09/03/2026
Mark Rothko, the painter most people know for color, made a chapel in Houston almost entirely black.
Dominique and John de Menil commissioned it. In the summer of 1952 they toured France’s new churches with Father Marie-Alain Couturier, the Dominican priest behind the country’s postwar sacred art movement. One stop was Matisse’s chapel in Vence, where he had designed the windows, the tiles, even the vestments. Dominique took one idea home: give a master a free hand and see what he can do. In 1964 they offered Rothko a chapel that did not yet exist.
Philip Johnson drew it first, tall, with light dropping through the top, but Rothko objected to the design. He felt a building that grand would turn the paintings into decoration, and he wanted the room to disappear. Johnson ended up leaving the project, and Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry built to Rothko’s specifications.
Rothko never painted in Houston. He built temporary walls at the chapel’s dimensions inside his studio on East 69th Street and worked there from fall 1964 to spring 1967. The color he called plum was alizarin crimson and black, mixed by the bucket, thinned, and brushed on with house-painter’s brushes. Fourteen canvases in the end.
He died in February 1970 and never saw them hung. The chapel opened a year later, and the Texas sun flattened the work. It wasn’t the light of his studio, and it took nearly 50 years to get it right. In 2020 a new skylight of 280 aluminum louvers finally brought the light down to what he had painted for.
He once said the people who wept in front of his paintings were having the same experience he had painting them. In a chapel in Houston, it still happens today.
