Rothko Chapel

Rothko Chapel is a temple to death, the great obliterator-transformer. Death rambling, in wounded dialectic with life: Nietzsche’s nihil, Adorno’s negation. Produced during Rothko’s late “dark” period, the fourteen large canvases contained in the chapel surround the viewer like the arresting monoliths of Stonehenge. Three triptych arrangements adorn the dominant square walls, four single paintings occupy the canted corners of the square-cross building, and a final field painting unifies the panorama. Despite no perfect symbolic syzygies, the groups of fours and threes feel mystically loaded, like the four cardinal directions, the Holy Trinity, or the four seasons of three months.