Why Modern Artists Saved Their Last Great Work for a Chapel

Feature image: Hickey-Robertson, Original 1971 chapel interior setup with benches, 1971, © Hickey-Robertson / Courtesy of the Rothko Chapel, © 2026 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

For most of the twentieth century, the avant-garde and the Church kept to separate worlds. Fauvism, Surrealism, and abstraction grew up in studios, cafés, and dealer galleries, far from the altarpiece commissions that had supported European painters for a thousand years. After World War II, Dominican priest Marie-Alain Couturier set out to close that gap, urging the Catholic Church to hire the greatest living artists, regardless of faith. Several of the century's major painters answered late in life, and for many, a chapel or small church became the last great project of a long career. Each chapel below is open to visitors today, and each one turns a painter's style into a room you can stand inside, lit by colored glass, wrapped in painted walls, or surrounded by dark canvases made for a single space.

In 1941, Henri Matisse survived major abdominal surgery, and the following year he hired a young night nurse named Monique Bourgeois, who also posed for several of his works. In July 1943, Matisse left Nice for the hill town of Vence to escape the threat of bombing, and Bourgeois joined the Dominican convent there as Sister Jacques-Marie, though sources differ on whether she entered in 1943 or 1946. In August 1947, she asked her former employer to help decorate a small oratory the nuns had fitted out inside their convent. Matisse, then 77, proposed an entire chapel. Working with the Dominican Brother Rayssiguier, Father Couturier, and the architect Auguste Perret, he spent four years planning every element of the chapel, and the Chapel of the Rosary was consecrated on June 25, 1951.

Matisse limited the chapel's stained glass to three colors, yellow, green, and blue, so that sunlight falls across the white walls and floor in pools of color that move through the day. On the rear wall, he drew fourteen Stations of the Cross in black line on white glazed tile, a scene he called tormented and passionate. He also designed the stalls, the holy water stoup, the liturgical objects, and the priests' chasubles, and the chapel remains the only building he ever designed. The project drew rumors of a romance between the artist and the nun, which both denied for the rest of their lives. When Sister Jacques-Marie told him she believed God had inspired the work, Matisse replied, "Yes, but that god is me." He considered the chapel his masterpiece, and he died in Nice in 1954, three years after its consecration.

Down the coast in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a sixteenth-century fishermen's chapel on the harbor had fallen out of religious use after a fire. By the 1950s, local fishermen stored their nets inside, and the building also housed their fishing tribunal, which settled disputes among the town's boats. Jean Cocteau was then staying with his patron Francine Weisweiller at her villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and his friend Albert Lorent persuaded him to restore the chapel. Once the fishermen gave their approval, Cocteau began work in 1956, in his late sixties. Local artists and craftsmen joined him, including the painter Jean-Paul Brusset, who helped transfer the figures to the chapel walls, and a brickworks in Valbonne fired the chapel's ceramic candlesticks. The chapel was inaugurated on June 30, 1957, as the first of several chapels Cocteau would decorate.

Cocteau covered the entire chapel interior and the facade, organizing the walls into five main scenes. Two honor Mediterranean life, with tributes to the young women of Villefranche and to the pilgrimage town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and three follow the life of Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen. In one scene, an angel frees Peter from King Herod's prison, and cherubs drawn in Cocteau's quick, looping line appear at several points across the vault. The chapel was listed as a historic monument in 1996, and it still stands on the Quai Courbet facing the boats, with a small entry fee paid at the door.

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita made his name in 1920s Paris with porcelain-pale nudes and cats, and later became one of the postwar era's most surprising converts. After a mystical experience at the Basilica of Saint-Remi in Reims, he and his wife Kimiyo were baptized in Reims Cathedral on October 14, 1959. He took the name Léonard in honor of Leonardo da Vinci and chose René Lalou, head of the Mumm champagne house, as his godfather. In 1964, Lalou agreed to fund a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Peace in Reims, and construction began in 1965. Foujita designed the entire chapel with the architect Maurice Clauzier, drawing the plans, the ironwork, the sculptures, and the stained glass, which the Simon-Marq workshop in Reims fabricated.

In the summer of 1966, at the age of 80, Foujita painted roughly 100 square meters of fresco across the chapel interior in about three months, after practicing the technique in advance. The building is Romanesque in form, a style Foujita considered the purest and simplest, and the frescoes draw on the Italian Renaissance, with scenes including the Last Supper, the Baptism of Christ, and a Madonna of the Vines. Foujita added chrysanthemums and insects as reminders of his Japanese roots, and he painted Kimiyo and his friends René Lalou and Georges Prade into the scenes. The chapel was blessed on October 1, 1966, and handed to the city of Reims on October 18. Foujita died in 1968, and he and Kimiyo, who died in 2009, are both buried inside the chapel they made together.

Marc Chagall took up stained glass around the age of 70, and his windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem went on view at the Louvre in 1961. Among the visitors were Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid and her mother, Lady Rosemary d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, whose family lived at Somerhill in Kent. In 1963, Sarah drowned in a sailing accident off Rye at the age of 21, and her parents commissioned Chagall to design a memorial window for their parish church, All Saints' in the village of Tudeley. The east window was dedicated in 1967, on what was Chagall's only visit. According to local accounts, he looked around the small nave and declared, "C'est magnifique! Je les ferai tous!" ("It's magnificent! I will do them all!"). The church dedicated five north windows and two south windows in 1974, and installed the final four chancel windows in 1985, the year of Chagall's death. All Saints' is the only church in the world with every window designed by Chagall, and his longtime collaborator Charles Marq translated each design into glass at the same Reims workshop that made Foujita's windows.

Chagall's Swiss commission came through Peter Vogelsanger, the pastor of the Fraumünster in Zurich, who approached him in 1967 after a design competition among Swiss artists had failed. The church traces its founding to 853, when King Louis the German established an abbey there for his daughter Hildegard. In 1970, at the age of 83, Chagall installed five tall, narrow windows in the choir, each built around its own dominant color and biblical theme, devoted to the Prophets, Jacob, Christ, Zion, and the Law. He returned eight years later to add a rose window depicting the Creation in the south transept, giving the old abbey church a second Chagall commission within a decade.

In 1964, the Houston collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create a meditative space built around his paintings, and they gave him control over the room as well as the canvases. Rothko proposed an octagonal plan for the chapel and worked first with the architect Philip Johnson, but the two disagreed over the design, and the architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry completed the chapel. From the fall of 1964 through the spring of 1967, Rothko painted fourteen large canvases for the chapel, plus four alternates, in his New York studio, where a full mock-up of the room let him test their arrangement. He regarded the chapel commission as the major event of his career, yet he died in February 1970, a year before the chapel opened.

The Rothko Chapel was dedicated on February 27, 1971, as a sacred space open to people of every faith. Three of the chapel's walls hold triptychs and five hold single paintings, all in near-black hues whose surfaces shift with the daylight entering from above. Rothko said of the series that he wanted to paint both the finite and the infinite. Outside, Barnett Newman's sculpture Broken Obelisk stands in the reflecting pool, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., and the composer Morton Feldman wrote his 1971 piece Rothko Chapel to be performed inside it. Visitors entering the chapel for the first time still tend to ask the question its staff have heard since the opening, which is simply, "Where are the paintings?"

The most recent chapel by a modern master took more than thirty years to build. In the mid-1980s, the television producer Douglas S. Cramer asked Ellsworth Kelly to design a pavilion for his vineyard near Santa Barbara, California, and Kelly drew a small stone chapel shaped by his experiences of religious architecture in France. Blanton Museum of Art sources date that commission to both 1986 and 1987. The vineyard project fell through, and the drawings stayed with Kelly for decades. In 2015, he gifted the design concept to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and he died that December at the age of 92.

Austin opened to the public on February 18, 2018, as a 2,715-square-foot stone chapel on the museum grounds. Its colored-glass windows cast red, yellow, blue, and green light across the white interior; fourteen black-and-white marble panels on the walls serve as Stations of the Cross, and a redwood totem stands at the chapel's far end. Kelly intended the building as a nonreligious chapel for reflection, open to visitors of any belief or none. In its first year, more than 171,000 people walked through its doors.

The modern chapel has since become a destination for art travel in its own right. Vence and Villefranche sit close enough to see Matisse and Cocteau in a single day, and Houston and Austin are a short drive apart. The next great chapel may already exist as a set of drawings in an artist's studio, waiting, as Kelly's did, for the right site to carry it into the light.

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