Art Essays
Philadelphia Museum of Art workers on strike, photographed by Emily on Oct. 10, 2022.
Contributed to editorial by Alaina Johns, editor-in-chief, Broad Street Review: 'What is the Arts Writer's Beat? How did Philly’s media cover the PMA strike, and why does it matter?' Oct. 18, 2022.
Letter from Jim Brewton to Joe Amarotico, ca. 1963.
'Jim Brewton, Graffiti Pataphysician,' April 24, 2015, Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium.
Lessons on Legacy:
Abstract Expressionists and their estates
copyright 2019 by Emily Schilling
(Citations removed for online version)
Among the many Abstract Expressionists whose work has stood the test of time, several artists' posthumous reputations were affected by the trustees who initially guided their estates. After summarizing the origins and major characteristics of the Abstract Expressionist movement, we focus on the estates of four artists.
Abstract Expressionism is Born in New York City
Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement of international importance, was not a cohesive group, but a dynamic, bold, non-objective style that began in the late 1930s and came into its own toward the end of World War II. Based in New York, its roots were European; and Surrealism, with its use of automatism, was a particularly strong influence on many Abstract Expressionists. Adolph Hitler and his fellow fascists frowned on avant-garde art; Josef Stalin favored social realism, and Modernism “seemed to go underground in the 1930s.” It's almost as if New York City, especially, had been preparing to welcome the European artists who found their way to America. During the 1920s and ’30s, attention was given to avant-garde art in New York, and many appreciative groups were active at the time. On a larger scale, the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929, the Whitney Museum of American Art held its first abstract show in 1935, and in 1939 Solomon R. Guggenheim founded his Museum of Non-Objective Painting.
The United States had been through the Great Depression; the war effort brought an economic boom, as well as a great movement of men to war and women into the men's former factory and office jobs. Paris and other European cosmopolitan centers were devastated, the artists, collectors, and dealers killed and scattered. Galleries and museums would either never reopen or spend years recovering from the war. Meanwhile, New York beckoned, and Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted in 1942-43 by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) positively sings with relief and hope for a life rebuilt in a new and exciting city.
In the words of Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman (1905-1970), his generation “felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated ... it was impossible at that time to paint ... flowers, reclining nudes....” Many of these artists, looking to express themselves in strong new ways, found themselves in New York’s Greenwich Village (Abstract Expressionism is also known as the New York School). A surprising number of Abstract Expressionists attended or taught at an inexpensive, atelier-style art school, The Art Students League, founded in 1875 and still operating today.
Although diverse, the Abstract Expressionist painters’ work generally falls into one of two types: “gestural” or “color field.” The gestural painters tended to allow the action of painting itself to show in their work, although it was often much more carefully planned and reworked than it appears—Franz Kline (1910-1962), for example, took painstaking care with the bold strokes that appear to be simply slapped onto his canvases. Other artists included in the gestural group were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). The color field painters, like Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), Clyfford Still (1904-1980) and Newman, used large sections of color in their works, to profound effect. Besides these two broad stylistic categories, the Abstract Expressionists experimented with important artistic discoveries and concepts. The color field artists sought deep meaning, similar to the quest of Vladimir Malevich (1879-1935) in his Supremacist works. In one of their letters to the editors at The New York Times, dated June 7, 1943, Rothko, Newman and Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), friends who were associated with The Art Students League, stated: “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing” ... the “tragic and timeless” are the only valid subjects. Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), who taught at The Art Students League, invented the “push/pull” concept of color theory. Pollock began experimenting with “allover paintings” in 1947, in which no focal point is given precedence over any other, and he began to paint on a mural-like scale, so the viewer is almost engulfed by the artwork. Rothko operated in a similar way, and Kline also played with scale, beginning in 1949 to project his small sketches onto large canvases. Many of the Abstract Expressionists worked in black and white, and indeed some of their ideas are best approached through their monochromatic works.
In the past, Americans imported their tastes in art from western Europe, modeling their galleries and museums on European institutions. Abstract Expressionists produced exciting, original work in the United States, sweeping aside the limits of objective painting, sculpture and photography. Alexander Calder (1898-1976) created sculpture in new, constructed ways that David Smith (1906-1965) took further, constructing massive metal pieces with a welding torch. Rather than carving in stone or casting in bronze, Calder and Smith brought new possibilities to the medium. Mark di Suvera (b. 1933) whose constructions seem to translate Kline’s gestural paintings into three-dimensional pieces of scavenged wood and rusty chains, admired Smith’s work, calling it “really strong, American industrial art.” American photography, too, was transformed by its increased usage in newspapers and magazines to tell stories, and Robert Capa (1913-1954), Lee Miller (1907-1977) and others used photography in new ways—sometimes more fluid, or abstracted in design—to great emotional effect.
Lessons in Artistic Legacies
The romantic image of tortured artists who die tragically, talents unrecognized while they lived, is an enduring one. Earlier modern artists whose reputations were built or modified posthumously include Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Van Gogh was unrecognized while he was alive, and if not for the consecutive efforts of his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, the great works he left in his brother’s care would have sunk into obscurity. Modigliani died young of tubercular meningitis, but his work had been shown frequently during his lifetime, alongside that of peers who recognized his genius, including Pablo Picasso and others. However, the myth persists that Modigliani died from the effects of drugs and alcohol, his art unappreciated while he lived. Unfortunately, Modigliani’s only child was less than two years old when he died, both of his dealers also died young, and his works and their provenance records were scattered during World War II, making research difficult. Modigliani has five published catalogues raisonnés, none of which are complete, creating opportunities for forgers and diminishing the artist’s reputation.
Management of artists’ estates can wield enormous influence on how the artwork is perceived, and even carefully planned foundations can fail. Drawing on interviews collected and edited by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau in Artists’ Estates: Reputations in Trust (2005), as well as other sources, we can learn from the estates of four Abstract Expressionists:
The children step up: Rothko and Smith
The most notorious case of an estate gone wrong is that of Mark Rothko, whose widow died six months after he died by suicide, leaving their children, Kate, 19, and Christopher, 6. Rothko had created a foundation and named three executors of his estate, all of whom were on the foundation’s board. Rothko earmarked paintings for his children, and must have believed that the executors—friends of his—would steer his legacy responsibly. What could go wrong? “Within seven months,” write Salvesen and Cousineau, “the executors sold a hundred paintings at a cut-rate price to the Marlborough Gallery and consigned the remaining 698 to it for twelve years.” Kate Rothko began her legal fight to get the paintings back in 1971, and it was 1983 before the litigation was over. Judith Dobrzynski summarized Kate Rothko’s struggle in “A Betrayal The Art World Can't Forget,” published Nov. 2, 1998, in The New York Times:
For nearly a dozen years beginning in 1971, the art world and the public were transfixed by the battle between Rothko's executors, all of them his good friends, and his two children, who accused the executors of waste and fraud, and by the ensuing appeals and related litigation. As a result, many of Rothko's luminous Abstract Expressionist paintings, which had been sold or consigned by his estate to the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan at deflated prices, were donated to museums, probably enhancing their value.
Rothko and his work became better known, further establishing his reputation. Marlborough lost its pre-eminence in contemporary art. Its flamboyant owner, Frank Lloyd, never recouped his reputation, and neither did Theodoros Stamos, a painter Rothko chose as an executor....
Before Marlborough was stopped by a court ruling, it had sold more than 100 paintings--including a few that Rothko's children now say they would have kept--at less than market value to favored clients while it collected inflated commissions as high as 50 percent, compared with the 30 percent usually charged for an artist of his caliber. The executors, meanwhile, divided the estate's proceeds from Marlborough as their fees.
The judges’ opinion, upholding the lower court’s decision in favor of Kate and Christopher Rothko, begins with a stinging “The principal asset of his estate consisted of 798 paintings of tremendous value, and the dispute underlying this appeal involves the conduct of his three executors in their disposition of these works of art. In sum, that conduct ... was manifestly wrongful and indeed shocking.” (New York Court of Appeals, Opinion)
Kate Rothko Prizel, disillusioned, stepped away from day-to-day management of her father’s estate once the paintings were safe, and her brother Christopher began steering their father’s legacy through a reconstituted foundation. Between them, they saved Mark Rothko’s paintings from being undervalued and dumped onto the marketplace.
David Smith also provided for his legacy and two young children—or so he thought. He died in 1965; he and his second wife had divorced four years earlier and his daughters, Rebecca and Candida, were 11 and 10. Smith, like Rothko, chose a trio of executors for his will, which left his entire estate and all of his artworks in trust for Rebecca and Candida until they turned 25. Smith’s trustees were his lawyer; his good friend and fellow Abstract Expressionist, Motherwell; and critic Clement Greenberg (who championed Abstract Expressionism, as did his rival Harold Rosenberg). Smith’s estate was hit with high taxes, as the work had not sold well until shortly before the artist’s death. The IRS used the most recent prices to put a high value on the estate, meaning that many works would have to be sold quickly in order to pay the estate taxes. However, if the market was suddenly flooded with Smith sculptures, their value would immediately decrease. With the help of testimony from art experts, the estate won a new legal precedent, the “blockage discount.” It allows appraisers to set the value of an estate at the price it would fetch if all of the work were sold at once, rather than slowly, one at a time. The ruling did not come in time to help the David Smith estate, which had to sell off works and pay its taxes while the case was pending. Although Smith’s daughters received a partial tax refund later, their art collection was greatly reduced.
Just as Stamos failed to act in Rothko’s interest, Motherwell apparently paid little attention to Smith’s estate. According to Peter Stevens, who married Rebecca Smith in 1979 and worked as an administrator for the estate for 35 years, Motherwell and the attorney deferred to Greenberg, and although they did fight the high taxes, they failed to have an inventory made and, says Stevens, “a lot of things, I think, were missing. ... Often they did try to do what was best for the work, but I don’t think they put in the necessary time and effort. Ultimately the court did have all their commissions cut in half because of their egregious neglect. ... Nothing was done to conserve the work, and that became one of the big scandals of the David Smith estate. ... The other egregious thing that Greenberg did was to arrange for the removal of white paint from five sculptures. It was horrible for those five sculptures, but also because the general public got the impression that the estate had altered the surfaces of all of David’s best work. ... [This] went beyond the pale.”
As with the Rothko case, the artist’s children cared enough about the artworks to advocate for them effectively. It’s an emotional issue, as Stevens described to Salvesen in November 2000: “It quickly became apparent that [Rebecca Smith] was very upset about her father’s estate ... she and her sister would see the sculptures vanishing from the fields with a total disregard for their feelings or input.”
Stevens asserts that the Rothko and Smith estates were similar except in one regard: Rothko’s will was written specifically, and violations could be proved. Smith’s will left everything up to the trustees, so there was no legal violation, even though “over two hundred major works were sold in less than a five-year period by Marlborough Gallery and, in some cases, to Marlborough Gallery, which is a horrible conflict of interests.” Greenberg only took the David Smith estate away from Marlborough in 1971, after the Rothko case was publicized. In 1979, the children gained control over the estate, stopped selling the works and began to work strategically with museums, slowly rebuilding their father’s reputation.
Widows: Krasner as model for Newman
In April 2002, Salvesen interviewed B.H. Friedman, collector, former trustee at the Whitney Museum, and author of the first biography of Jackson Pollock in 1972. Friedman worked closely with Krasner. “Lee did set the pattern for widows,” he says. “She made very smart moves.” Krasner priced Pollock’s work carefully, balancing tax implications with the art’s increasing value; and she quickly had a catalogue raisonné created by renowned scholars “to prevent fakes from coming on the market. ... there were Pollock fakes even quite early in the fifties.” Friedman says, “The only one who came close to [Krasner] was Annalee [Newman]. ... Annalee learned a lot from Lee.” After Barnett’s death, Newman bought an apartment in a convenient Manhattan location, re-created her late husband’s studio in it, and began hosting collectors, dealers and curators there. She hired a good scholar to handle “everything to do with Barney,” says Friedman. “She did things Barney would have done; it was eerie. Publishing Barney’s collected writings in 1990 was a brilliant stroke.” And a catalogue raisonné was published in 2004. In the May 13, 2000, obituary for Annalee Newman in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote, “Mrs. Newman devoted the bulk of her energy to placing her husband's paintings in public and private collections in the United States and Europe, an activity she likened to ‘marrying our children well.’”
Annalee Newman had supported her husband’s art-making by working as a teacher throughout much of their married life, while Krasner was an artist in her own right. Salvesen, in her interview with Friedman, asks why Krasner took on the Pollock estate, when he’d been publicly involved with another woman at the time of his death and she could have “'retreat[ed] from Jackson' and continued with her own work.” According to Friedman, "yes, she subordinated her career to Jackson’s. On the other hand, there was very little question in my mind that as Jackson’s wife, her own reputation was enhanced.
Krasner’s long game has paid off, and at the time of her death she was seen as “an artist of the first rank,” according to her obituary, written June 21, 1984, by Michael Brenson for The New York Times. Krasner steered Pollock’s reputation deftly, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation continues to do so, as well as awarding grants to individuals and organizations.
Motherwell: All for Art
In contrast to Krasner and Annalee Newman, Robert Motherwell’s fourth wife and widow, photographer Renate Ponsold, was given no role to play in Motherwell’s estate. His two daughters from his second marriage were also left a bit short, according to Friedman and Salvesen. Friedman says, of Ponsold, “She was excluded from all decisions about his work. ... She has a lot of his work that he had given to her previously. She’ll not starve. But in financial terms, it’s the children whom he really treated shabbily. ... he was overly involved with his reputation, his place in history.” Motherwell created his foundation in 1981; today it has a staff that administers grants, oversees exhibitions, and researches and publishes the catalogues raisonnés of Motherwell’s works. In Motherwell’s case, he was wealthy as well as talented, and he formed his foundation ten years before his death, enabling him to set its course and ensure its ongoing solvency. Krasner and Newman, as widows who were in control of their husbands’ legacies, were able to begin their work right away, and the men’s reputations were seamlessly protected. Rothko’s and Smith’s cases were different, in that their children couldn’t step in right away. Luckily, they were able to gain control of their fathers’ legacies before it was too late to salvage them.
Calls to Action
Kate Rothko and Peter Stevens had moments of recognition, when they were galvanized into action. “In November 1971, Kate Rothko, realizing that she and her small brother would inherit no work by their father, petitioned, through her guardian ... to stop Marlborough from selling....” Peter Stevens says that he and Greenberg were looking through Smith’s drawings in 1979, and “I clearly saw that Greenberg did not respect the work. I physically stepped forward and put my body between Greenberg and the drawings. At that point, I realized I was going to be involved....”
Magda Salvesen herself is the widow of artist Jon Schueler, who died in 1992. She writes of conflicted feelings, both wanting to serve his legacy and needing to protect herself from being subsumed by the time and dedication involved. “Were we subservient or supportive? In either case, the future had already been factored into our thinking. ... whatever the new demands on our time might be, we draw from a set of priorities that have already been established. ... Children of artists are in a more difficult position.”
(Citations removed for online version)
Among the many Abstract Expressionists whose work has stood the test of time, several artists' posthumous reputations were affected by the trustees who initially guided their estates. After summarizing the origins and major characteristics of the Abstract Expressionist movement, we focus on the estates of four artists.
Abstract Expressionism is Born in New York City
Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement of international importance, was not a cohesive group, but a dynamic, bold, non-objective style that began in the late 1930s and came into its own toward the end of World War II. Based in New York, its roots were European; and Surrealism, with its use of automatism, was a particularly strong influence on many Abstract Expressionists. Adolph Hitler and his fellow fascists frowned on avant-garde art; Josef Stalin favored social realism, and Modernism “seemed to go underground in the 1930s.” It's almost as if New York City, especially, had been preparing to welcome the European artists who found their way to America. During the 1920s and ’30s, attention was given to avant-garde art in New York, and many appreciative groups were active at the time. On a larger scale, the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929, the Whitney Museum of American Art held its first abstract show in 1935, and in 1939 Solomon R. Guggenheim founded his Museum of Non-Objective Painting.
The United States had been through the Great Depression; the war effort brought an economic boom, as well as a great movement of men to war and women into the men's former factory and office jobs. Paris and other European cosmopolitan centers were devastated, the artists, collectors, and dealers killed and scattered. Galleries and museums would either never reopen or spend years recovering from the war. Meanwhile, New York beckoned, and Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted in 1942-43 by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) positively sings with relief and hope for a life rebuilt in a new and exciting city.
In the words of Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman (1905-1970), his generation “felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated ... it was impossible at that time to paint ... flowers, reclining nudes....” Many of these artists, looking to express themselves in strong new ways, found themselves in New York’s Greenwich Village (Abstract Expressionism is also known as the New York School). A surprising number of Abstract Expressionists attended or taught at an inexpensive, atelier-style art school, The Art Students League, founded in 1875 and still operating today.
Although diverse, the Abstract Expressionist painters’ work generally falls into one of two types: “gestural” or “color field.” The gestural painters tended to allow the action of painting itself to show in their work, although it was often much more carefully planned and reworked than it appears—Franz Kline (1910-1962), for example, took painstaking care with the bold strokes that appear to be simply slapped onto his canvases. Other artists included in the gestural group were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). The color field painters, like Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), Clyfford Still (1904-1980) and Newman, used large sections of color in their works, to profound effect. Besides these two broad stylistic categories, the Abstract Expressionists experimented with important artistic discoveries and concepts. The color field artists sought deep meaning, similar to the quest of Vladimir Malevich (1879-1935) in his Supremacist works. In one of their letters to the editors at The New York Times, dated June 7, 1943, Rothko, Newman and Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), friends who were associated with The Art Students League, stated: “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing” ... the “tragic and timeless” are the only valid subjects. Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), who taught at The Art Students League, invented the “push/pull” concept of color theory. Pollock began experimenting with “allover paintings” in 1947, in which no focal point is given precedence over any other, and he began to paint on a mural-like scale, so the viewer is almost engulfed by the artwork. Rothko operated in a similar way, and Kline also played with scale, beginning in 1949 to project his small sketches onto large canvases. Many of the Abstract Expressionists worked in black and white, and indeed some of their ideas are best approached through their monochromatic works.
In the past, Americans imported their tastes in art from western Europe, modeling their galleries and museums on European institutions. Abstract Expressionists produced exciting, original work in the United States, sweeping aside the limits of objective painting, sculpture and photography. Alexander Calder (1898-1976) created sculpture in new, constructed ways that David Smith (1906-1965) took further, constructing massive metal pieces with a welding torch. Rather than carving in stone or casting in bronze, Calder and Smith brought new possibilities to the medium. Mark di Suvera (b. 1933) whose constructions seem to translate Kline’s gestural paintings into three-dimensional pieces of scavenged wood and rusty chains, admired Smith’s work, calling it “really strong, American industrial art.” American photography, too, was transformed by its increased usage in newspapers and magazines to tell stories, and Robert Capa (1913-1954), Lee Miller (1907-1977) and others used photography in new ways—sometimes more fluid, or abstracted in design—to great emotional effect.
Lessons in Artistic Legacies
The romantic image of tortured artists who die tragically, talents unrecognized while they lived, is an enduring one. Earlier modern artists whose reputations were built or modified posthumously include Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Van Gogh was unrecognized while he was alive, and if not for the consecutive efforts of his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, the great works he left in his brother’s care would have sunk into obscurity. Modigliani died young of tubercular meningitis, but his work had been shown frequently during his lifetime, alongside that of peers who recognized his genius, including Pablo Picasso and others. However, the myth persists that Modigliani died from the effects of drugs and alcohol, his art unappreciated while he lived. Unfortunately, Modigliani’s only child was less than two years old when he died, both of his dealers also died young, and his works and their provenance records were scattered during World War II, making research difficult. Modigliani has five published catalogues raisonnés, none of which are complete, creating opportunities for forgers and diminishing the artist’s reputation.
Management of artists’ estates can wield enormous influence on how the artwork is perceived, and even carefully planned foundations can fail. Drawing on interviews collected and edited by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau in Artists’ Estates: Reputations in Trust (2005), as well as other sources, we can learn from the estates of four Abstract Expressionists:
- Rothko, who committed suicide in 1970 at age 66;
- Smith, who died in a car crash in 1965, aged 59;
- Krasner, who tied her legacy to that of her husband, Pollock (who died at 46), and successfully managed both reputations; and
- Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), who provided for his artistic legacy to the detriment of his family.
The children step up: Rothko and Smith
The most notorious case of an estate gone wrong is that of Mark Rothko, whose widow died six months after he died by suicide, leaving their children, Kate, 19, and Christopher, 6. Rothko had created a foundation and named three executors of his estate, all of whom were on the foundation’s board. Rothko earmarked paintings for his children, and must have believed that the executors—friends of his—would steer his legacy responsibly. What could go wrong? “Within seven months,” write Salvesen and Cousineau, “the executors sold a hundred paintings at a cut-rate price to the Marlborough Gallery and consigned the remaining 698 to it for twelve years.” Kate Rothko began her legal fight to get the paintings back in 1971, and it was 1983 before the litigation was over. Judith Dobrzynski summarized Kate Rothko’s struggle in “A Betrayal The Art World Can't Forget,” published Nov. 2, 1998, in The New York Times:
For nearly a dozen years beginning in 1971, the art world and the public were transfixed by the battle between Rothko's executors, all of them his good friends, and his two children, who accused the executors of waste and fraud, and by the ensuing appeals and related litigation. As a result, many of Rothko's luminous Abstract Expressionist paintings, which had been sold or consigned by his estate to the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan at deflated prices, were donated to museums, probably enhancing their value.
Rothko and his work became better known, further establishing his reputation. Marlborough lost its pre-eminence in contemporary art. Its flamboyant owner, Frank Lloyd, never recouped his reputation, and neither did Theodoros Stamos, a painter Rothko chose as an executor....
Before Marlborough was stopped by a court ruling, it had sold more than 100 paintings--including a few that Rothko's children now say they would have kept--at less than market value to favored clients while it collected inflated commissions as high as 50 percent, compared with the 30 percent usually charged for an artist of his caliber. The executors, meanwhile, divided the estate's proceeds from Marlborough as their fees.
The judges’ opinion, upholding the lower court’s decision in favor of Kate and Christopher Rothko, begins with a stinging “The principal asset of his estate consisted of 798 paintings of tremendous value, and the dispute underlying this appeal involves the conduct of his three executors in their disposition of these works of art. In sum, that conduct ... was manifestly wrongful and indeed shocking.” (New York Court of Appeals, Opinion)
Kate Rothko Prizel, disillusioned, stepped away from day-to-day management of her father’s estate once the paintings were safe, and her brother Christopher began steering their father’s legacy through a reconstituted foundation. Between them, they saved Mark Rothko’s paintings from being undervalued and dumped onto the marketplace.
David Smith also provided for his legacy and two young children—or so he thought. He died in 1965; he and his second wife had divorced four years earlier and his daughters, Rebecca and Candida, were 11 and 10. Smith, like Rothko, chose a trio of executors for his will, which left his entire estate and all of his artworks in trust for Rebecca and Candida until they turned 25. Smith’s trustees were his lawyer; his good friend and fellow Abstract Expressionist, Motherwell; and critic Clement Greenberg (who championed Abstract Expressionism, as did his rival Harold Rosenberg). Smith’s estate was hit with high taxes, as the work had not sold well until shortly before the artist’s death. The IRS used the most recent prices to put a high value on the estate, meaning that many works would have to be sold quickly in order to pay the estate taxes. However, if the market was suddenly flooded with Smith sculptures, their value would immediately decrease. With the help of testimony from art experts, the estate won a new legal precedent, the “blockage discount.” It allows appraisers to set the value of an estate at the price it would fetch if all of the work were sold at once, rather than slowly, one at a time. The ruling did not come in time to help the David Smith estate, which had to sell off works and pay its taxes while the case was pending. Although Smith’s daughters received a partial tax refund later, their art collection was greatly reduced.
Just as Stamos failed to act in Rothko’s interest, Motherwell apparently paid little attention to Smith’s estate. According to Peter Stevens, who married Rebecca Smith in 1979 and worked as an administrator for the estate for 35 years, Motherwell and the attorney deferred to Greenberg, and although they did fight the high taxes, they failed to have an inventory made and, says Stevens, “a lot of things, I think, were missing. ... Often they did try to do what was best for the work, but I don’t think they put in the necessary time and effort. Ultimately the court did have all their commissions cut in half because of their egregious neglect. ... Nothing was done to conserve the work, and that became one of the big scandals of the David Smith estate. ... The other egregious thing that Greenberg did was to arrange for the removal of white paint from five sculptures. It was horrible for those five sculptures, but also because the general public got the impression that the estate had altered the surfaces of all of David’s best work. ... [This] went beyond the pale.”
As with the Rothko case, the artist’s children cared enough about the artworks to advocate for them effectively. It’s an emotional issue, as Stevens described to Salvesen in November 2000: “It quickly became apparent that [Rebecca Smith] was very upset about her father’s estate ... she and her sister would see the sculptures vanishing from the fields with a total disregard for their feelings or input.”
Stevens asserts that the Rothko and Smith estates were similar except in one regard: Rothko’s will was written specifically, and violations could be proved. Smith’s will left everything up to the trustees, so there was no legal violation, even though “over two hundred major works were sold in less than a five-year period by Marlborough Gallery and, in some cases, to Marlborough Gallery, which is a horrible conflict of interests.” Greenberg only took the David Smith estate away from Marlborough in 1971, after the Rothko case was publicized. In 1979, the children gained control over the estate, stopped selling the works and began to work strategically with museums, slowly rebuilding their father’s reputation.
Widows: Krasner as model for Newman
In April 2002, Salvesen interviewed B.H. Friedman, collector, former trustee at the Whitney Museum, and author of the first biography of Jackson Pollock in 1972. Friedman worked closely with Krasner. “Lee did set the pattern for widows,” he says. “She made very smart moves.” Krasner priced Pollock’s work carefully, balancing tax implications with the art’s increasing value; and she quickly had a catalogue raisonné created by renowned scholars “to prevent fakes from coming on the market. ... there were Pollock fakes even quite early in the fifties.” Friedman says, “The only one who came close to [Krasner] was Annalee [Newman]. ... Annalee learned a lot from Lee.” After Barnett’s death, Newman bought an apartment in a convenient Manhattan location, re-created her late husband’s studio in it, and began hosting collectors, dealers and curators there. She hired a good scholar to handle “everything to do with Barney,” says Friedman. “She did things Barney would have done; it was eerie. Publishing Barney’s collected writings in 1990 was a brilliant stroke.” And a catalogue raisonné was published in 2004. In the May 13, 2000, obituary for Annalee Newman in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote, “Mrs. Newman devoted the bulk of her energy to placing her husband's paintings in public and private collections in the United States and Europe, an activity she likened to ‘marrying our children well.’”
Annalee Newman had supported her husband’s art-making by working as a teacher throughout much of their married life, while Krasner was an artist in her own right. Salvesen, in her interview with Friedman, asks why Krasner took on the Pollock estate, when he’d been publicly involved with another woman at the time of his death and she could have “'retreat[ed] from Jackson' and continued with her own work.” According to Friedman, "yes, she subordinated her career to Jackson’s. On the other hand, there was very little question in my mind that as Jackson’s wife, her own reputation was enhanced.
Krasner’s long game has paid off, and at the time of her death she was seen as “an artist of the first rank,” according to her obituary, written June 21, 1984, by Michael Brenson for The New York Times. Krasner steered Pollock’s reputation deftly, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation continues to do so, as well as awarding grants to individuals and organizations.
Motherwell: All for Art
In contrast to Krasner and Annalee Newman, Robert Motherwell’s fourth wife and widow, photographer Renate Ponsold, was given no role to play in Motherwell’s estate. His two daughters from his second marriage were also left a bit short, according to Friedman and Salvesen. Friedman says, of Ponsold, “She was excluded from all decisions about his work. ... She has a lot of his work that he had given to her previously. She’ll not starve. But in financial terms, it’s the children whom he really treated shabbily. ... he was overly involved with his reputation, his place in history.” Motherwell created his foundation in 1981; today it has a staff that administers grants, oversees exhibitions, and researches and publishes the catalogues raisonnés of Motherwell’s works. In Motherwell’s case, he was wealthy as well as talented, and he formed his foundation ten years before his death, enabling him to set its course and ensure its ongoing solvency. Krasner and Newman, as widows who were in control of their husbands’ legacies, were able to begin their work right away, and the men’s reputations were seamlessly protected. Rothko’s and Smith’s cases were different, in that their children couldn’t step in right away. Luckily, they were able to gain control of their fathers’ legacies before it was too late to salvage them.
Calls to Action
Kate Rothko and Peter Stevens had moments of recognition, when they were galvanized into action. “In November 1971, Kate Rothko, realizing that she and her small brother would inherit no work by their father, petitioned, through her guardian ... to stop Marlborough from selling....” Peter Stevens says that he and Greenberg were looking through Smith’s drawings in 1979, and “I clearly saw that Greenberg did not respect the work. I physically stepped forward and put my body between Greenberg and the drawings. At that point, I realized I was going to be involved....”
Magda Salvesen herself is the widow of artist Jon Schueler, who died in 1992. She writes of conflicted feelings, both wanting to serve his legacy and needing to protect herself from being subsumed by the time and dedication involved. “Were we subservient or supportive? In either case, the future had already been factored into our thinking. ... whatever the new demands on our time might be, we draw from a set of priorities that have already been established. ... Children of artists are in a more difficult position.”
B.H. Friedman lists what he thinks are essential for an artist’s estate: great artwork; critical support; and museum and gallery support. I would agree, up to a point. I believe an artist’s estate needs to have a great body of work; a critic or curator who believes in the work; and someone willing to work very, very hard.
For further reading about artists' legacies, I highly recommend Artists’ Estates: Reputations In Trust, edited by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau, Rutgers University Press, 2005.
For further reading about artists' legacies, I highly recommend Artists’ Estates: Reputations In Trust, edited by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau, Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Related: "Expanding the Modigliani canon? The Barnes Foundation's Modigliani Up Close will feature newly examined paintings" includes a summary of difficulties faces by scholars attempting to build a reliable catalogue raisonné for Amedeo Modigliani's works. Broad Street Review, September 2022.
