Rothko’s Houston
When I first visited the Rothko Chapel I didn’t know it was famous. I was new to Houston then, new to exploring places on my own, and even though I thought the chapel represented nihilism, I kept coming back once or twice every year.
I kept expecting the same shock I experienced the first time I saw the row of religious texts laid on the bench in the entryway: The Quran, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Torah, the Bible, and others. To me, the chapel flattened belief to its lowest common denominator. Rothko’s grey panels lining the octagon-shaped room felt like dead-ends to religion, like the slanting doorways leading nowhere. I never visited without remembering how Rothko committed suicide before the chapel was even completed, before his masterpieces were lowered by crane through the skylight, dangling like bait in the water-drenched air. Now the chapel is advertised as a quiet place to meditate or a “non-denominational chapel” (Wikipedia’s assessment).
One Friday in October, when my college classes were cancelled, I brought my friend Kenneth to visit the Rothko. He had lived in Houston for 11 years but had never been. “I don’t like it,” I said. “But you should really visit.”
The Rothko wasn’t our first stop of the day; first we swung by a Goodwill so I could find a costume for Halloween. I’ve browsed through many Goodwill stores in Texas and found several items to be consistently represented: stained prom dresses, pointed-toe cowboy boots, and The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. In Goodwills in Sharpstown, a semi-notorious district, I also find silk and leather kippot, African print dresses, and high-heeled boots that reached the upper thigh.
I climb back in in my car with my purchase — a beaded belt and paisley scarf — and we’re back on our way. On the street we pass a guy on a bicycle who pedals past with a painting hanging in a plastic bag. It is about a yard wide and, from the little I could see through the tinted plastic, looked like a landscape. I wondered where he was taking his painting, whether he had just bought it or was selling it. When you’re driving in Houston, it’s best to keep your eyes off your phone and on the road, and not just for safety’s sake. If you pay attention, you’re bound to see something interesting, from the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, gleaming with oil money, to cars tied together with masking tape. New money, old money, no money at all — in Houston, we use the same roads to commute hours a day.
The Rothko Chapel is situated in the Montrose District, not far from downtown. The same morning, the Italian Festival is being hosted on the University of St. Thomas campus, so we park half a mile away to keep from paying. We walk past quiet houses, including the Writers in the School’s Headquarters, a nonprofit that brings renowned authors into public schools to teach creative writing.
The great white wall of the Menil Museum rises like an ark out of the small neighborhood. The Menil Museum holds the art collection of John and Dominique de Menil, legendary Houston philanthropists. Inheritors of the Schlumberger oil fortune, John and Dominique left France during the Nazi occupation in 1941 and settled in Houston. They hosted an art salon in their home frequented by Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others. The Menil Museum feels like a home, open each day of the week and free to the public.
Today our mission is the Rothko chapel, so we cross the Menil Park, where a small class is doing yoga, and a few couples are eating brunch on old quilts. Live oaks trail their long, knotted branches onto the grass, the perfect perch for an Instagram shot, but we pass it by to slip through the wall of bamboo separating the park from the Rothko chapel grounds.
The chapel itself is inconspicuous: tan, brick, with a cave-like entrance. In front of it stretches the reflecting pool, a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. The “Broken Obelisk,” by Barnett Newman, rises with jarring lines and bewildering balance from the water. This spring, white supremacists spattered white paint across the stone sidewalks and into the pool, sprawling on the stone, “It’s okay to be white.” Cleaning crews have scrubbed off the message since. Perhaps it was the angry protest against a space devoted to finding unity in diversity, or maybe it was just anti-Semitism; Mark Rothko was Jewish. He grew up studying the Talmud in an Orthodox community in Russia, but rejected his beliefs around the time he attended Yale University.
Kenneth and I sign the guestbook, and I gesture meaningfully at the row of religious texts lying on the bench. We enter the chapel’s dim recesses. The skylight has been contracted since the chapel was built in 1971, and the light seems to evaporate as if absorbed by Rothko’s huge, dark paintings: five of the walls bear single paintings, but the other three bear triptychs. Triptychs are three panels joined into one picture, and traditionally used as an altarpiece. In the triptych opposite the door, the middle panel rises a few inches above the others — the shadow of a cross.
Do the canvases depict the human search for the divine, or are they an admission that ultimate reality is silence? Afterwards, Kenneth and I can’t agree. I sit on one of the long, minimalist benches in the center of the chapel and stare into the paintings: today they look black, with tones of purple and burgundy. The longer you sit inside the chapel, the more your eyes adjust to the dimness, and the more the colors emerge. Rothko created his panels in New York City, and because light angles would change in the geographical location of their future gallery, he tried to replicate the same light within his studio. He died, of course, before his works could be installed. He was never privy to the hues that emerged under a Texan sun.
Dominique de Menil said Mark brought his viewers to the “threshold of the divine.” “His paintings grew darker every year,” Stanley Kunitz wrote in his poem “The Artist”: “The filled the walls, they filled the room; / Eventually they filled his world.”
Perhaps I just was not looking closely enough. Either way, I left the chapel admitting that viewing the chapel as a statement of nihilism was simplistic to the point of ignorance. There was more to the chapel than it being merely a dim space where one could feel good about having “faith,” no matter how vague.
When we return later to Montrose to visit a coffee shop, the afternoon traffic is congested. Of all the coffee shops in Montrose, we choose Siphon. It is the third business beside a Pilates studio and “The Argyle League,” a barber shop with $75 cuts. I had been to Siphon twice before: once I got a ticket for parking too close to a water hydrant, and the second time I sat on the picnic table outside and talked to a man about his wife, Islam, and Jesus. I buy a glass of cold-brew coffee, declining the $7 siphon coffee, which is brewed in a glass globe contraption that looks like it belongs in a chemistry lab.
We lug our book-bloated backpacks to a small table. Most other people in the shop are studying or working too, but two men are holding a work meeting beside us, one younger, the other in his late fifties. The younger man looks Middle Eastern: he is wearing fine leather sneakers and an elbow-patched shirt that gapes slightly at each button-hole. He checks his laptop, iPhone, and Apple watch frequently. His work colleague wears khaki cargo shorts and rubber slides. He makes notes on a yellow note pad. His pale legs rock nervously back and forth as they argue about an Indian engineer who may or may not be promoted. I infer that this employee is related to someone else in the company and the older man disagrees on principle with allowing family to work with each other.
“Nepotism!” said the man with the wagging leg.
“No, no. Haven’t you ever seen two brothers form a company?”
“Yes, I have! Cain and Abel. They formed a company in the Bible. One became Muslim, and they’re still fighting today.”
“I’m not sure if they formed a company.” The younger man stares through his black frame glasses with the long-suffering attitude of those who have grown used to negotiating with people they dislike. Eventually he pivots the conversation to politics and the ongoing race between incumbent Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Beto. The older man did not know who Beto was, but pronounced Cruz an embarrassment: “Cruz, I could take him out and run him over. Beto, is he Republican or Democrat?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” said the younger man, his eyes shining with amusement. He seemed to be personally entertained by the thought of his colleague feeling favorable towards Beto.
“All this with Kavanaugh,” the man scoffed. “I came up with a new saying about that woman: “Ford, Ford, pants on fire!”
I didn’t want to listen any longer and went to the bathroom. At the entrance to the stalls was the customary bulletin board where Montrose locals could pin up ads for pet-sitting, open mics, and art shows. One poster advertised a certain Rev. Jerry M. Mayer, interfaith minister, offering “Spiritual Companionship”; “Do you have need for guidance from a spiritual leader?” The poster also featured a bio pic of Rev. Jerry, clearly a selfie, with a clip-art image with a range of religious symbols: the Jewish star, the cross, yin-yang, the crescent moon and star, and the wheel of dharma. It reminded me of the row of religious texts on the bench in the Rothko Chapel, that strange merging of distinct faith traditions.
By the time we headed back to Sharpstown, I had almost forgotten about the Rothko chapel, its silence swallowed in the speed and roar of the freeway. As we exited the freeway onto the access road and approached a red light, a car screeched from behind, honking. It whipped around us and turned left, despite the red light. Fortunately, there were few cars at that intersection, but cars were speeding through the intersection on the other side of the underpass. The car didn’t stop: horns blared and tires swerved to make way for the driver.
“Maybe they were going to the ER,” I said, as we sat stunned at the red light. The car was long gone.
“Seems like a good way to die,” Kenneth said.
Now the Rothko chapel is closed; they need to adjust the skylight again to draw it close to the artist’s vision. The doors will be closed all year while they remove the dirty glass, crack the ceiling open a little wider, and let in broad swaths of light.
Who knows then what colors will step out from the muted glaze, what shades and hues? Perhaps the paintings will be blacker than ever. For me, I cannot visit without feeling evil brush past — that old hatred of difference; without knowing death is close by, close as the swerve of a neighbor’s car; without sensing, within the silence, the jostling of hope and despair.
