The Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel: Oil Money Becomes Art

John and Dominique de Menil were French oil heirs who could have built their museum in Paris or New York. They chose Houston.

The couple had come to Texas in nineteen forty-one when John's employer, Schlumberger, transferred him to oversee operations in the Americas. They were serious collectors: by the time of John's death in nineteen seventy-three they had assembled about ten thousand works spanning ancient Greece through the postwar avant-garde. When they decided to give the collection to a city rather than an institution, they chose the city where they lived. The Menil Collection opened in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston in nineteen eighty-seven, fourteen years after John's death, in a building designed by Renzo Piano at Dominique's direction.

But the Rothko Chapel, which Dominique completed in nineteen seventy-one, came first and remains the stranger thing.

Mark Rothko was commissioned in nineteen sixty-four to create a cycle of large paintings specifically for an octagonal room that would be formally ecumenical: open to all faiths, designated for meditation, and architecturally spare. Rothko worked on the fourteen black paintings for years. The canvases are enormous, and the blackness is not uniform; Rothko varied his surfaces so that different qualities of light produce different depths. He died by suicide in February of nineteen seventy, before the chapel opened.

The Rothko Chapel has hosted heads of state, peace negotiations, and civil rights commemorations. Jimmy Carter spoke there. The Dalai Lama spoke there. The Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize is awarded there. It is formally Christian and formally not; formally a chapel and formally a contemporary art installation. It is the product of French Catholic sensibility, Texas oil money, the abstract expressionist movement, and one man's last sustained work before his death. There is no other room quite like it in any American city.