While their deep plum hues come out on bright days, they're so somber they can make the viewer ache as much as Mozart's "Requiem." The paintings have invited contemplation during countless memorials and have been a profound presence at concerts and lectures. Fittingly, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is the only U.S. venue for the exhibit "Mark Rothko: A Retrospective," opening Sunday. "The Rothko Chapel was a game changer for so many people in Houston," Alison de Lima Greene, the exhibition's curator, said. Art patrons and human-rights activists John and Dominique de Menil commissioned the paintings for their ecumenical chapel, which they envisioned as an intimate sanctuary for people of all faiths. Many experts read them as the final statement of a deeply depressed genius, an idea that lingers as one the most persistent myths of American art history. Most of the show's paintings belong to the National Gallery of Art, which received them after a legal battle between Rothko's agents and his children, who were minors when he died. If viewers felt moved only by his paintings' color relationships, Mark Rothko once said, they were missing the point. Some people argue Rothko turned to darker palettes to steer the conversation away from color. In 1957 he famously abandoned his first major public commission, for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York's Seagram Building, because he feared his paintings might be construed as decorative. Born in 1903, Marcus Rothkowitz was the youngest son of immigrants who came to the U.S. from what is now Latvia after the Bolshevik Revolution. The earliest painting in the Houston museum's retrospective, 1936's "Street Scene," is from that period. Rothko became identified with the circle of painters known as the abstract expressionists, which included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. Sixth-grade students from Houston's Presbyterian School filed in, filling the benches with a rush of youthful energy before settling quietly. "The paintings mean so many things to so many different people," Rothko Chapel Executive Director David Leslie said. The retrospective's final room offers proof that Rothko kept working after he finished the chapel's murals.
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