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Most indelible memory of your father. Without question, his voice. It was round and warm and usually singing Mozart. Best art experience with your father. My father and I discussed music constantly but never discussed art. When I would visit him in his studio, however, he would unfurl a seemingly endless roll of brown craft paper and let me paint as much as I wished. Most influential thing you learned through your father's notes and works of art. The power of abstraction. It was the uni- versal language that he used to shape and communicate his own personal vision of the world, his philosophies — what he felt were the true essentials of human existence. Why your father's work resonates today. Because of the sincerity with which he speaks through his paintings, and the deep human connection he actively seeks with each viewer through each work. Rothko painting that most moves you. A 1963 work at the Kunsthaus Zürich. It is four black rectangles on a black back- ground, yet each sings out with a unique voice. Above the uppermost black rectangle is a band of creamy, almost fleshy white. It softens anything forbidding about the paint- ing and fills it with light. Do you live with work by your father? Yes. Do you collect contemporary art? I love art, and from time to time I buy things that move me, but I have no involvement with the market and the names or any isms. Hometown? Personal stats? Manhattan. Married 23 years. Three kids. Trajectory of your professional life. I worked as a classical music critic for a number of years. I'm a clinical psychologist by training and practiced for several years. Throughout, I've tended my father's legacy, which has been my exclusive work for the last 17 years — organizing exhibitions, writing and lecturing about his work, archiving and editing and publishing his written work, supporting scholars and curators in their research and occasionally curating myself. 67 On your 2015 volume, Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. I came up with ideas for nearly all of the essays in the volume in a single moment about 14 years ago. A cou- ple trickled out as catalog essays or lectures, but most were written in the last four years. It's intended as a pretty comprehensive discussion of my father's work, what makes it tick, and what can get in the way. It draws on my 25 years of hands-on experience with the paintings and my unique per- spective — to some degree as his son, but primarily as someone who looks carefully at only one artist's work. I un- derstand the connective tissue between the different periods, the patterns and the exceptions — this is my inside-out point of view. Take us back to the beginning of the Rothko Chapel. What's the anecdote about John de Menil com- ing up with the idea while stuck in Houston traffic? It's come down to me as [John de Men- il's] moment of epiphany [which arose when he was stalled during rush hour]. He believed that what Houston needed was a place for respite, for contempla- tion. A sacred space that would help people move away from the mundane — such as traffic — to deeper things. Is it true your father took over as architect after Philip Johnson left the project? That evolution happened over a num- ber of years, but it is in essence true. Johnson was very responsive, even when reluctant, to my father's vision for the Chapel — the octagon, the sim- plicity, the apse for the north triptych. They could not agree, however, about the ceiling height, skylighting and (lack) of tower, and Johnson left the project when the de Menils supported my father. The firm of Barnstone and Aubrey helped realize my father's plan, allowing further simplifications so that we have today an unimpeded ground level experience of my father's murals. Was the Rothko Chapel originally planned to serve the Catholic faith? Yes. When did this change to become nondenominational? In the late 1960s before the actual construction. Do your father's paintings allude subtly to the Stations of the Cross? There is no explicit discussion of this, but he knew he was [originally] cre- ating a Catholic Chapel, and the 14 panels seem an unlikely coincidence. Beetlecat restaurant in Atlanta, designed by Ingram PHOTOGRAPHER HENRY ELKAN. @ 2013 KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO COLLECTION KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND Right: The painter's Untitled (White, Blacks, Grays on Maroon), 1963, at Kunsthaus Zürich Mark Rothko, circa 1952- 1953 Left and here: Christopher Rothko at the Rothko Chapel, Houston