What would become the Rothko Chapel had its inception on April 17, 1964, when Mark Rothko received a visit in his New York studio from Mrs. Dominique de Menil. She proposed that he execute a set of paintings for the interior of a chapel to be built for the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution in Houston that was administered by members of the Basilian Order. The de Menils—Dominique and John—were known as enlightened patrons of art with a strong inclination toward the avant-garde; they were also the principal benefactors of the university. The architect would be Philip Johnson, one of the luminaries of American architecture of the postwar period. The work would be a collaboration of architect and artist at the highest level, such as the twentieth century had rarely seen. Rothko accepted immediately and said that he would henceforward devote all his time and energies to the project.

The conjunction was not entirely surprising. Its principals were already familiar to one another, having had previous dealings: just a few years before, Rothko and Johnson had engaged in another collaboration. Johnson approached the painter in 1958 with a commission to execute a suite of pictures for the interior of the Four Seasons, an elegant restaurant in the just-completed Seagram Building in New York, which he had designed in partnership with his mentor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Rothko worked intensely for two years before deciding to withdraw from the commission, withholding the magnificent ensemble of paintings that he had completed and returning the considerable sum that he had been advanced. Johnson's association with the de Menils went back to the immediate postwar years: he had designed their Houston residence and was responsible for the overall plan of the St. Thomas campus and for its architectural realization. The chapel would climax its central feature, a mall flanked by long alignments of porticoed halls. The de Menils' outstanding personal collection of twentieth-century art already included several Rothkos. They had visited him before (the first time in 1960) at his studio in the Bowery, where the Seagram paintings had been executed and where they still hung. They were displayed within a full-sized mock-up of the interior for which they had been destined, the sort that Rothko would again construct for the chapel commission. The overwhelming effect of the great canvases, surrounding the viewer in their frieze-like array, somber black upon smoldering and flaming red, has been described by contemporary visitors. Against the background of this enclosure, Rothko received his guests. They reacted with awe; after a time they realized that they had been speaking in whispers. They were impressed also with Rothko's attitude towards his art and with the motives he professed for having turned his back on the commission. They had conceived the idea of acquiring a group of these paintings for the future chapel in Houston and made a subsequent visit to pursue this possibility, but in the end Rothko demurred: it would be impractical to adapt these paintings to a setting and purpose for which they had not been conceived. He proposed instead to create a series of paintings expressly for this purpose, and now, after four years, the de Menils were resolved to act on his suggestion. A design was to evolve for a chapel to be built specifically as the container of a set of paintings created for it. The project would become one of the century's most ambitious ventures in the integration of painting and architecture.

The project also inscribes itself within what was probably the century's most serious attempt at the reintegration of art and religion, hopelessly estranged since the Enlightenment. Such was the mission of the Art Sacré movement within the Catholic church, whose animating spirit was the Dominican Father Marie-Alain Couturier. Father Couturier, an impassioned radical committed to the spiritual regeneration of the church and a thorn in the side of conservative Vatican authorities, believed in the efficacy of great art as a means to such regeneration. Lamenting the degeneracy into which art created by and for the church had fallen, he sought to enlist the foremost artists of twentieth-century modernism (whatever their personal beliefs or lack thereof) in the service of sacred art. This effort resulted in a series of major achievements, among them Fernand Léger's windows at Audincourt, culminating in Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary at Vence and Le Corbusier's church at Ronchamp. During his years of wartime exile in the United States, Father Couturier had cast his spell over the de Menils, devout Catholics of intellectual bent and, like him, admirers of modern art. The commission for the chapel in Houston was an offshoot of Father Couturier's mission, displaced to the other side of the Atlantic but directly inspired by his Art Sacré movement. In any event, this renewed attempt at the reintegration of what had become over the last two centuries culturally and ideologically distinct and potentially or actually rivalrous paths of transcendence would not succeed. Because the attempt failed for adventitious reasons, the question that unavoidably poses itself to the skeptical twentieth-century observer—whether these paths had essentially grown so divergent, and their respective requirements so incompatible, that such failure was inevitable—remains unanswered. The project would indeed be realized after many difficulties, but not as a functioning Catholic chapel. Displaced from both its intended role and its original site, it would be incorporated as a nonsectarian and ecumenical center for religious and spiritual activities. Instead of the chapel of the University of St. Thomas, it would come to be known, formally as well as in vernacular usage, as the Rothko Chapel.

Rothko's receptivity to the commission was anything but fortuitous: the chapel project presented an opportunity he had been hoping for over many years. It offered the possibility of his finally fulfilling those aspirations immanent within his art that the existing machinery of commercial diffusion and public access could not accommodate. Among the radical American artists of the postwar years, Rothko, along with Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, had pioneered an art that fundamentally reoriented pictorial dynamics in such a way that the painting turned outwards, directly addressing and implicating the spectator. The abandonment of the traditional frame—or, in sculpture, the base—was only the most external and superficial symptom of this reorientation. Composition was frontalized to direct the painting outwards at ninety degrees to the plane of the material surface and was expanded in scale so that its elements immediately engaged the entirety of the pictorial object and addressed the viewer as physically embodied and localized, not merely as a weightless and implicitly placeless eye. For such an art, the space beyond and in front of the painting and the situation obtaining within that space were now part of the field of pictorial action, as much as the space contained within the material limits of the picture. More than did his colleagues in this enterprise, Rothko drew the conclusion that the terms that would govern the interaction between the painting and its environment—which specified how it would be perceived—were as important to its constitution as an artwork, or nearly so, as its internal formal construction. It seemed to him vital to take control of these terms. This undertaking ran counter to what by now had become the traditional decorum of the artwork, in scale, internal articulation, and external packaging (framing) and in the established machinery for its circulation and reception.

Between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, an evolution in art took place in which social, cultural, and economic factors all played their part: paintings became normatively produced as commodities to be distributed through the agency of a capitalist "free" market, destined for an end use as items of decor in bourgeois interiors. These conditions applied with particular force to artworks and artists of more progressive tendencies, whose relationship, if any, to the established powers of church and state was increasingly adversarial. Thus, the opportunity to create largerscaled works addressed to specific conditions of site and function, work traditionally destined for public rather than domestic venues, became exceptional. The result was the dominance—ideological as much as quantitative—of the so-called "easel painting," which was portable and self-contained, an apparently autonomous unit of value conveniently adapted to its mode of distribution and its eventual conditions of display. Rothko's paintings since he attained at the end of the 1940s his own canonical format had—like those of Pollock and Newman—stretched the definition of the "easel painting" to its limits, both with regard to its material scale and to the protocols of its formal organization. But the domain outside the picture's limits—the spaces and conditions that dictated how it would be exhibited, sold, and eventually displayed—remained indifferent to the specific content of any particular work and largely outside the control of the artist.

To the best of his ability, Rothko attempted to confront and overcome this situation. He did so in the first instance by specifying as closely as possible the particular viewing circumstances under which he desired that his pictures be seen. He had become, by the early 1940s, very exacting about such matters as hanging height, the intervals between and juxtapositions of paintings, the placement of paintings within the architectural features of an interior, the color of the wall surface upon which pictures would be seen, and more importantly, the character and strength of the lighting. His views on these questions were not monolithic; rather they were sensitive to the requirements of the particular works at issue, and they changed over time as his work itself changed. As his reputation and authority grew, his ability to coerce gallery owners and museum curators into accommodating these demands grew commensurately, so that Rothko made himself responsible on several occasions for dictating precise hanging and lighting conditions and sometimes participated directly in the installation process. We have accounts, in his own words or those of others, of his specifications for exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1955, 1958), the Art Institute of Chicago (1954), The Museum of Modern Art (1961), and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961). But these temporary exhibitions were by nature ephemeral. Rothko aspired to similarly control the more permanent displays of his works. He seized upon whatever possibilities presented themselves, for example, taking advantage of the cooperation of sympathetic private collectors. In 1961 he installed a group of his paintings—previously and individually acquired—as a calculated display in the living room of the Manhattan apartment of collector Donald Blinken. The paintings completely dominated and transformed the room, and Rothko would sometimes visit in order to sit for hours in contemplation of his work. Permanent installations in museums presented another, obviously preferable, possibility. Such an installation had indeed been realized in the previous year—the Rothko Room in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (1960, fig. 2). This, too, was a collocation of preexisting, individually conceived works. Although Rothko was not personally responsible in this case for the installation, it had been undertaken in consonance with his desires, and he approved of it. Another museum installation, this time carefully prescribed by Rothko himself, would be created towards the end of his life (1969-70). This was the Rothko Room at the Tate Gallery, London—comprising a gift by the artist of a number of paintings selected from those created a decade before for the Seagram commission (fig. 3). (The remodeling of the Tate has since led to the reinstallation of the paintings in a new and differently disposed room, so that Rothko's original arrangement is no longer to be seen.)

But all of these were at best expedients. What Rothko really desired was the chance to create an ensemble of works conceived in relation to one another and destined for permanent display in a space dedicated to this purpose. Such an opportunity, in fact, seemed to present itself in 1958 with Johnson's invitation to the Four Seasons commission, but for Rothko this invitation was a poisoned fruit. While he was delighted with the long-sought opportunity, the more so as he was being given carte blanche to create whatever sort of pictorial environment he saw fit, he found the intended venue—a luxury restaurant for New York's social and business elite—distasteful and was suspicious, no doubt justifiably, of the role his paintings would play in it. Shortly after beginning work on the project, he expressed to Willem de Kooning his excitement at the challenge that the formal resolution of the new paintings presented and at his discovery of the unexpected artistic benefits of working on a series of paintings simultaneously, but he could also not conceal his deep misgivings about the purposes his pictures would be made to serve and his mistrust of those with whom he had to deal. Rothko went on to develop no fewer than three successive series of paintings for the Seagram project before arriving at what he felt was a satisfactory solution: a striking new pictorial format, full of architectonic allusions but also assertively gestural, of a sort unprecedented in his previous work. Traveling in Europe during the summer of 1959, he told a newfound acquaintance about the project, scornful of the privileged clientele who would dine surrounded by his paintings, which they would be inclined to regard as mere decoration, but convinced that he had arrived at pictorial realizations of such power as to shatter conventional expectation and overwhelm any diner's complacency and self-absorption. However, when he ventured the acid test of dining himself at the Four Seasons after his return to New York, he was overcome with anger and broke off the commission.

A more auspicious occasion appeared to offer itself in 1961 through the agency of a friend, the distinguished Harvard economist Wassily Leontief, who suggested to Rothko the possibility of his creating a suite of paintings for a meeting room to be used by Harvard's prestigious Society of Fellows in the newly built Holyoke Center. Encouraged by the prospect of creating a pictorial ambience for such an august institution of learning, Rothko pursued the idea and arranged at length to donate the paintings created for this purpose to Harvard as a gift. Unlike the Seagram commission, this project was ultimately realized, but it did not completely satisfy Rothko. Even before it began, the intended function of the setting was changed: the Society of Fellows was shunted aside and the room would serve—ironically enough—as a dining room for university functions. Even though the Harvard authorities assured Rothko of the elevated nature of the occasions for which the room would be used, this did not entirely quiet his concern. The space itself proved difficult, and the possibilities of altering it into more suitable form did not materialize. Nevertheless, by 1962 Rothko had executed a new cycle of paintings in a format developed from, but even more assertive than, that for the Seagram commission; a preliminary installation began in January of 1963 but was not completed until February of 1964, only two months before he would be offered the commission for the chapel. Frustrated by a variety of obstacles, Rothko did not consider the installation to be entirely successful. Moreover, sensitive as he was to slights, he had already discerned an undertone of indifference, if not contempt, beneath the attitude of official Harvard towards his gift, foreshadowing the shameful neglect that would result in the destruction of these splendid paintings (fig. 4). In this context, the Houston commission—which promised for the first time a setting specifically designed for his pictures—was all the more welcome.

For another reason, too, the chapel project seemed to Rothko to promise the fulfillment of long-deferred hopes. His preoccupation with the conditions under which his works would be seen extended beyond the material circumstances of hanging, lighting, wall color, etc. For Rothko, the response to a work of art by an observer was an intellectual and moral, as well as a merely visual, transaction; therefore, circumstances that did not promote the reception of the work's inner meaning were no less unacceptable than those affecting its external appearance. Rothko realized that the psychological conditions accompanying the presentation of a work of art were at least as important as the physical ones in promoting (or preventing) its realization as a communicative act. As long ago as 1947, he had written:

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!

Rothko's sense of the need for a psychic attunement between painting and viewer so as to enable the act of communication to take place, and of the fragility of this process and the ease with which it could be blocked or distorted by unfavorable circumstances, led him to dislike group exhibitions that jumbled together a promiscuous assortment of works of diverse character and aspiration. After 1952 he usually declined to participate in them. Writing to explain his decision in one such case, he declared that:

... the real and specific meaning of the pictures was lost and distorted in these exhibitions ... Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.

In the contract for the chapel commission, he would specify that its interior should contain no works of art other than those that he would create for it.

The prevailing system of exhibition and circulation for works of art certainly afforded little opportunity for the conditions of display that Rothko regarded as necessary to the proper functioning of his paintings. He imagined alternatives. Since he disliked large museums, with their pompous architecture and their heterogeneous collections, like vast department stores of art, he envisioned instead a series of small museums scattered about the country, modest cinder-block structures each dedicated to the work of a single artist: there would be one for Ad Reinhardt, one for Rothko, and so on. Such quiet retreats, small in scale, would be best suited for the intimacy between the work of art and the beholder that Rothko most valued and for the contemplative frame of mind essential for such intimacy.

These hopes and speculations about ideal situations of display for his work in the years immediately preceding the commission were repeatedly associated, by Rothko himself and by people close to him, with the ideal of a "chapel." When Duncan Phillips in 1960 described his plans for the room in which a group of Rothko's paintings would be hung, he characterized it as like a chapel. The art historian Robert Goldwater, reviewing Rothko's major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1961, considered that the most effective display of all was a group of pictures from the Seagram series that were set apart by themselves in a small room: he called it chapel-like (fig. 5). Rothko trusted and confided in Goldwater. It seems most likely that he himself was the originator of this image, not only in Goldwater's case but in that of Phillips as well. Rothko's discussions with the de Menils in 1960 had obviously fired his imagination, and he returned again and again, in the years following, to the idea of a chapel installation for his paintings. But there are indications that this was not a new idea to him and that he had been preoccupied with it before their visit.

In 1962, while Rothko was at work on the Harvard commission, a visitor to the studio who, awestruck at the sight of the paintings, commented, "They ought to build you a museum," received the reply "No, a chapel " Already, in 1959, Rothko had evoked the theme of a chapel again in conversation with the German curator and critic Werner Haftmann, who had come to solicit his participation in the Kassel Documenta: the only way he would consent to exhibit in Germany, Rothko said, would be in the setting of an expiatory chapel dedicated to the victims of Nazism—for this he would execute the paintings free of charge. In his travels in England in the summer of 1959, he came upon an old and disused chapel at Lelant in Cornwall, which he thought of buying and using to house a set of his works. It seems, in fact, that—however incongruous this may be, given the emphatically worldly character of its intended destination—he regarded the pictorial installation that he was preparing for the Seagram commission itself in just such a light. The imagery with which he described the paintings was overtly otherworldly, and a number of contemporary commentators caught the idea that the installation's true character was that of a sacred space. Haftmann compared it to a tabernacle; the French novelist and critic Michel Butor, to a mosque. Such religious associations no doubt derived from the expressed attitude of Rothko himself. Intimations of this kind, in addition to a more general admiration for the artist's work, probably helped to inspire the initial inquiries of the de Menils, which must have occurred soon after Rothko's much publicized withdrawal of the paintings from the commission.

The Houston commission, however, was not for a "chapel-like" room or small museum: it was for an actual chapel in which worshippers congregate to participate in the rites of the Catholic church. This prospect in no way diminished for Rothko—it may even have enhanced—the attractiveness of the project. He had more than once described his art as "religious." There is evidence that he envisioned with sympathy the role that his paintings would play as an ambient within which the liturgy and the private devotions of the faithful would take place. For Rothko, the quiet and the solemnity entailed by the religious purpose of the building were consonant with what he saw as the optimal psychological conditions for the reception of his paintings. They would surely be more apprehensible in their essential meaning housed in a chapel than, for example, serving as a backdrop for the "power lunches" and see-and-be-seen preenings that were routine in a place like the Four Seasons—a truth that doubtless held as well for the museum or gallery settings he so distrusted.

The meaning of the chapel commission to Rothko has to be assessed from another standpoint as well. When he accepted the commission in April of 1964, he was sixty years old and had been painting since the late 1920s. Most of the intervening years had been spent as a struggling, unrecognized outsider—marginal to an art world that was itself marginal to mainstream American society. Success, whether measured in worldly terms or in those of decisive artistic achievement, came late to Rothko—a situation he shared with most of his fellows of the Abstract Expressionist generation. What is now recognized as his "mature" style—the pictorial formulation with which his impact upon art history was made—would not crystallize until the end of the 1940s. Only in the early sixties did he begin to enjoy financial security and the kind of reputation that finally made him welcome in the cultural institutions of the establishment. But at this very moment of belated recognition, hailed by mainstream opinion as an Old Master, Rothko could feel that his position within the art world was already being challenged. During the years he and his colleagues of the New York School at last were making the transition from lonely and derided pioneers to artists of recognized stature, a younger generation had appeared that took their innovations as a matter of course—still worse, regarded them as old-fashioned, passé. Not only the formal realizations of the older artists but their values, their world view, and their mode of life were spurned, even derided, by the impertinent young. The art scene, with its relentless quest for innovation, was moving on, and the new artistic landscape of the 1960s was taking shape—the world of Op, Pop, Hard-Edge Abstraction, and Minimalism on the one hand and of Happenings, Environments, and "anti-art," Neo-Dadaist provocations on the other.

Rothko found much of this new art deeply antipathetic. Nevertheless, his judgment was too keen for him not to perceive that some of these artists were to be reckoned with, posing challenges to the assumptions, explicit or implicit, of his own generation that could not be ignored. The situation was all the more galling in that some of the more serious manifestations of this new work, which was often most polemical in its rejection of the artistic credos of the recent past, were founded on the more radical and less obvious innovations of the older generation itself. Rothko, one of the foremost among the more radical wing of Abstract Expressionism, therefore found himself in the unenviable position of a father recognizing, but unrecognized by, his denatured children—and all too conscious of the deadly serious nature of their rivalry. For Rothko the chapel commission represented at the same time an opportunity and a threat. He could repeat himself and appear in the eyes of the young as outmoded, an embarrassing survivor. Or he could confront anew the issues already implicit within his own art, which had been refracted, reconfigured, and in part distorted in the new work of the 1960s. These issues were now critical. He took up what he at once recognized could be the summation and also the most difficult challenge of his artistic career.