Building a City Then Running It

"At the Rothko Chapel, fourteen paintings created between 1964 and 1967 wash bruised purples up canvas columns, limned with lighter edges along black parallelograms so dark they're hard to call a color. Dove-gray walls above dark square stones, twelve chunky wooden benches squared toward the center. Unlike the stained-glass allegories of my churched childhood-Saint Michael spearing demons, Peter's denials-here all image drowns beneath all this color, unevenly brushed in deepest pigment."

"Outside, the Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman (designed 1963-67) presides over a bubbling reflecting pool. The local government accepted the sculpture (which John and Dominique de Menil originally planned to purchase with the City of Houston) for a space in front of City Hall, but not the dedication to Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination was then recent. The de Menils rejected the city, bought it outright, and set it here in 1971 as a rather wonderfully meaningful middle finger to local racism."

Houston's contemporary art presence sits alongside visible signs of the petroleum industry and energy professionals. The Rothko Chapel contains fourteen deeply pigmented canvases that saturate the space with bruised purples, dove-gray walls, and austere benches, creating a near-spiritual experience centered on color rather than image. Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk occupies a reflecting pool as a pointed civic gesture after municipal refusal to accept an MLK dedication, purchased and placed by the de Menils in 1971. The Menil Collection pairs surrealist works with global tribal objects, producing an eclectic, museum-scale Wunderkammer.

Read at Artforum