Looking and Listening by Leach Brenda Lynne;

Author:Leach, Brenda Lynne; [Leach, Brenda Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Mark Rothko worked on the fourteen almost monochrome chapel paintings from1964 to 1967 (see figure 8.1). There is a triptych in the apse of the chapel and four panels on the diagonal-facing walls. These are painted black with washes of maroon. There are two additional triptychs on the side walls and another panel on the entrance wall opposite the apse that are black, hard-edged rectangles on a maroon field. The panels are dark in color, but the actual color is impacted by light and shadow. They create a sense of both presence and void. At the opening of the chapel in 1971, Dominique de Menil described the panels as “intimate and timeless. They embrace us without enclosing us. Their dark surfaces do not stop the gaze. . . . But we can gaze right through these purplish browns, gaze into the infinite” (quoted in Weiss 1998, 284).

Mark Rothko did not live to see the opening of the chapel. He died by his own hand in 1970. Katharine Kuh, the art writer and curator, was a personal friend of Rothko. She wrote about these fourteen paintings in the chapel,

which, though dark, are based on a hidden radiance more related to religious passion than to personal mood. I believe that with those murals he was also trying to prove he no longer needed luminosity to accomplish his ends. And whether subconsciously or not Rothko was competing with his colleagues Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, and Reinhardt, who found the dark of the moon as persuasive as the light of the sun. (Kuh 2006, 144–45)

Kuh also reflected on his process in creating the chapel paintings, writing,

He worked on the chapel paintings with such oneness of purpose that he was virtually burned out when they were completed late in 1967. He sank all his energies into them, and now, quite suddenly, he seemed to have lost his raison d’etre. At that point Rothko had said in paint what he had to say, and anything further was either superfluous or repetitive, yet he persisted. . . . Mark himself readily agreed that most of his paintings, if not strictly religious, were related to realms of the spirit and conceived as a contemplative experience. (Kuh 2006, 163–64)

Morton Feldman and Rothko Chapel

American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987) attended the opening of the Rothko Chapel in 1971. Like some other composers of his time, such as John Cage, Earle Brown, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff, he was drawn to the art of abstract expressionist painters, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Willem De Koonig, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. They, along with poets, dancers, and sculptors who shared similar ideas and approaches, were labeled the New York School from around 1943 to 1967. Cage and Motherwell served as coeditors of the journal Possibilities, which explored abstract expressionism across the arts. Members of this group frequently met at the Cedar Tavern or at The Club on East Eighth Street in New York City. Of the art he

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