Yes. He’s a weird outlier. He didn’t break new ground or spawn a bunch of imitators. He used a very straightforward style to draw images that were bizarrely mathematically playful.
I think he’ll be remembered for a long time the way Arcimboldo is remembered – as a decent artist who is famous for being quirky and idiosyncratic. He’s never going to have a reputation as a “great” like Rembrandt or Monet, but he’s not going to vanish completely either because his work is too original.
No, sorry, I can’t articulate it.
Best I can do is to say that I can always return to the experience of sitting in the chapel to better understand both what I’m doing, and what my surroundings are doing to me, when I sit and look at anything. The work, when you’re inside it, redirects your attention to yourself as interpreter of the work, (because in a sense it is itself so blank you have almost nothing to pay attention to other than what you yourself are doing), and then you wonder how it did that to you, and now your attention is on the work again.
This shifting of attention happens with any artwork, of course, if you’re looking at it carefully, but the Rothko Chapel seems to be effective at bringing this very shift of attention to the fore, making it the “subject” of the work. And after sitting in the chapel, I myself anyway haven’t been able to feel the same about sitting-and-looking about anything since.