Rothko's Chapel

Visitors cry in the Rothko Chapel. Not all of them, not even most of them, but enough that the docents keep tissues near the door and the staff has stopped being surprised by it. People who arrive skeptical often describe the strongest reactions. People who come expecting a religious experience often report the lightest ones. The effect resists the usual categories.

Part of what’s happening is scale. The paintings are big enough that a standing adult sees mostly painting and barely any wall. The eye stops having anywhere else to go. Part of it is monochrome ambiguity. Because the colors aren’t stable — because the paintings seem to breathe and shift the longer you look — the brain keeps searching for an image that doesn’t resolve. That searching, carried on for several minutes in a quiet room, tends to loosen whatever the visitor walked in with.

Mark Rothko was born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, in what was then the Russian Empire, in 1903, and arrived in the United States as a child. He spent the first twenty years of his career painting more or less figuratively, and then in the late 1940s he did something almost every serious painter of his generation did: he abandoned representation.

What he didn’t abandon was ambition. Rothko was one of the loudest voices in American painting against the idea that abstraction meant decoration. In letters, lectures, and studio arguments, he insisted that his paintings were about something — something hard to name, but serious. He compared his goal to what Aeschylus was doing in Greek tragedy. He thought a painting, like a play, could produce a direct encounter with grief, terror, awe, the things he called “the tragic sense.” He wanted viewers to be wrecked by his work, not charmed by it.

The Rothko Chapel isn’t the only example of a modern building trying to do what chapels used to do without the theology attached. The Turrell Skyspaces, the Matisse Chapel in Vence, the Barnett Newman Stations of the Cross at the National Gallery in Washington, the Menil Collection’s Byzantine Fresco Chapel before it closed — twentieth-century art is full of rooms designed to produce the kind of attention and quiet people used to seek in churches.

This isn’t an accident. In most of Europe and North America, religious attendance has been declining for decades, while attendance at museums, concert halls, and designed contemplative spaces has gone up. The philosopher Charles Taylor, writing about what he calls a secular age, argues that the functions religion used to cover — the need for ritual, for shared silence, for an encounter with something larger than daily life — don’t disappear when belief recedes. They migrate. Art is one of the places they migrate to.

Fourteen near-black panels in an octagonal room in Houston. No altar, no cross, no scripture. A few benches in the middle and a tissue box by the door. What Rothko built is a piece of architecture disguised as a set of paintings, or a set of paintings disguised as a piece of architecture — it’s not obvious which way the weight falls, and that ambiguity may be part of why the room works as well as it does.

What we know is that it moves people who don’t expect to be moved, and that the effect doesn’t require any particular belief to kick in. What Rothko seems to have discovered, almost by accident, is that color and scale and silence, assembled in the right proportions, can produce the kind of experience human beings used to associate with the sacred. Whether that means art has taken over a job religion used to do, or whether the job was always really about color and scale and silence, is a question the room doesn’t answer.