To See, or Not To See
Less is more
fig. 43
Mark Rothko, Untitled [south wall painting , Rothko
Chapel ] (CR 798), 1964-1967 Dry pigments, poly-
mer, rabbitskin glue and egg/oil emulsion on canvas,
180 x 105 inches (457.2 x 266.7 cm). Rothko Chapel ,
Houston
DavzdAnfam
Robert Browning
Death is not representable. It is imprinted, however,
by spacings, blanks, discontinuities, or destructzonof representation
Julia Knsteva
he fourteen paintmgs that inhabit the Rothko Chapel murals in almost
T every sense except for then not being rendered directl y upon the build-
ing 's walls, which mdeed the y supplant take then pl ace 111 a length y
cultural lmeage (fig. 4 3) 1 Simpl y stated, 1t 1s the practice of amcomc
images. 2 Instead of depicting then nommal subiect, such imag es either replace 1t
meton ym1cally with another one or, sometnnes and most significantly, with blankness.
To cite three diverse examples: the amcomc impulse has ranged from ancient Buddhist
reliefs (ca. 2nd century A.O.), through such phenomena as the Kaaba at Mecca (ca. 7th
century A.O.), to modern instances as exemplified by Stanley Kubrick 's film 2001
A Space Odyssey (1968). In the first, the Buddh a may not be portra yed as a person but
instead as, say, a tree ; in the second, the Kaaba consists of a black-draped structure hou s-
ing a black stone that 1s, to Islam , a supremel y sacred object; and in the thnd , at key
Junctures dunng 2001 a mysterious black slab appears (fig. 44 ). That sentmel tablet is
curiousl y similar to the monolithic black forms of several of the chapel murals. Yet the
linkage is coincidence: wh en 2001 was relea sed (1968 ), Rothko had completed hi s
grand undertaking , although the Rothko Chapel did not open to the public until 197 1
The affinity between 2001's aforementioned pre sen ce and Rothko 's murals
stems from then amconic nature : an urge from antiquit y onwards to evoke the tran-
scendent by blan kness . Ancient Greek imag es and coms had repre sented a deit y as
an unmarked stone. Possibly some pnmordial religious worship addressed such enti-
ties .3 The meteonc rock in the Kaaba may have harkened back to this premise ; and
Rothko 's scheme for the chapel pamting s reconfigured 1t anew The latter remam
startling becau se the y present either imageless icons (the mottled dark purple field s
of the northwest, northeast , southwest and southeast panels and of the north apse
tnpt ych ) or inscrutable black motifs (the south wall panel and the east and west wall
tript ychs). The confluence between these and Kubnck 's monolith articulates a mutual
awareness that crepuscular vaca nc y can be a cipher for awesome alterit y Funda-
mental to the magnetism of the amcomc is that its voided otherness affects, lik e a
mirror, to return the beholder 's gaze. Outwardl y empty, 1t condenses aura.
Of course, the reciprocal "gaze" has contrar y consequences: obiects confronting
us like watchers (precisel y the role that 2001's stele plays), which nevertheless contain
65
 fig.44
Film still from 2001. A Space Odyssey, directed by
Stanley Kubrick, 1968.© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

nothmg overt. 4 This triangulation between vision, the not-seen, and darkness marks
the chapel as a nexus 111Rothko's evolut10n. The wider issues at stake encompass
what he called his "dark pictures," which Rothko confided 1111963 "began m 1957
and have contmued almost compulsively to this day." 5 The chapel paintmgs climaxed
that direction.
The "dark pictures" m111ed111trospect10n (whereas the earlier so-called classic
idiom might advance, 111noontide warmth, to enfold the viewer, these prompt us to
fathom a shadowy cont111uum); negation (of a hitherto strong, vaned chromaticism );
and withdrawal (they deny our entry, m 1111agination,through the metaphorical picture-
as-a-w111dowmode ). The pa111tmgs' facture suggest a move towards greater solidity;
many bespeak a precis10n and an obsessiveness ("cont111ued almost compulsively" )
The chapel took these traits to a pomt of no return. But despite Rothko's smgulanty,
there remams a sense 111which notwithstanding his avowed hostility to Pop Art, to
the msurgent younger generation, and so forth he meshed with the 1960s.
To compare Rothko and Mick Jagger may appear at best 111congruous, at worst
preposterous. Yet the Roll111gStones' most famous songs 111cluded "Pa111tIt Black"
(1966) . Its lyrics are unexpectedly pertment to the late Rothko:

I look inside m yself and see my heart is black

I see m y red door and it has been painted black.

I wanna see it painted, painted black,

Black as night , black as coal
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky.
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted black.
Yeah!

The mood of "Pa111tIt Black" -a paean to alienat10n, darkness , repetition, and

depress10n typifies a strain in 1960s culture that undid the uptight 1950s and
flaunted basic human emot10ns ("tragedy, ecstasy, doom," in Rothko's proleptic
words of 1958 ).6 More generally, the chapel has an apocalyptic tenor, as though it
were a full stop , an ending to a long artistic narrative. 7 To some cntics, it silenced an
entire Western pictonal language , used from the Renaissance onwards , with a porten-
tous finality that 1salmost Biblical. The Sixties were nothmg if not apocalyptic. The
year 1968 (when Rothko finished the chapel's ensemble ) was proverbially so, bnnging
such news as the assass111at10nsof Mart111Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the

66 David Anfam

fig.45
Mark Rothko in his garage studio, East Hampton,
New York, summer 1964.Works shown: Untitled
[Brown Red] (CR 795), 1960 or 1964,and probably
Untitled (CR 766), 1964. Photograph by Hans Namuth
fig.46
Albrecht Di.irer, Melencolia I, 1514 Engraving,
91/2 x 73/s inches (24.1 x 18.7cm). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund
My Lai massacre, and widespread nots and demon-
strations. By contrast , in the following year a human
being first reached the moon an event that may
find an echo in the ventable lunar landscapes , in
which "the black 1s always at the top ," of Rothko 's
last works. 8 The decade , in other words , mixed
new beginnings with a sense of endings. Aestheti-
call y, too, blackness was in vogue from Frank
Stella's somber stnpe senes of 1958-59 that ush-
ered in the Sixties avant la Lettre, to Ad Reinhardt's
ultimate canvases (again certainly known to Rothko )
and, less obv10usly, the darkness, both literal and
metaphonc, infiltrating vanous Andy Warhol compo -
sitions, particularly the "Death and Disaster " senes. 9
Several of the last are dipt ychs: one side shows a
hornfic or tragic image, the other 1seffaced with monochrome. 10 Lest these analogies
sound farfetched , consider the art h1stonan Dore Ashton's recollect10n. "W hen he
asked me three months before his death whether I thought the world would last
another 10 years, I know he was senous ." 11 So Rothko who ear her had opined that
"all art deals with mortality " -chim ed with an eschatological note in the Sixties. 12
However, Rothko 's gloom and doom also had its antithesis. Increasingly , his
"dark pictures " became disciplined, spartan, and objective even as his health wors-
ened, hypochondna set in , and his depress10n deepened. The so-called Black on
Gray series (1969-70), done after his heart attack, culminated this trend , with then
sharp horizontal div1s1onsand the distancing effect of a white border. 13 An explanation
for the dichotomy hes in Rothko 's long-standing wish to separate the creator 's self from
the syntax in which he believed 1t should be expressed. "truth must stnp itself of self
which can be very deceptive."1 4 The pnnc1ple finds a prototype in a wnter with whom
Rothko was familiar, T S. Eliot. In the well-known essay, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent " ( 1920), El10t memorably declared: "The more perfect the artist, the more com-
pletely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." 15
Rothko himself summanzed this doctrine of authonal distance: "I express my not-self."16
The acute meticulousness with which Rothko conceived and caused his assistants to exe-
cute the artistic campaign of the chapel reflected, to paraphrase Georges Braque 's
maxim, the steely will of the rule that corrects emotion . 17 At his most ascetic, Rothko
said of the chapel proiect, 'Tm only interested in prec1s10nnow." 18
Something of this deliberation informs Hans Namuth's photograph of Rothko
(fig. 45 ) The canvas that the painter contemplates belongs to a sequence, done in
the summer of 1964, which he numbered individuall y (a sure sign of a new methodical -
ness) and which probe an almost unprecedentedl y hard-edged , smgle rectangle . 19
They constitute Rothko's first aesthetic moves m response to the comm1ss1on from
Domm1que de Menil for the chapel. The artist's pose here ma y be symptomatic of a
more encompassing cond1t10n. Like any good portraitist , Namuth had a knack for
captunng his sitter's outlook. The iconograph y of Namuth's scene conforms to a
well-established typology that of melancholia.
To See , or Not To S ee 67
 Namuth 's Rothko-seated 111his studio, head turned pensively, possibly as
the da y waned (the time for contemplation that he 111creas111gly
preferred in
later years ) belongs to the same syndrome as that, for example , of Albrecht
DLirer's Melencolia I (fig. 46 ) and The Artzst in His Studio (1819 ), formerl y at-
tributed to Theodore Gericault. Whether or not the scenario was Namuth 's
invention, ample evidence suggests that Rothko bore melancholia's stereotypical
traits. (Indeed, 1t remams odd that the vast literature has rarely , 1f ever, ad-
dressed this glanng possibility an oversight which, we might add , misses the
wood for the trees. ) 20 Thus , Rothko 's personal alienation, his extensive p1cto-
nal exploration of shadow , the preoccupation with solitude, mwardness,
tragedy , and death alike fall squarely w1th111the pattern , charted from Anstotle's
time onwards, of the artist "born under Saturn. " 21 A nameless hurt or loss ap-
pears to mfect Rothko 's feel111gsand statements throughout many decades. It
echoes through his msistence on the tragic message in even his bnghtest pa111t-
111gs.22 Two obv10us b10graph1cal causes obtain. First , his father Jacob
Rothkow1tz died 1111915, onl y two years after Rothko had emigrated from Russia
to 10111 him 111 the Umted States. That loss left an 111delible 1mpress1on (to the
degree that Rothko still discussed 1t some forty years later ) So , too, did lm
mother 's pass111g1111948. A month later , Rothko confided to Clyfford Still. "I am
MELANCHOLIA iust emerg111g from one of the blackest depressions that I have ever thought I would
expenence. It struck at me physically, as well as 111 m y thoughts. That 1s a depres-
s10n."23 That 1111948 Rothko also made a break from his previous surrealist -t inged
st yle and , with his so-called multiform canvases, entered a phase of the highest
fecundity to embark on a course that soon led to lm mature abstract format, further
implies that melancholia became his keenest muse. 24
Rather than vulganze Rothko 's achievement with pseudo-ps ychoanalysis , 1t looks
more 111structive to explore the 111terfacebetween his p1ctonal language and the fore -
most s111gleanalysis of melancholia by Sigmund Freud 1111917 (that Rothko had
read Freud, mentioning him in lm notebooks of the 1930s, 1s relevant but not 111dis-
pensable to the companson ) Freud 's "Mournmg and Melancholia" to redact a
complex theor y to the simplest outl111e differentiates mourn111g's therapeutic
process , wherem the ps yche confronts and ultimatel y acknowledges the loss of a
loved one , from the neurosis of melancholia. In melancholia the loss 1s repressed
and the object of attachment 111tro1ected buried as it were , with111the self, which
consequently becomes a living tomb . "Thus, " concluded Freud, "the shadow of the
object fell upon the ego."25
Freud's theory offers a potential bluepnnt to Rothko's m1d-1940s obsession with
the idea of entombment (he gave several oils and watercolors this des1gnat10n and
treated the subiect of Antigone , who was immured alive, 111a key trans1t10nal compo-
fig. 47 s1tion of 1939-40 ) as well as his lifelong preoccupation with shadow Examples of
.\l ark Rothko, Self-Portrait (C R 82), 1936. Oil on cama s, the latter abound: the thnd oil pa111ting of his entire corpus (ca .1925 ) Sketch zn the
321/2x 26 inches (82.6 x 98.7cm). Collection of
Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prize), 1ew York
Shade (Jul y 192 5); a mere one or two of his 400 or so figurative canvases depicts sun-
light ; a number of works from the 1930s, such as Street Scene (193 7) , have nocturnal
fig. 48
settmgs ; Seascape (1940 ) 1s a fantasia about the tracmg of shadows; and two late
Arnold Bocklin, Melancholia, 1900.Oil on " ·ood, 561
/s
x 393
/s inches (142.5x 100 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel mural series-for ew York's Seagram Building ( 1958-59 ) and for a din111groom at

68 Da vid Anfam
 Harvard (1962 ) engrneer a meta-architectural framework laden with dusk y
recesses. 26 Even the mostly bnght surfaces of his 1950s paintings denve then mtens1t y
from the 1mpress10n that they often overlay, like screen memones, dim depths. 27
In his unusual Self-Portrait (fig. 47 ) Rothko 's eyes and glasses are mexplicably
v01ded and black . His strategy references the old belief that melancholy entails an
rnner extinction. The Swiss artist Arnold Bocklm 's Melancholia (fig. 48 ) rehear ses
the same supposition. In gazrng rnto a mirror covered with black cloth , Bocklm 's
symbolic woman beholds her soul's dark mght. In Bocklm's and Rothko's images , ob-
scunty has befallen the ego. The obdurate black forms of the chapel seem to rob
viewers of v1s10nbecause they are darkness mcarnate. 28 Along similar lines , his Tiresias
(fig. 49 ) presents a huge cyclopean head with one dun eye. At stake mall these other-
wise disparate mstances is a relation between melancholia, v1s1on, and darkness.
Tiresias was a blmd prophet. 29 Unable to physicall y perceive , he gamed mantle
111s1ght.Rothko 's Tiresias also sports a transparent body , its internal organs nsible, as
though to materialize the not10n of "in-sight. " The blind "seer" (the double entendre
1smtrms1c ) conforms to a long dramatzspersonae, stretching from Tiresias and Oedipus
through Gloucester in Shakespeare 's Lear·

I have no way and ther efore ,,·ant no eyes.

fig. 49
\lark Rothko, Tiresias (CR 247), 1944.Oil on cam ·as,
-9,J4 x 397/sinch es (202.6x 98.7 cm). Collection of
Ch ristophe r Rothko, New York
ng. 50
\ lark Rothko, Green and Red 011 Tangerine (CR 562),
1956. Oil on canvas, 935/s x 691/4 inche s (237.8x
1- :;_9cm). Th e Phillips Collection , Washington, D .C.
I stumb led when I sa,Y.30
Rothko 's concern with the makeup of his pictonal surfaces crafting
effects of opacity and translucency, reflective and matte textures-embodies
an obJective correlative to sight's propensity to be alternately annulled and
quickened. In their tarr y opacity, the facture of the chapel pamtmgs ' slate-
like forms (Rothko labored hard to achieve then texture ), constitute a late
rejomder to his earlier preference for a translucent or scumbled matiere.
As such, the former presuppose an averted gaze and are therefore imbu ed
with implications of spmtual msight.
My theS1S, then , is that melancholia was the reservon from which
1
Rothko 's high creativity evidently sprung.3 To paraphrase philosopher Julia
Knsteva , the depressive 's "other realm " la y m his pamtrng s' undemable
beauty 32 When Rothko "ex plarned " his creat10ns to tho se whom he
thought wished to hear a narrative exegesis, he was wont to adopt terms para-
digmatic of melancholia. Describmg Green and Tangerine on Red (fig. 50)
to collectors Duncan and Ma[Jone Phillips , Rothko reportedly said that
the "strikmg tangenne of th e lower sect10n of the canvas could sym boli ze
the normal, happier side of livrng , and m proport10n , the dark blue-green
rectangular measure above 1t could stand for the black cloud or wornes th at
always hang over us."33 This "explanation " aptly fits clmical descnption s of
a depressive 's mrndset. At the opposite degr ee of subtlety stand Rothko 's
dazzling abstract images-some so refulgent that the y almost seem to dare
us to blink that suggest the glowing fruits of black melancholia. 34
Among Rothko 's most revealing early efforts is Interior(fig. 51), an archi-
tectural facade. (Rothko wryly observed man y years later "my pamtmgs are
sometimes described as facades , and mdeed the y are facades." ) 35 The source

To See, or Not To See 69


fig. 51
Mark Rothko, Interior (CR 79), 1936. Oil on hard-
board, 237/sx 18 1/4 inches (60.6 x 46.4 cm ). Na ti onal
Ga llery of Art, Washin gton, D .C ., gift of th e M ark
Rothk o Foundati on.
fig. 52
M ichelangelo Buonarroti , The Tomb of Lorenzo de'
Medici, 1521-3 4, M edici Chap el, San Lor enzo,
Florence
for Interzor is one or other of Michelangelo's tombs for Lorenzo (fig. 52) and
Giuliano de ' Medici 111San Lorenzo, Florence. 36 The s1milanty between the assem -
blages frontal, arranged 111hers, divided by columns , parsed with blank niches and
each with two statues 111the lower sect10n (Interior replaces that of Lorenzo
de ' Medici with a picture -w1th111-the-p1cture ) 1sforthnght. However, further 111fer
-
ences follow First, that Rothko ma y have been drawn to these edifices because the
pose of Lorenzo suggests the melancholic temperament, as does that of Night 111the
monument to Giuliano .37 Second, that Rothko made a s111glemaior change; at the
lower center he placed three figures emerg111g 111tothe bnght red and green planes
from a murk y open111g-theH position corresponds to the region beneath the sarcoph-
agus 111Michelangelo's tombs . What more graphic narrative evidence could exist for
Rothko 's equat10n of architecture and the 111tenonty of his "human drama"?3 8 In
InterzorRothko shaped melancholia 111toa p1ctonal construct. In turn, architectural
space has been associated with that of the mmd smce ancient t11nes. 39 This
announced Rothko's prime preoccupation: the location of the self 111its ambience.
Another example of his preoccupation 1sRothko's untitled portrayal of a female
nude push111g aga111sta wall as if its angles were clos111gupon her (fig. 53) Nearly
five centunes earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had composed his famous drawmg of the
human figure 's proportions (fig. 54 ), a canomcal statement of how man measures him-
self 111the macrocosm. Rothko's nude 1sa qu111tessential set piece by a modern artist
schooled in the Old Masters and long engaged with the selfsame issue-a modernist
who once wrote "smce there are no gods, man must measure himself. "40 Further -
more, the assumption that we negotiate space by proiect111gfeel111gs111to1t has a defi-
mte provenance 111the n111eteenth-century theory of empathy which translates 111to
German as Einfuhlung, literally "feeling 111.
" According to this pnnc1ple (propagated
by the mfluential German aesthet1c1an Theodor Lipps ), nonhuman phenomena
such as landscapes or architecture mmor bodily or psychological states . Thus a
small building ma y appear to distill claustrophobia or doom, whereas a large one
ma y seem filled with expansive uplift or hope. This tenet 1swhy Giorg10 Vasan, the
Renaissance art histonan whom Rothko cited 111 his notes, said a buildmg "1s not
made but born ." 41 We humamze buildmgs. Our life passes from womb to tomb.
Houses and "home" are where the heart 1s. This highly traditional spat1alizat10n of
the emotions proved pivotal to Rothko's thought. Aga111,it 1stied to melancholy
Susan Sontag 's essay on theorist Walter Benjam111 argued that "for the character
born under the sign of Saturn, time 1sthe medium of constramt, 111adequacy, repeti-
tion . In time, one 1sonly what one 1s:what one has always been. In space, one can be
another person. Space is broad, teem111gwith possibilities, positions, intersections,
passages , detours, U-turns , dead ends , one-way streets. " 42 Sontag's text might almost
have been the script for Rothko's lifelong exploration of spaces that are by turns broad
(starting with a wide road vamsh111g111tothe distance 111The Road, tell111glythe 1111tial
work 111his first one-man exhibition held in 1933); complex (the layered 111tercalations
that develop from the mulhforms 111toRothko's classic idiom of the 1950s); and eventu-
ally claustrophobic (the avowed desire, 1111tiated111the Seagram murals, to recast the
entrapment that Rothko associated with Michelangelo's Laurentian Library vestibule ).
The primary condition of Rothko's space 1semptiness which reads as blankness. 4 3

70 David Anfam

fig. 53
Mark Rothko, Untitled [nude ] (CR 117), 1937/38.Oil
on canvas, 237 /8x 181/s (60.6x 46.1cm ). Nationa l
G allery of Art , Washington , D .C .
fig. 54
Leonardo da Vinci , The Ideal Proportionsof the
Human Figure (called "Vitru vian Man "), c. 1492.
Pen and ink , 131
/z x 95/ginche s (34.4x 24.5 cm ).
Could the precise rectangles launched m the numbered sequence of pamtmgs
m 1964 and apotheosized m the chapel likely owe somethmg to Kaz1mir Malev1ch's
Black Square (1915, fig. 41 )? Even if that p10neering ne plus ultra remamed un-
known to Rothko (to be sure, there 1s no concrete evidence to adduce ), Malevich's
model helps make sense of his endur111g love affair, consummated 111the chapel,
with blankness. Certainly, Rothko 's fellow abstract express10nist Barnett Newman
was conversant with Malev1ch from 1959 onwards: he mentioned the Russian in his
writmgs and, likewise, made a sketch of Alexandr Rodchenko's Black on Black (1918 )
from a reproduction 111Camilla Gray 's The Russian Experiment in Art. Published 111
1962, Gray's book thrust Malev1ch and his compatriots back 111toavant-garde parl-
ance 44 Even so, Rothko could well have creatively misread Malev1ch 's Black
Square, tur111ngit 111tohis own address to the absolute mag111fy111g
an easel picture
meant to hang 111the corner of a wall to a huge scale that supersedes several of the
chapel's walls. What may make the m1spris10n more probable is Rothko's unques-
t10nable competition during the 1960s with Re111hardt's black canvases. Re111hardt's
notebooks record vanous references to Malev1ch . The y also com a phrase exception-
ally apposite to the chapel. "negative presence." 45
Malev1ch talked of the "face" of the Black Square: "Any pa111tmgsurface 1smore
alive than a face a surface lives, 1t has been born. It is the face of the new art." 46
Correspondingly, Rothko placed unusual stress on the not10n of the "portrait." As
early as 1943, in reply to the question "Why do you consider these semi -abstract
works portraits?" Rothko answered "There 1s a profound reason for the persist-
ence of the word 'portrait.' In this sense, all of art 1s the portrait of an idea ."47
Tech111cally speak111g, Rothko had summoned a figure of rhetoric known as
prosopopo1ea the perso111fication of an absent, imag111ary or abstract concept .48
Malev1ch's characterization of the Black Square as a "face " and Rothko 's characten-
zation of his abstractions as "portraits" are kindred rhetorical acts of prosopopoiea.
Each gives a countenance to the 111v1sibleand the 111effable. As the chapel proJect
neared complet10n 1111967, Rothko confided to a pa111terfriend that he was deter-
m111edto make "someth111g you don't want to look at." 49 This extraordinary remark
hmts of Rothko 's acknowledgment that the absolute and the sacred defy vision, similar
to the God of the Pentateuch hiding his face from the human gaze. 50 The Hidden
God, or deus absconditus,is tantamount to an oxymoron, a negative presence.
The void 1sanother negative presence. Rothko had long romanced it from the
blank gray re~tangle near the center of his first oil painting of 1924/2 5 onwards. 51
The ub1qu1ty of his v01ded surfaces alone would merit an essay.52 Followmg Knsteva ,
these erasures may be deemed tropes for death. As Knsteva writes m Black Sun
"death 1snot representable 111Freud 's unconsc10us. It 1simprmted there, however,
by spac111gs,blanks, discont111u1ties or destruction of representation."53 Whatever
the significance, its h1stoncal background v1s-a-v1s Rothko 's interests 1s diverse. A
blank space pregnant with light 1sthe asto111sh111g
focal po111tof Fra Angelico 's
Annunciation (ca. 1441-43 ) 111the monastery of San Marco in Florence; murals that
Rothko much admired. 54 Similarly , he was strongly affected by the blind mches in
Michelangelo's Laurentian Vestibule as well as by Mary McCarthy's book The Stones
of Florence( 1959) 111which monochrome photographs emphasized the flatly abstract
To See, or Not To See 71
 fig. 55 surfaces of Renaissance buildings. From a more modern standpoint, Rothko v01ced a
Temple ofAthenaAphaia (500-490BCE), Aegina
,
Greece.Photograph by VincentScully mutual affimt y with the Italian director Michelangelo Antoniom 's films. 55 In his
great trilogy, L'Avventura, La otte, and L'Eclisse (1960-62 ), Antomoni highlighted
fig. 56
MarkRothko , Panel #4 (HarvardMural(CR 740)], the spatial tens10ns of blankne ss, freezmg solitary figures amid bewildenng arch1tec-
1961-62.Oil andmixedmediaoncanvas,105x 180 to111cplanes-pr ecisely what Rothko had done 111his works of the late 1930s such as
inches (266.7x 457.2cm). Harvard UniversityArt Untitled [Three Women and a Child with Mannequins] and Street Scene (respectivel y
Museums , FoggArtMuseum , Han·ardUnivers ity,
Gift ofthe artist, on deposit tothe HarvardUniversity 1936/37 and ca.1937 ) 56 When Anto1110111 v1S1tedRothko 111his ew York studio 111
ArtMuseums,TL28284.4 the early 1960s, the dnector noted , through an interpreter , that the y both had the
same subiect matter "nothingn ess."57
The magnetism of nothmgness rema111s111separablefrom Romanticism. The
nineteenth century proved emptmess might be hypnotic: from Francisco Goya's Dog
Buried in Sand (1820-23), where the ammal 1s mned in a chiaroscuro blankness , to
Odilon Redon , who 1111892 drew a smgle eye stanng from a rectangular tabula rasa,
and to the poet Stephane Mallarme 's conflat10n of the white field of the page and the
empty azure sky 58 Possibly Rothko either did not know or never adnmed some of
these precedents, such as Caspar David Fnednch 's Monk by the Sea (1809, fig. 30); of
others, such as J M. W Turner 's mysteriously fieldlike expanses 111his late work, he was
unquestionabl y aware ("That chap Turner learned a lot from me ," Rothko quipped on
the occasion of a Turner exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art) 59 As the n111e-
teenth century progressed, blankness's allure had become such a toposthat Lewis Carroll
could satuize its geography in Im mock-epic quest, "The Hunt111gof the Snark"

"O th er maps are suc h sha pes, with th eir islan ds and capes!
But we have our brave cap tain to thank "
(So the crew would protest ) "that he 's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"6 0

What silence is to sound, blankness 1sto vision. Both ant1c1pate some sudden
mcurs10n 111tothen umformit y Therem lies then uncanmness. Rothko 's apothegm,
"silence is so accurate," points to his penchant for Edward Hopper 's art. Rothko once
said "[Andrew ] Wyeth 1s about the pursuit of strangenes s. But he 1s not whole as
Hopper is whole."61 Hopper used silence , architecture and strangely v01ded expanses

72 David Anfam
as recurrent devices to arouse tens10n 111the beholder 62 Much of what lmked then
sensibilities is captured 111Rothko's confess10n . "Often , towards mghtfall, there 's a
feelmg in the air of mystery, threat, frustration-all of these at once . I want my pa111t111g
to have the qualit y of such moments."6 3 A final stimulus that may 111part underlie the
num111ous mystery that Rothko sought m his mural cycles was architectural historian
Vincent Scully's 1962book The Earth, the Temple,and the Gods. ot only do the photo-
graphs of Greek temples 111this volume call to mind the architectural elements that so
obsessed Rothko (fig. 55) the columnar upnghts, the blackish pediments, the meas-
ured rectangular ordonnance of light and deep shadow but also Scully 's first page 1s
couched m words that, 1fthe pa111ter111deedread them, would have been music to his
ears. "Simple," "abstract," "repetitive ," "presences embodymg states of being" are
the phrases Scully chose, opemng with an epigraph from Sophocles:

As for this place, 1t 1sclearly a hol y one.6 4

Undoubtedly Rothko's path was already set before Scully's book appeared , un-
questionably, the Seagram murals predate 1t. However, Scully's reproductions some-
times come provocatively close to the Harvard murals that Rothko executed m 1962
(fig. 56), and Scully's meditat10ns on the umversal aspects of the Greek temple, his
emphasis on spatiality, light, shadow, the here-and -now and the beyond and the sa-
credness of "place" match the attributes that Rothko began to seek two years later for
the chapel pro1ect. But dunng his 1959v1S1tto Paestum Rothko po111tedout "I have
been pamt111g Greek temples all my life without knowmg it."65 Thus his notions
were prophetically cognate with Scully 's thoughts about the ex1stent1al dimension to
architecture. Both , albeit m different ways, concluded that space is where we are and
that the arch1tecto111c 1s the locus where 1t becomes a threshold, a platform to com-
mune with whatever lies beyond , as well as w1thm.
"I have made a place" Rothko tersely explamed when asked what he had sought
m the Seagram murals cycles, a statement that applies a fortiori to the chapeI. 66 If
his conv1ct1on sounds as though 1t held memones of the Hebrew concept of place ,
"Makom" -a sentiment also summoned m Newman's titles such as Here, Not There-
Here, The Gate, Broken Obelisk (that is, a place marker ) and so forth then 1t also
reiterates the Judaic roots of a111co111c
images. A key reference m Rothko 's recently
rediscovered manuscript, "The Artist 's Reality · Philosophies of Art, " wntten around
1940,foretells the absences whose negative presence subtends the chapel : "the Hebraic
abstraction of Jehovah, who cannot be seen , whose name must not even be spoken
and whose representat10ns must never be made. "67 To fulfill some archaic desire for
an absolute that defies normative v1s10n, Rothko assembled ventable shadow lands
full of blankness and effacement yet suffused with a muted, obscure lummos1ty for
this 1sthe stuff of the pamtings for the chapel.
The quest for a "place" that 1ssomehow beyond or apart from the human dommion
grants the chapel its strange fus10n of tradition and modermt y As to tradition , the
chapel finds various prefigurements , especially in the v1S1onaryarchitecture of the
French Enlightenment era. Etienne -Louis Boulee, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and then
contemporanes had envisaged edifices that, 111architectural historian Richard A. Etl111's
words, delved "the eloquence" of "empty space, " transformmg blankness and darkness

To See, or Not To See 73

 into signifiers of infinit y and the numinous. 68 There are few more graphic harbingers
for Rothko's culminating "place" in Houston than these "spaces of absence."69 Boulee
even named one of his unbuilt designs a "funerary monument charactenzing the
genre of an architecture of shadows" (ca. 1785). It may be heresy to suggest that there
1sa sense in which the chapel can feel like a tomb .7° Yet whenever I, at least, enter its
precinct my feeling is always, metaphoricall y speaking, as if I had taken a downward
step from the real world (although its floor 1sof course level with the extenor) into a
realm of quiescence , at once melancholy and powerfull y metaph ysical. That Domi-
nique de Menil had organized an exhib1t10n in 1967 of these very architects-French
v1sionanes Boulee , Ledoux, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (there 1sno evidence that Rothko
knew about the show), renders their example all the more topical.7 1 To such names
might also be added John Soane 's. The mausoleum that Soane built for Sn Francis
Bourge01s, in his own picture gallery in Dulw1ch, London although unlikel y to have
been in the minds of Philip Johnson and Howard Barnstone, still less Rothko 's par-
ticularl y presages the chapel 's radical s1mplic1ty·it contains vntually nothing except a
dark tomb , doorways and light from an unseen source above that accentuates the un-
adorned walls (fig. 57) Testimony to Rothko 's mitial intent10ns also comes from
Franz Meyer, former director of Basel's Kunstmuseum. Rothko told Meyer that he
fig. 57
wished v1S1torsto enter the chapel through a tunnel. 72 In the eighteenth century
Tomb of Sir Peter Franci s Bourgeois, Dulwich Picture Boulee , Ledoux , and Lequeu also had planned entrances for then edifices that led the
Galler y and Mauso leum (Sir Joan Soane, archi tect),
spectator downwards .73 And Rothko 's Entrance to Subway (1938) announced, more
London , 1811-15
than a quarter of a century before his designs for the chapel, the motif of figures de-
fig. 58 scending into a netherworld. Overall, the thematic continuities are probabl y as unin-
Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry, plan of the
Rothko Chape l with interior wall plane s indi cated, tentional as they are remarkable.
1970 .. Th e Menil Coll ection , Houston As for the chapel's modernit y, Rothko 's p01gnant aside about the Seagram senes-
that he had "ma de a place " (and, let us note , how nearl y this approaches Wallace
Stevens's aphonsm that "the consolations of space are nameless things ") brings to
D
mmd how twentieth-centur y social commentators from Georg S1mmel and Walter
G Benjamin to Jean-Paul Sartre and beyond believed that the human predicament was
dogged by disonentation , vertigo and rootlessness. Famously , Martm Heidegger m
1947 summanzed the dilemma m one sentence: "Homelessness 1scoming to be the
destin y of the world." 75 Rothko 's final "place" m Houston where, more than ever,
B
"less is more, " seems to wish to retreat from the destabilizmg perils of modernit y
even as its p1ctonal means were as starkly reductive as any of then tune to the
condition of an archaic sanctuary.76
K
In conclus10n, the chapel provides an envnonment m which we are confronted
t by a great deal (not least the largest paintings Rothko ever created ), yet can find little
N
to see by any convent10nal reckonmg. The images force the beholders to env1s10n
blankness. More 1s sensed than grasped. Rothko had pledged to "illumme" this
arena, while sunultaneously producmg the most darklmg images of his entne
career. 77 Accordingly, the space became a kind of camera obscura, laden with repeti-
tions (between the oppositional placement of the murals, then near-idenhcalit y, as well
as then rhyming with the rectangular doorways ) and empty/full with luminous
shadow 78 That the expenence leaves man y at a loss for words may be part of the m-
tended effect. The chapel feels haunted by negative presence, the ghosts of the unsaid

74 David Anfam
fig. 59 and perhaps the unsayable. It gives a blank "face" to melancholy , to yearning, and to
Rothko Chapel interior with original uncov ered
skylight grid, 197 1 a sort of primordial awe- a regressive condit10n in which some vestige of nature affects
to replace the cultural.7 9 To recall Stevens:
fig. 60
View of Stonehenge , Amesbury, Wiltshire County, And the sublime comes down
England , Prehistoric, c. 2750- 1500 BCE
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space80

If Rothko's prev10us abstract10ns had presupposed a virtual transact10n between the

onlooker and their fictive depth, then viewers in the Chapel find themselves in the
midst of a network of real spatial axes rather than illusor y ones-as if caught at an un-
marked crossroads (fig. 58).81 Moving from the "more" of the everyday to this meta-
temple of "less," viewers are left with prec10us little except the most atavistic
opposit10ns: entrance and exit, sunlight and shade, figure and field , surfaces and
apertures (fig. 59). I can think offew counterparts to compare with this uncann y, latter-
day outcome of a preference for the primitive other than such an archetypal site as
Stonehenge (fig. 60 ) whether or not Rothko had it consciousl y in mind. 82 Like the
Chapel, Stonehenge deplo ys a complex array of axes and sightlines; is dominated by
monoliths; demarcates limits between human placement and intimat10ns of some
larger order; and maps a shadowy plot dependent upon where natural light does , and
does not , falJ.83 The Chapel, too, hovers in this cryptic zone between secular and sa-
cred , a culturall y charged microcosm ne vertheless orientated so as to intimate a larger
plot. As Rothko darkl y yet cruciall y avowed, its paintings should be seen as if stum-
bled upon in a natural setting such as a forest. If it were daylight , you would see
them, and if it were night, you would not. 84•

To See, or Not To See 75