts from many world religions available for visitors' use. As I sat in the chapel I remembered that David Summers spends a few pages on the Rothko Chapel toward the end of Real Spaces. This book is basically my bible ("bible" means "book") and it is with me on this trip. I walked out to my car, got it, and sat back down in the Rothko Chapel to read David Summers' analysis of the Rothko Chapel.