Mark Rothko Painted 14 Black Canvases for a Texas Chapel He Never Saw Finished

Mark Rothko got the commission in 1964. John and Dominique de Menil, oil-fortune patrons in Houston, wanted a contemplative space for their University of St. Thomas campus. Rothko's only condition was that the building be designed around his paintings, not the other way around. Philip Johnson drew up a Greek cross in beige brick with a central skylight. Rothko hated the skylight.

The paintings he eventually delivered are nearly black, but not quite. Seven are 'black-form' canvases, with hard-edged dark rectangles set on darker grounds; seven are monochrome plum, lacquer-thin layers built up over months. They reward the eye that has stopped expecting incident. A first-time visitor often sees flat black. After ten or fifteen minutes, fields begin to recede and advance, edges loosen, the rectangles cease being shapes and become pressures.

Rothko's last years were grim. His marriage was failing, he was being treated for an aortic aneurysm, and he had begun mixing his paints with rabbit-skin glue, egg yolk, and dammar resin in increasingly brittle layers. On February 25, 1970, he was found in his New York studio. He had cut his arm with a razor and bled to death. The chapel opened in February 1971, dedicated as a non-denominational sanctuary; the de Menils insisted no single faith own it.

The medium has not aged well. The natural-resin glazes are sensitive to ultraviolet, and the original skylight admitted too much. Some panels developed micro-cracks; the violet undertones drifted toward gray. Conservators replaced the skylight in 2019. The paintings still darken the longer you sit.