Mark Rothko dreamed that his paintings, rectangles with velvety hues and blurred contours recognizable among thousands, would be miracles. This is indeed the epiphany sought by the approximately seven thousand seven hundred visitors who, every day, enter the doors of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, where the largest retrospective has been held since October 18 and until April 2. of the American painter never organized for twenty years. In one hundred and fifteen canvases, the hanging retraces the figurative beginnings of the artist, born in 1903 in a small town in the Russian Empire, his shift into abstraction in 1949, his solar and seductive hues, until the final apotheosis of black and gray paintings, before his suicide in 1970, at the age of 66.
Nothing is missing, apart from the fourteen dark paintings from the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas, opened in 1971 by collectors Dominique and Jean (who renamed himself John) de Ménil. “It would make no sense for them to be in Paris, explains Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the Vuitton Foundation. VSThis chapel is not just paintings, it is a whole, an architecture. We don’t move a place. »
And what a place! Open to all faiths, the Rothko Chapel is a pure utopia, as the 20th century was able to produce, at the intersection of art, spirituality and the defense of human rights. It is also the apotheosis in Mark Rothko’s career, his ultimate masterpiece. “A dream commission, a total work of art and an achievement”, sums up in a soft voice his son, Christopher Rothko, 60 years old, a slim figure who watches over the legacy of a father he lost at the age of 6 with his sister, Kate.
A stripped-down face-to-face with the works
Curator, alongside Suzanne Pagé, of the exhibition organized at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, he is also the one who closely followed the restoration of the fourteen paintings and the renovation of the chapel, completed in 2021. He is now in charge of a development project with the construction of several pavilions in the surrounding area, to develop a program on human rights and artist residencies, as well as a meditation garden.
Legions of historians and art critics have written entire chapters about him. Generations of artists have been inspired by it. The composer Morton Feldman dedicated a musical score to him, the author John Taggart celebrated him in a poem. Even the artist Mike Kelley, America’s enfant terrible, cited it in a performance. The chapel has hosted luminaries such as the Dalai Lama, who celebrated a prayer there in 1991, or, in the same year, South African President Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years of his life behind bars for having struggle against apartheid “.
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